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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Empire Pictures

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress reviews


8.3

based on 22 reviews
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How did we calculate this?

based on 6 votes
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MPAA RATING: Not Rated

Starring Xun Zhou, Kun Chen, Ye Liu, Shuangbao Wang, Zhijun Cong, and Hong Wei Wang

Based on the international best-seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is set in the early 1970's during the later stages of China's "Cultural Revolution," as two city-bred teenage best friends, Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu), are sent to a backward mountainous region for Maoist re-education. (Empire Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Comedy \| Drama \| Foreign \| Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Sijie Dai (also novel) Nadine Perront
DIRECTED BY:	Sijie Dai
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: December 27, 2005 Theatrical: July 29, 2005
RUNNING TIME:	111 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	France / China
LANGUAGE(S):	Mandarin / French (with English subtitles)

Original title "Balzac et La Petite Tailleuse Chinoise"

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

San Francisco Chronicle Jonathan Curiel

Sweet, funny, sad and profound -- the sort of film that becomes more remarkable when you realize it's based on someone's real life.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

For an exquisitely melancholy story steeped in a sense of the past as a succession of great waves of political, ideological and economic change, it's fitting that the movie should end with an underwater sequence. It looks like a dream of a memory of a place about to be wiped out by the next great flood of history.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

If the movie is straightforward and predictable in its attitude, it also exudes a sort of documentary lyricism.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

In the end, it's a lovely little movie about very big things, and the smallness both illuminates it and keeps it from greatness.

New York Post V.A. Musetto

A meditation on literature, love and remembrance that is able to find humor and hope in the dark days of the Cultural Revolution.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

It's a fanciful tale, but the message is sweet - that the higher arts speak a universal language that transcends politics and ignorance.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

It makes for an unusual angle on the era, and a passionate paean to the power of books, ideas and art.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Dai Sijie's tender, touching adaptation of his own novel of the same title.

Variety David Stratton

A visually lush and very Westernized vision of life in a remote Chinese village in the early 1970s.

Village Voice Ed Park

Though the film lacks some of the paper incarnation's subtlety, Dai's infidelity to his own text keeps things interesting. He busts the book's brief time frame, tweaks countless plot points, and tops it all off with a titanic metaphor not found in his own pages.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

By turns merry, tough-minded and sweetly nostalgic.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Artfully designed to appeal to lovers of romance and books, but by the end of the film I was not convinced it knew much about either.

Washington Post Teresa Wiltz

Sure, Balzac meanders at too leisurely a pace. But the actors are charming; the story sweet

Chicago Reader Patrick Z. McGavin

The ethereal private moments and inspired passages are beautifully shot by Jean-Marie Dreujou, but Dai never quite organizes the material dramatically, and the tone is too often jagged and disruptive.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

Sijie mostly adapts his own work dryly and literally—the footage of the Chinese mountainside is breathtaking, but it's the only thing in the film with much depth.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The story is winning but the telling, with Dai adapting and directing from his own novel, is too sentimental in the long run.

Dallas Observer Melissa Levine

The film is beautifully shot and well-acted, but, like the book, it never achieves anything like the import of the stories that inspired it. Balzac is even a little dull, especially toward the end.

Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman

Cute and toothless as a kitten, Seamstress doesn't inspire the same kind of fervent devotion its principals feel when confronted with art, but it does make a pleasant enough diversion.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Demonstrating just how different literature and filmmaking can be, filmmaker-turned-writer-turned filmmaker Dai Sijie botches an adaptation of his own best-selling short novel.

The average user rating for this movie is 8.3 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Chad S. gave it a7:
Rather than just watch two boys read from Balzac's "Cousin Bette", a more interesting strategy might've been to show us how two Chinese provincials would visualize period piece-France. We never really get a sense that these boys were transformed by an infusion of otherworldly words. With the tailor, we do. The way literature inspires him is when the film truly comes alive. For Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu), we're absolutely sure that they love the Little Chinese Seamstress (Xun Chou), but as for Balzac, because the filmmaker inadequately shows us their passion for literature, they come off as poseurs who use the books as a tool of seduction. In the Dai Siije novel, you don't think about "Jules and Jim" in the sticks.

Myron M. gave it a10:
Beautiful story, beautiful scenery, beautiful girls, what more could an old guy want. Makes me want to visit China.

Richard F. gave it a9:
Powerful setting, both emotionally and physically . . . charming cast . . . familiar truth (cf. Educating Rita, e.g.): art can change a person utterly, and not always without cost.

m wench gave it a9:
A lovely story, unusual, beautiful to watch, especially the closing frames. A lucid glance at politically misguided philosophy resulting in pointless circumstances. In the end all beings revert to expected human conduct and seem much the nobler for it. Makes me want to crack open a few classics given the inspiration they provide to the characters.

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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress Empire Pictures

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Empire Pictures