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100Sweet, funny, sad and profound -- the sort of film that becomes more remarkable when you realize it's based on someone's real life.
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88An 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.
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88A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.
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80For 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.
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80If the movie is straightforward and predictable in its attitude, it also exudes a sort of documentary lyricism.
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75It's a fanciful tale, but the message is sweet - that the higher arts speak a universal language that transcends politics and ignorance.
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75A meditation on literature, love and remembrance that is able to find humor and hope in the dark days of the Cultural Revolution.
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75In the end, it's a lovely little movie about very big things, and the smallness both illuminates it and keeps it from greatness.
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75Enlightenment is good, Dai acknowledges. But the movie's more provocative assertion is the notion that ignorance was also a kind of bliss.
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75It makes for an unusual angle on the era, and a passionate paean to the power of books, ideas and art.
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70By turns merry, tough-minded and sweetly nostalgic.
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70Though 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.
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70Dai Sijie's tender, touching adaptation of his own novel of the same title.
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70A visually lush and very Westernized vision of life in a remote Chinese village in the early 1970s.
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63Artfully 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.
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60Sure, Balzac meanders at too leisurely a pace. But the actors are charming; the story sweet
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50The story is winning but the telling, with Dai adapting and directing from his own novel, is too sentimental in the long run.
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50Cute 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.
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50Sijie 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.
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50The 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.
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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.
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40Demonstrating 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.
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JulienK.9
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ChadS.7