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Beautiful, moving film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

In Communist China, 1971, two close friends, Luo and Ma, are forcibly relocated to a remote southern region of the country because of their "reactionary"--one of their dentist fathers once filled a tooth for Chiang Kai-shek, etc--backgrounds and activities. They are given Spartan living quarters with diets to match and forced to work back-breaking jobs doing "honest" labor such as hauling large vats of human waste to fertilize the nearby fields. They become friends with a local girl, a seamstress whose true name they never learn, and the three begin a covert reading group of forbidden foreign novels.First of all, BALZAC and the LITTLE Chinese SEAMSTRESS is just a very moving, engaging, and intelligent story. Based on Dai Sijie's excellent novel of the same title, it's not for those who want a lot of fast action and such. Nevertheless, this film truly takes you to Mao's China, providing dead-eye satire of its institutions and revealing the amazing ignorance of the political "chiefs" responsible for making life-and-death decisions for thousands of people. The ugliness of this system contrasts very well with the beautiful natural scenery in the film. The way that three free-thinking people circumvent the tunnel-visioned totalitarian system is a wonderful story device. It's also very funny: Wow, I didn't know that Balzac was an Albanian! There are sexual themes and sexual tension but no blatant sex or nudity. The three-way relationship between these individuals is simply as real as real can get.If you enjoy this film, I might recommend another excellent Chinese production with a similar theme: XIU XIU: THE SENT DOWN GIRL.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie up until the ending. There was a fourth major character whose vital importance to the ending was ignored, a character who intruded into their menage a trois: the gynecologist/abortionist. It was extraordinarily difficult for him to make that long trip deep into the mountains. Why would he do it, and risk all? Why? Because he found an attractive 18-year-old woman who was a known goer able to keep a secret whom he wanted to make into his mistress. He bought and took away one thing Ma had that most seduced the seamstress: Ma's violin. Did the doctor also buy all the books, or maybe just the Balzacs? Without these the two boys would be less attractive, less interesting, boring even, to the dishonest little seamstress (dishonest? Whose idea was it to steal four-eyes' valise of books?). When she left the mountains at the end the seamstress' statement to Luo that her leaving was due to Balzac was not necessarily entirely true. People do not always tell everyone the truth all of the time. In her case what was she going to tell her ex-lover, that she had fallen for the sweet talk of a more worldly man? What letters she and the doctor may have exchanged, or even further meetings they may have had after the abortion we don't know. But yes, the seduction of her by the words of Balzac led to her pregnancy, and that led to her leaving.So this is the ending that should have been: A scene of her reaching town, being met in the darkness of night by the doctor and ensconced in some third-rate hovel where she would commence her temporary life as his secret mistress. Another quick scene or two showing either him or her, or both tiring of the situation and her going on to some factory in Shenzen. Then from there (different hair style and clothing) to Hong Kong. She could become a bar hostess at a Bar called Champs Elysees and, there, meet some French guy who takes her to Paris.It is beautiful irony that the money paid to Ma for his violin went to pay for the sneakers she used to walk to the doctor and her "new-and-exciting urban" life. ("Don't worry. I'll be fine in town," she said to Luo with complete confidence. Confident that there would be someone there waiting for her to make sure she was alright.).

At the core of 2003's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, a film directed by a man adapting his own novel, is a bond shared between two men at a time of oppression and punishment - something which is threatened into disintegration on account of a young woman seemingly coming between them. Much later on, when one half of this masculine double-act embraces the titular Chinese seamstress, his long-time friend peers through slats in a nearby shack at their lonely coming together up on a rock beside a stretch of water - itself a highly romanticised image within a film about nastiness at a time of political and cultural strife. As he looks on, there is a looming sense of whatever little fondness the film infers he has for her is clashing with the fact she is coming between him and his friend; in spite of the fact the film is somewhat of a love story, this sense of men and males bonding in harsh circumstances takes centre stage - Dai Sijie's film deceptively about the fondness two people share for a member of the opposite sex and more-so about the understanding two of the same gender have with one another; those around them and their predicament.If one were to say that the sorts of films Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress feigns to be more often than not end with a heterosexual embrace, the final few scenes of this film display a muted mutual understanding of what two people of the same gender went through: thinking along the lines of 'we experienced all of that, lost it, but still have each other'. The characters we observe during the opening shots move in a very robotic manner; they lumber up steep hills to the backdrop of mountains but both the reasons they're there and the tasks they must carry out whilst there do not match up with the picturesque view on display. Where they are is a punishment camp in the nether-regions of early 1970s China, a nation undergoing change what with its cultural and political crises then-presently unfolding closer to the top - a nation deeming it worthy to send a man to one of these rural correctional facilities if it means they were a dentist who corrected a bad tooth for someone in support of the present government's opposition. Such a man is Luo (Chen), a young adult suffering through the same hardships with a good friend named Ma (Liu), of whom is a bit of a musician.From robotic foundations comes the film about characters exploring books and music and other texts at the higher end of culture; items which touch the characters so much that they decide to print verses from their favourite banned material on their shirts so they may feel how they feel. Such a thing strikes us as being akin to people in our contemporary Western world walking around with song lyrics or images from their favourite movies on their T-shirts; we take it as a given, these people must hide their enthusiasm. The film is a piece about two, gently mutating into three, fellows broadening both their creativity and thinking whilst at the same time their feelings for one another. It begins with a finding of a small shed housing banned material, instruments and books by the eponymous Balzac among others. Ceturies old classical works by famous Austrain composers are allowed to be played by the likes of Ma, but only if it means successfully fobbing off the superior officer on guard with promises that it is in actual fact a recent tune promoting the regime.It carries on with the arrival of Xun Zhou's character, an attractive young woman arriving at the camp to hear Ma play and coming to stick around a while longer when she discovers their illegal lust for such things matches that of hers. It progresses further still when Luo and the seamstress get closer than they perhaps should; their occupying of a police-governed and totalitarian state run nation, in which power-play and control plays a large role in factoring how people live; exist and behave, leads to a deep fondness when the seamstress is charged with flogging his back to cure his malaria – this symbolic occurrence of power exchange ultimately leading them to an embrace and affecting their own existence and behaviour. On the one hand, the film is a deftly played love story following three people deeply involved in what they've got themselves into, but it is an affecting dialogue driven drama that slides into believable tragedy as the circumstances they find themselves in, due to certain complications, befall the threesome. Its sense of advancing its characters, in having Ma and Luo enjoy sneaking up on the female population of the camp during the opening exchanges as they bathe nude in a natural spring, is prominent as they come to indulge the seamstress' presence and begin to understand women much more in that regard. The fondness characters develop for one another is believable, while Sijie, what with all the expectancy lumped onto him given it is his novel; his screenplay; his adaptation and his whole project, brings to life this vision's story with punch – the thing totalling up into a worthwhile experience.

It is impossible to understand this story in his real essence. The beautiful skin of love and nice images, the acting and slices of memory are only small details of a horrible era (Chinese Communism of Mao period is more that the best thriller can presents). So, a tale about resistance, about culture like secret and vital refuge is not only interesting or touching but good "remember", too. The life in a country who considers his citizens like social dough is a cruel experience and a survive exercise. In Romania, the Communist regime was not very different but the relates about this period, his reflexion in films is mixture of frustrations and hate. Maybe, this is the normal way after a social crisis. So, the principal virtue of film is the subtle humor. The innocence of resistance, the original game, the delicate resistance against a grotesque situation. In many aspects the film is a charming miniature and it is Sijie Dai's merit to present not only a personal experience, a story of past but a slice of far reality so present in ours life, yet. Same impressive token about a subtle form of resistance is "Flying against the arrow" by Horia- Roman Patapievici.