Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress

It never seems to take much to cause grievous offence in the People’s Republic of China. Like the time the Chairman himself declared that blackbirds were enemies of the people. It may have caused seismic disruptions in the eco-system and a massive explosion in the locust population, but hey, total extermination taught those feathery fucks not to mess with Mao.

Still, you’d be hard pressed figuring out why Dai Sijie’s literary reminisces of the cultural revolution are banned in his native country. Not that censure has prevented the book Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress becoming second only to Wild Swans in terms of worldwide sales.

Like many young urban teens in the 1970s, Dai was sent away from the undoubtedly nefarious clutches of his reactionary parents into a totally unmodernised backwater – think Leitrim without the electricity or the Germans – so that the local peasants could get medieval on his bourgeois ass.

Balzac is an autobigraphical account of this time, now brought to the big screen by the author himself, and perhaps the most striking thing about it is just how downright fondly it remembers the period. No searing indictment of Mao’s re-education programme here. The local cinema may have only screened crud from North Korea, and there was a spot of malaria to contend with, but some of Enid Blyton’s more robust characters almost certainly had to contend with worse, without ever having left the Home Counties.

Of course, it helped that even the fierce local chieftain was easy to get around. The opening scene finds the central character Ma (Ye Lui) and his best mate Luo (Kun Chen) arriving in the rural settlement, and persuading the elders that the Mozart sonata Ma likes to play is entitled ‘Mozart Is Always Thinking Of Chairman Mao’.

Besides, there are plenty of distractions from any drudgery involved in the boys’ new lifestyle. The film’s titular love interest is a captivating, if unrefined little minx, whom the two boys fix upon as a Pygmalion style project with the help of forbidden Western literature. Soon there’s a love triangle of sorts, and everyone is gorging on Balzac and the like.

If you think this smacks of Western cultural superiority, you may well have a point, but to be fair, Balzac derives equal pleasure from non-occidental art-forms, even the filthy old ballads of mountain dwelling folk. The result is a terribly pretty coming-of-age tale that illustrates perfectly how you can get through anything with the healing power of art. That, and the possibility of getting laid.