Authors rarely get to script the movie adaptations of their books, let alone direct them. So in writing and directing the cinematic version of his runaway bestselling novel Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress, Chinese-born, France-based author and director Dai Sijie put himself a nearly unique position: No matter what he changed from his original book, no one could say he didn't respect the author's intentions. Still, some of the alterations between the novel and the film of the same name seem not only gratuitous, but actively designed to make the story weaker.
Kun Chen and Ye Liu star as a pair of Chinese city boys sent to labor in a remote mountaintop village in 1971, as part of the "re-education" movement of Mao's Cultural Revolution. From the hour of their arrival, the bolder Chen begins manipulating and lying to the rural villagers, while the shyer Liu holds back. But they still have to deal with backbreaking work and a suspicious, hostile local headman. Nonetheless, they wangle the plum assignment of journeying to a nearby town to watch movies and then describe them to the whole village, and they find other ways to entertain themselves—including stealing a cache of banned Western books from a hypocritical peer. These books come in handy when Chen falls in love with a local girl (Beijing Bicycle's Xun Zhou) he knows only as "the Little Seamstress," and attempts a re-education program of his own by reading the richly evocative books to her.
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. While the story ends with a twist that emphasizes the transformative power of art, it spends little time actually developing that theme. Instead, it wanders episodically and observationally in a pleasant but undirected way. And while Sijie's book was written firmly from Liu's character's perspective, the film version is more formless: While the Little Seamstress takes a more aggressive and central role, that only highlights how little either the protagonists or the audience really knows about her. And Sijie's efforts to shoehorn her into more scenes with a series of little plot revamps mostly seem contrived. Sijie does eventually return to Liu's perspective, in a stunning final sequence that puts a new spin on his themes. But mostly, his film seems like a harmless but inessential adjunct to the novel that preceded it. Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that a book was the best format for a story about the importance of books.