Stitching a vision of China

DIRECTOR Dai Sijie and his crew drove two hours on treacherous mountain trails in China’s Sichuan province to arrive at their filming location each day, sometimes using dynamite to blast away boulders that had fallen overnight.Up a set of stairs carved into a rock face was a lakeside village barely touched by modernization. There were no showers or refrigerators, and the only contact with the outside world came via the few satellite dishes that dotted the pristine landscape.

It was in this village that Dai, 51, chose to film the movie adaptation of his bestselling novel, “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles and is based partly on his experiences during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, when children of professional families were sent to remote villages to be politically “re-educated” by peasants. (The real village where Dai spent four years of his youth was too isolated to use for filming -- a two or three days’ drive from the nearest town.)

The film, with dialogue in Mandarin and French with English subtitles, tells the story of two 17-year-old boys, Ma and Luo, who are sent to a village to be ridded of the “reactionary” influence of their urban families.

Upon their arrival, the village chief inspects their belongings before seizing a cookbook they have brought with them. “Revolutionary peasants will never be corrupted by a filthy bourgeois chicken!” he barks as he torches the cookbook in the fire. He also nearly burns their violin before they convince him that the piece they want to play is called “Mozart Is Thinking of Chairman Mao.”

The boys spend their days at the camp using human waste to fertilize the crops and crawling on their knees through a copper mine -- until they come across a hidden stash of forbidden foreign literature.

When the boys meet the granddaughter of a tailor from the neighboring village, they use the books to teach her to read and open her eyes to the outside world. Soon, the girl, known only as the “little seamstress,” takes a liking to Balzac’s “Cousin Bette,” and a romance blossoms with Luo. As she develops a desire for Western clothes and a fascination with city life, she must choose between Luo and the world beyond their village.

At its heart, Dai said, the film is not a political statement but a love story about the ability of literature to transform and empower people. He sought to tell the love story of a man trying to free a woman’s mind through literature. But in the end, he said, the woman proves smarter than the man.

Reaching the film location was the first of many roadblocks Dai faced in making the movie. He spent nearly a year in Beijing meeting with government officials in an effort to gain approval to shoot in China.

“The major problem was [government officials] don’t believe that Western writers can change a woman’s mind,” Dai said, speaking through an interpreter. “In the mountain village, most of the people are illiterate, so that’s where literature shows its power for affecting people’s minds.”

Though he eventually got permission to film in China, the government did not allow the movie to be distributed in that country after its completion. Regardless, the movie has been screened in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and a pirated DVD version is readily available in the mainland. The book, written in French, has sold 250,000 copies in France and has been translated into 25 languages, not including Chinese. It too was banned from distribution in China.

Like the youths in the movie, Dai was 17 when he was sent to the mountain village. He stumbled across a stash of Western literature, including novels by Kipling and Dickens, which served as an escape from long hours of harsh physical labor.

“I was dying to read books -- a lot of books were banned and many were burned,” he said. “It would be hard for an American person to imagine how there would be no books to read. I made the film to demonstrate the passion our generation of people had for literature. When someone has something that’s not permitted or punishable, it was more exciting to have the chance to read it.”

There are other true-to-life elements in the film. Dai recalled that the peasants he lived with as a youth were fascinated by his alarm clock, an object unheard of by villagers who use the sunrise and sunset to govern their schedule. Just as Ma and Luo do in the film, Dai used it to his advantage -- setting the clock further and further ahead to shorten the workday. Also mirrored in the movie: The village chief also allowed Dai to go to the nearest town, a two days’ walk, to see Communist melodramas from Albania and North Korea and reenact them for the entertainment-starved locals.

WHEN Dai was freed from re-education in 1974, he returned home to finish high school. Then in 1977, the first year Chinese universities began to enroll students after the Cultural Revolution, Dai went to college and studied art history. He later applied for a study-abroad program in France and attended the French Film Institute. His experiences as a youth run throughout his work.

Dai’s 1989 film, “China, My Sorrow,” centered on a 13-year-old boy arrested by Mao’s cultural police for playing a pop record. After the film was released, Chinese authorities barred Dai from entering the country. That ban was lifted in 1995, and Dai still retains his Chinese citizenship, although he lives permanently in France.

He will follow up “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” with his latest film, “The Botanist’s Daughter.” He failed to get approval to film in China because it is a love story between two women -- a subject that remains taboo in that country. Instead, it was shot in Vietnam with mostly Chinese actors.

Dai says he will continue to tell stories about China and hopes one day his books and movies will be accepted by the government censors.

“Even though the Chinese people are still poor, they have the dream of becoming a wealthy, capitalized country,” Dai said.

“Everyone has interesting stories to tell. Rich countries don’t have such a beautiful dream anymore.”