Past the cover, to the content

Great political upheavals usually get the epic treatment in movies, which tend to flatten wholesale human suffering into cast-of-thousands backdrops for heroic stories of “one ordinary man’s extraordinary courage.” It’s rarer that a film focuses on the effects of large-scale social cataclysms on individuals whose bravery consists of remaining resolutely human and true to themselves, and much more poignant.

In Dai Sijie’s “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress,” which he based on his own bestselling semiautobiographical novel, two well-bred city boys are shipped off for “reeducation” to a remote mountain village in the Sichuan province during China’s Cultural Revolution. Ma (Ye Liu), a sensitive violinist, and Luo (Kun Chen), the handsome, cocky son of “a reactionary dentist” who “fitted a tooth for a scumbag mayor before 1949,” are sentenced to four years of labor in the copper mines and fields, where they carry sloshing buckets of human waste up steep mountain paths.

Their new status as fertilizer-donkeys may qualify Luo and Ma as newly minted proletariats in the eyes of the party (they have no idea, when they first arrive, how long they’ll be staying), but their manners, city clothes and strange possessions, which include a cookbook, an alarm clock and a violin, make them as exotic to the locals (girls especially) as they do threatening to the village’s communist chief. “Revolutionary peasants will never be corrupted by your filthy bourgeois chicken!” he sputters, destroying their cookbook when a farmer asks if a recipe allows the substitution of peanuts for walnuts. Then he nearly throws Ma’s violin into the fire. Luo saves the violin by convincing the chief that Ma’s Mozart sonatas are “mountain songs,” and that the instrument is good for playing old, revolutionary standards like “Mozart is Always Thinking of Chairman Mao.” The chief buys it and the fiddle is saved.

That’s the thing about fundamentalist ideologies; they’re so comprehensive it’s hard to keep everything straight and easy to twist things at will. Luo and Ma meet the spirited granddaughter of the village tailor, a local beauty who goes by the name the Little Seamstress (Xun Zhou) and inspires them to entertain the villagers by narrating films they’ve seen, as long as they’re Soviet, Chinese or North Korean, of course.

In no time, both Luo and Ma have fallen in love with the Little Seamstress, who begins a relationship with Luo but keeps Ma close, while Ma keeps his feelings to himself. Bothered by her lack of education and blissfully oblivious to the irony of his plan, Luo decides to “transform” the Little Seamstress by curing her of her ignorance.” He enlists Ma to help him steal a suitcase of banned Western books from an astigmatic, field-tilling intellectual, and soon the three of them are huddling in a cave at night to read.

The parallels between Luo and Ma’s official (and, of course, failed) political conversion and the Little Seamstress’ fortuitous intellectual and sexual awakening are handled, not surprisingly, without a trace of dogmatism. Dai has a humanistic, not political, agenda (the movie is a love song to the universal appeal of great literature), and he’s so attuned to the ironies inherent in these curious cultural exchanges that they permeate every inch of the film like a dense mist. A subtle, tender humor pervades the boys’ attempts to influence the villagers’ values and way of thinking, and vice versa. Just as Eisenstein predicted, a synthesis does result from their unexpected juxtaposition. The old tailor offers to teach the boys how to sew (it’s a practical trade), and they accept. Before the tailor knows it, though, he is thoroughly ensnared by Dumas, and suddenly fleurs-de-lis and French sailor motifs start cropping up in the clothes of the Sichuan mountain-dwellers. They of course have no clue that their tailor has been staying up nights listening to “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

Soon, the boys are passing off Balzac’s “Cousin Bette” as the latest revolutionary themed Albanian film. And the Little Seamstress has taken Balzac, who has imparted the tenebrous lesson that “a woman’s beauty is a priceless treasure,” as her guide and savior. Still, it’s Flaubert you think of when her anxious grandfather begs Luo and Ma to stop reading novels to her. “I was so frightened my hands shook,” he says. “A book can change a life.”

Which is why, presumably, both Dai’s novel (which was written in French) and his movie have been banned in China, though authorities did allow the director, who has lived in France for more than 15 years, to shoot there. “It wasn’t that I touched the Cultural Revolution,” the director told the New York Times. “They did not accept that Western literature could change a Chinese girl.”

As it happens, though, the transformation of the Little Seamstress is ambiguous and bittersweet and leaves you with the feeling that, like a character out of Balzac, her story will be one of loss of innocence.

Whether that turns out to be liberating or corrupting is impossible to say, though it’s clear that in some ways, to Dai, the Little Seamstress represents China itself -- too isolated to be worldly but too experienced to be innocent. Meanwhile, much of the mountain area where the movie was shot will be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam, which when completed will have inundated tens of thousands of miles of farmland and displaced nearly 2 million people. It’s a perfect metaphor, not to mention an amazing coincidence -- the village where Dai himself was re-educated in the 1970s will probably end up underwater. For 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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‘Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Contains partial nudity

An Empire Pictures release. Director Dai Sijie. Screenplay by Dai and Nadine Perront. Based on the novel “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” by Dai. Director of photography Jean Marie Dreujou. Editors Fleur Augustin, Nicolas Duchemin, Berengere Saint-Bezar, Zoe Forget, Alice Godeau. Costume design Huamiao Tong. Music by Pujian Wang. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes. In Chinese, with English subtitles.

In selected theaters.