"Balzac and the Little Tailor" begins with two young people coming to a small village in the mountains. The village chief checked the luggage of the two and found the recipe and violin. Culture clashes are fairly common at this point.
The next two events begin to move the story forward. The two educated youth met a beautiful girl in the mountains and got a box of translated novels. So these two people secretly read the novel and read the novel to the beautiful girl, and started their first love.
This could have been a wonderful story about enlightenment and growth, ignorance and civilization. Unfortunately, the screenwriter was only indulged in the memories of his youth, and was unable to sublimate this story into art. More often, he was in this story. The various possibilities contained in it have been fluctuating before and after, and finally ruined this supposedly more exciting story. Or this is the limit of the creator's ability.
There are many wonderful passages in the story, which could have calmly expressed the influence of culture on these two educated youths and villages, but unfortunately missed opportunities again and again.
For example, the educated youth read Balzac for the first time, read it all night, woke up in the morning and said that the world has completely changed in my eyes. Of course, we know that it is not the world that has changed, but the people who see the world. However, in the whole film, the educated youth did not seem to have any changes, even including his later going to collect music and music, it is difficult for people to judge whether it was his hobby or the influence of novels.
For the influence of the villagers, the film has more opportunities, but it is also very weak. Two educated youths were sent to watch a movie, and then returned to the village to talk about the movie. They seem to be a "Flower Girl", but when they come back, it is a French novel. So in that era of poor culture, people in this small village got far more cultural enjoyment than people in the outside world. But that's all. The content of the film After leaving the storytelling field of the two educated youths, the villagers' lives have not changed.
After listening to "The Count of Monte Cristo", the old tailor made naval uniforms for the villagers, which was also a very interesting part. Yet again, these navy suits didn't show up afterward.
I originally thought that this story should have some magical and realistic colors, but in fact, he is very low-key and plain. I couldn't help but think that it would be much better if Jiang Wen made this story. It's just that he may feel that the story is too small.
As I said before, the screenwriter of the movie was at a loss for this story because of some petty bourgeois sentiment, and finally only indulged in the memories of his youth. For the petty bourgeoisie, cultural relativism is of course good. Even if the people in the small village are ignorant and no longer see the light of day, they still have their own culture. Therefore, when he was talking about the impact of Western civilization on the small village, he was stunned, and stopped before the point was reached.
And his obsession with memories makes the second half of the movie very unreliable. After the educated youth left the village for many years, when the village was about to be submerged due to the construction of the dam, he began to miss this small mountain village again, and ran back to the mountain village that was about to be submerged to be nostalgic. Here, he has completely disregarded the authenticity of the story, and actually gave a village that was completely illiterate more than ten years ago the tradition of putting paper lanterns in the water pool, and what nonsense is writing thoughts on the paper lanterns.
His meaning is obvious, the dam symbolizing modernity floods the small village representing the tradition, so people will never see those water lanterns in the future. It's just that those water lanterns are completely his imagination. As soon as he leaves the mountain village where he suffers, he forgets the ignorance and suffering there. Those lanterns can only prove the selfishness and stupidity of cultural relativists.
The best handled part of the story is the little tailor of the beautiful girl in the mountains. She was originally illiterate, but under the influence of the novel she heard, she left this mountain village. As for her whereabouts, the movie subtly disrupts the narrative sequence, giving a wonderful suspense. Looking back, the educated youth actually went to the village where she left more than ten years ago to find the whereabouts of this little tailor. The stupid sense of superiority in his heart is really obvious.
Most of the lines in the film are in Chongqing dialect. Liu Ye and Zhou Xun don't seem to use other people's voices because their Chongqing dialect is really awkward.
Pros: Good story
Cons: Poor language in film
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