Xun Zhou Thursday 28th April 2011 IWC Schaffhausen presents Peter Lindbergh's A Night In Portofino held at Culver Studios Culver City, California
Xun Zhou
Xun Zhou
Stolen Life Review
By Don Willmott
Very Good
How does the Chinese government choose what to censor? If they read scripts ahead of time, one would expect that they'd never let Stolen Life be made. If there's a more bleak depiction of the terrible life of the hundreds of millions of peasants and migrant workers hopelessly stuck in the underclass, I haven't seen it. Prepare to cringe.
Abandoned by her parents and raised grudgingly by a collection of disinterested relatives, the pretty Yan'ni (Jun Wu), who hides her beauty under a black knit wool hat, grows up alone and miserable. It's a miracle when she's accepted at a university in Beijing, and away she goes, hoping for some kind of new life.
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Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Review
By Jay Antani
OK
One has to wonder what gave Sijie Dai the impression that his screenplay for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress -- an adaptation of his own best-selling novel and co-scripted by Nadine Perront -- was structurally sound. About three-quarters of the way into his story, and in one of the more baffling and ineffectual transitions to be found in recent movie memory, Dai jerks his narrative forward by two decades literally in the blink of an eye. The sudden shift only makes Balzac's weaknesses in the character department that much more glaring. As we watch his characters, aged now by makeup, and reminiscing about their teenage years after a long separation, we become aware of how superficial our understanding of them actually is. That awareness robs his flash-forward technique of any poignancy it might otherwise have had and points perhaps to his lack of fluency with the film form.
Set amid lush mountains in an isolated region in China in the early 1970s, Dai gives us a gently paced semi-autobiographical account of two teenage boys, Ma (Ye Liu) and Luo (Kun Chen) who arrive at a Maoist camp for "re-education." Because they are the offspring of the "reactionary" elite -- the very class that Mao sought to purge during his Cultural Revolution -- the boys are prescribed a daily regimen of lugging buckets of shit to fertilize the local rice fields alternated with tedious shifts in a copper mine. Through Dai's eyes, though, what ordinarily might be a rather bleak portrayal of suffering is viewed through rose-tinted lenses. The Communist Committee chief of their village (Shuangbao Wang) is, true to fashion, a by-the-book ideologue. He wants to come off as a hardliner, but he's won over easily enough by Ma's claim that the Mozart lieder he plays on his violin is, in fact, a tribute to Mao. This would be fine if it led to a more complex dynamic between the chief and the boys, but this cheeky repartee goes no further.
Continue reading: Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Review
Xun Zhou
Occupation
Actor
Xun Zhou Movies
Balzac And The Little Chinese Seamstress Movie Review
One has to wonder what gave Sijie Dai the impression that his screenplay for Balzac...
