Demonstrating just how different literature and filmmaking can be, filmmaker-turned-writer-turned filmmaker Dai Sijie botches an adaptation of his own best-selling short novel. Teenaged Ma (Ye Liu) and his best friend Luo (Kun Chen) are sophisticated city boys who, along with thousands of others, are sent to the remote Chinese countryside as part of Mao's effort to "reeducate" the children of bourgeois enemies of the state (Ma's father is a physician; Luo is the son of a disgraced dentist) through the mythical purity of peasant life. Stripped of all the trappings of their decadent lifestyle — Luo is allowed to keep his beloved violin only after the quick-thinking boys explain the piece Ma knows by heart is actually entitled "Mozart Is Always Thinking of Chairman Mao" — they're soon put to work hauling baskets of ore from a dangerous mine shaft and carting overfilled buckets of human waste to the small farms dotting the hills and valleys of their new home on Phoenix Mountain. Luo and Ma are pulled back from the brink of despair by two discoveries. First, they meet the "Little Seamstress" (Xun Zhou), the pretty daughter of the local tailor (Zhijun Chung). Second, the Little Seamstress tells them that another city boy whom they've nicknamed Four Eyes (Hongwei Wang) is hiding a suitcase filled with the most forbidden contraband of all: books. And not just any books, volume after volume of Western literature: Balzac, Gogol, Flaubert, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky. When Four Eyes refuses to admit he owns such a treasure trove — even a whisper of a rumor of their existence would be enough to get him hauled off to the dreaded Security Office — Ma and Luo contrive to steal it from him. Once they do, a whole new world opens for them. The Little Seamstress, who by now has become Luo's lover, can barely read, but Luo is determined to use these books to release her from her "primitive" life. He does, but the transformation has unexpected — and unexpectedly tragic — results. Choppy and episodic, Dai's film is further dragged down by a disconcerting, third-act flash-forward that saps the film of whatever momentum it managed to build. Not all of this is entirely Dai's fault. Rather than a history of China's Cultural Revolution, his autobiographical novel — a surprise best-seller that firmly established Dai as a novelist after a shaky start as a filmmaker — is instead a tribute to literature that demonstrates the power of reading by being itself a great read. As such, the story falls flat the moment it's separated from its intended medium, in much the same way that CINEMA PARADISO loses some of its strength when seen outside the dream-space of the movie theater. --Ken Fox
