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One of the main events of China's Cultural Revolution was that young urban intellectuals were forced to live and work in the country for several years. I've read that many of those sent out have fond memories of this experience, decades later at least, despite all the privations of rural China in the late Sixties and early Seventies. I'm not in much of a position to question novelist/writer/director Dai Sijie's accuracy in portraying this time and place, considering he was sent to rural Sichuan himself as a youth in 1971-74, but Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is certainly a distinctive take on one of the most chaotic events of the 20th century. Luo (Kun Chun) and Ma (Ye Liu) arrive at a quaint mountain village looking like well-fed Singaporeans reporting for a cushy National Service gig in Gap tanks 'n' tees. They're put to work mining and lugging watery natural fertilizer to the fields, but most of the time they seem to be absorbed in hijinks and an unspoken love triangle involving the titular seamstress (Xun Zhou), daughter of the local tailor. The young men steal a collection of banned foreign novels that seduce them, the seamstress and eventually the whole village in various ways. Along the way there's sweet humor, though the love story and dramatic elements never grow very intense. It's quite reminiscent of The Postman, and though it doesn't have quite the charm and power of the earlier film, it's enjoyable once you get past the initial discomfort of watching a lush European-style depiction of a setting usually captured with stark Chinese realism. A ghostly sequence at the end, looking back at those idyllic days as the village is flooded in the Three Gorges Dam project, has a poignance that should have shown up earlier in a film that is largely about reminiscence. Dai's greatest failure is that he doesn't reveal his rose-colored glasses earlier. Wen Jiang's 1994 film In the Heat of the Sun, a European-style take on growing up in 1950s Beijing, succeeds by working the conflict between memory and fantasy into an operatic frenzy. Visions of Chinese realism vanish in its wake.