Dai Sijie’s "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," a film adaptation of his own best-selling autobiographical novel, is set in China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s. It is the story of Luo (Chen Kun) and Ma (Liu Ye), two cultured and well-read young men from the city who are sent to a mountain village for a "re-education" in Maoist principles. They labor alongside the peasants under the suspicious eye of the doctrinaire the village chief (Wang Shuangbao), who considers their violin to be a symbol of the bourgeoisie. Luo and Ma both fall in love with the little Chinese seamstress (Ziiou Xun), the daughter of the tailor (Chung Zhijun), and they read her forbidden works of Western literature including French writers Balzac and Dumas.
This movie, which sounds rather uneventful in this brief summary, is quite absorbing and -- in a completely non-trite way -- inspiring. The two young men are actually in a lot of danger, since the Red Guard of mostly young fanatics would have felt little compunction about killing the two as enemies of Chairman Mao, enemies of the Revolution, and enemies of the state.

The underlying theme of the movie is not so much the liberating effect of the reading done by the three young people, as the powerful transformative capacity that literature has on the individual who reads it. Reading to oneself is not a very good way to learn obedience and conformity -- quite the reverse.

The little seamstress, being illiterate, has never been exposed to literature before, and so she is completely electrified when the works of Balzac are read to her. Indeed, it is not inappropriate that neither of the two young men is mentioned in the title -- only her and the 19th century French author who reaches across the years, in the voices of the two young intellectuals (who are both in love with her), to transform her life. She is not made happy by literature -- who is? -- she is made serious, and sensitized to the emotional and social complexity of the world.