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By Peter Keough
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111 MINUTES | mandarin +french | JANEPICKENS Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, which he adapted from his own novel, celebrates bourgeois complacency. The Cultural Revolution sentences teenage pals Luo and Ma to a primitive village for re-education. There both are smitten by the title local girl and enchanted by a cache of contraband books. Dai’s novel is slight; it does evokes the magic of great literature, but that quality is inherently uncinematic. And in his feature debut as a director, he proves he’s no cinéaste. Despite some clever conceits, Balzac makes Maoist fanaticism look better than Western mediocrity.
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