Not One Less
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Movie Reviews of Not One Less
Movie Review: An outstanding movie - it brought back memories
Summary: 5 Stars
I ordered this DVD due to my interest in China. The plot seemed interesting. Little did I expect it to be such a wonderful movie.
It is the story of a young substitute teacher barely older than her students who is asked to fill in for the regular village teacher while he is gone for a month. He tells her that if she has the same number of stndents present when he returns as there are when he is leaving, he will pay her a bonus. She is 13 - little older than her students.
The village school is a one room affair. The teachers office doubles as her bedroom. Some of the students sleep at the school so presumeably they live to far to go back and forth each day. Not only is she a teacher, she is also a house mother with 24 hour responsibilities for her students.
One student is recruited for an athletic school. The young teacher tries to prevent her from leaving so she won't loose the bonus. However, she is overruled by the mayor and the student leaves the village. It is a golden opportunity for her to possibly have a chance at a better life.
Another student, one she has had trouble with, then runs away to the city to earn money for his mother's debts. What type of work he could do is not mentioned. Ultimately you see him just walking around the city, ragged and hungry, begging for handouts of food.
His student is determined to get him back to preserve her bonus. In her determination she rallies the class around her. First asking them to help solve money problems. Then they all work for several hours at the local brickyard moving bricks to earn money. When there isn't enough money, the class comes up with another solution. The teacher stows away on the local bus after the students distract the teacher. She is discovered and put off after the bus leaves but it is a start. She then hitches rides to the city.
In the city her troubles are not over. No one has seen the student. The person he came with was seperated from him. The teacher decides to make signs so she spends the last few yuan she has to buy paper, pen and ink. The work is wasted when she falls asleep in a doorway, the wind blows the signs away while she is sleeping and they are swept up by street cleaners. She meets with many people offering advice but no one really helps her. She struggles along doing the best she can.
Finally someone suggests that she goes to the TV station and after more struggles is put on the air as a guest speaker on a TV show. Her plea for the student to return is seen by a shop owner who sees the boy outside of her place. She asks him "is this you?" when she brings him inside and he sees the teacher talking to him through the camera.
Ultimately the teacher and student are reunited and return ot the village by the TV station. Along the way, the boy is asked what he will remember from his adventure. He says " begging for food, I'll never forget that". The school gets additional supplies beyond the wildest dreams of the students who are there.
This is a movie that is simple in it's theme but quite effective in the delivery of the message. It is a part of China that is rarely seen - the deep rural areas with few resources and little money. It is a far cry from Shanghai and Beijing. Yet it brought back memories of my elementary school where we had to copy pages from a book. I never knew why - we just did it. Likewise the students have to copy sentences written on the blackboard. Is it make work? We never know.
The determination of the teacher is great. We forget and maybe she does too, about her bonus based on numbers. We become absorbed in her adventures and how her students support her. It is an outstanding movie and while it is a very different subject it should be viewed as a way to learn more about China. I highly recommend this movie to anyone with an interest in China.
Movie Review: Beauty in simplicity
Summary: 5 Stars
What good are special effects and action movies if not for their escapist value? But there is much more good to be learned from movies like Zhang Yi-mou's "Not One Less", for what we are watching may be part of everyday reality. In a small school in a remote rural area of China, a thirteen year old girl substitutes for a teacher, who has to visit an ailing parent. This is a job that not too many people want, so a girl not much older than the kids seems to be the only choice. The girl is obviously not cut out to teach 28 kids, whose ages range from kindergarten level to fourth grade. On her first day of teaching, she spends a good part of the day writing the lesson on the board, with the students clueless about what to do. Yet the teacher seems more clueless in what to do next after she is done with her writing. When a dispute breaks out in class, the young teacher has absolutely no idea what her responsibilities are. Yet when events take an interesting turn, she keeps her hopes up and makes the situation into a teachable moment, to the surprise of the village mayor. With steely stubbornness, she heads to the big city to uphold her mission to lose not one less kid from her school not just because she needs the money but also because she has become attached to her students, especially this one. And boy does she get more than she bargained for at the end!
There are some very touching moments in this movie, and their effectiveness lies in their sheer simplicity. We get to know what one of the more responsible and sensitive girls in the class feels about the poverty of her school. Her tears were from embarrassment, having revealed to the rest of the school, against her will, her personal feelings. Perhaps she knew there were other possibilities in life, but she felt helpless to attain those possibilities. Another unforgettable scene was the twenty or so kids sharing two cans of Coke, passing it around, with not one kid feeling entitled to more than a single sip. The hunger and desperation that beset both teacher and lost student in the anonymity of the big city. How the TV camera has triggered the teacher's last call for hope. When the boy recognized the teacher on TV and realized that she was specifically looking for him, how could anyone not be touched by his feeling of happiness, relief, and self-pity?
It is unfortunate that lack of resources, kids just dropping out of school in order to work, help the family, or move to the city to work, and the limitations in choices when the kids grow up are realities in many impoverished schools, both rural and urban. "Not One Less" is a movie that brings us closer to reality and makes us think about what we can do or contribute to improve other people's lives.
Movie Review: So much from so little
Summary: 5 Stars
I have yet to see all of Zhang Yimou's films, but I am beginning to suspect he must be considered among the greatest of all film directors -- ever.
I am sympathetic to the tremendous challenge of making a living by having to continuously churn out creative material, but how some of this man's films compare with other modern fare is absolutely stunning. How this man makes such evocotive films with so little resources can only be fully appreciated when one considers so many other films made with infinite resources that are utterly bereft. If this is not proof of genius in his field, I don't know what might be.
When I first starting watching Zhang's films I became charmed by the lack of predictability. I found myself thinking: Now if this were an American film, this would happen. But something different usually happens -- something so true to life that you become involved with the characters of the story on a deep and satisfying level. I hope he can resist the temptation to immitate his Western peers -- it is they who should immitate him.
This very simply told tale has a large message that I think Zhang wants to tell about his homeland.
In Maoist times, the Chinese people were strongly persuaded that the ideal countryman was a souless, thoughtless, slogan-chanting, agrarian worker who bred the next generation of obeying automatons. The characters of this story are those whose lot in life is to endure the system that regime had wrought, and when our 13 year old heroine journeys to the city, her goal is to retrieve the missing boy for her own narrow purposes.
However, when she is interviewed on television, her humanity, in spite of herself, comes forth. Furthermore, the spontaneity of her emotions touches the local viewers in a way that shows China is a land where the oppressors failed to extract the souls from their subjects.
If you have kindness and caring in your soul (of course you do) you will connect with this movie. If you are also new to Chinese film, you will begin to question what you thought made a worthwhile film.
Movie Review: Let everyone have a sip
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been a fan of Zhang Yimou since 1999 when I watched his amazing film _Raise the Red Lantern_ for the first time in my East Asian Novel class. I have since had the pleasure of watching _The Road Home_, _Happy Times_, and _The Story of Qiu Ju_. Similar to Hou Jianqi's _Postmen in the Mountain_ and a number of the films mentioned above, _Not One Less_ depicts the natural beauty of rural China next to the abject poverty in which quite a number of farmer families live.
The film begins simply enough with the mayor tugging along the pretty, slim Wei Minzhi who has been hired by the village to teach in the place of an older teacher who must leave town in order to look after his sick mother. Minzhi does not bring much to the table, however, because she is only able to sing one song in praise of Mao and her teaching ability seems to be limited to copying information on the board and then ordering her students to copy what she has written. Also, did I mention the fact that Minzhi is thirteen years old?
Minzhi was hired because she was the only one willing to work in the little bumpkin village. Of course because of her age she is not only taken advantage of by her students, but the mayor as well who tries to swindle his way out of paying the young woman fifty yuan, around maybe twenty dollars for a month's work. However, when Minzhi is offered an extra ten yuan by the old teacher if she is able to keep all of her students during the month, Minzhi becomes determined to keep all of her students in place. However, one soon joins a school specializing in sports and another leaves for the city to support his sick mother.
Like Yang Zhang's film _Quitting_, all of the actors, all non-professional, play themselves. Filming is still highly censored in China, so Zhang Yimou had to veneer the true messages of the film. So under that happy ending and bubbly children, this is a serious social critique which needs to be seen to be appreciated.
Movie Review: A moving film - a sober reminder of how the other 80% live
Summary: 5 Stars
This is NOT a political protest film, despite the tendency of some people to politicize every major piece of contemporary Chinese film-making. If this film has a political over-tone at all, it would be to serve as a propaganda piece for the government-sponsored Hope Project, a massive fund-raising campaign to benefit rural education. Rural education is in fact one of the bright spots of the Communist record, considering that prior to the Communist take-over the vast majority of rural China was illiterate, and efforts to promote literacy (even those sponsored by Christian missionaries) were violently opposed by the traditional gentry. But of course, all that was too much Chinese history to expect from people who insist on referring to the director as "Yimou", when his family name is Zhang. We do not refer to Mao Zedong as Zedong.I probably don't need to rehash the basic story of the film or to point out yet again that the director casted local non-actors for every major role in the film. The result is a film that has the look and feel of a docudrama. But despite the somewhat awkward acting, all of the characters are entirely believable. While the story line is certainly somewhat contrived, the film was peppered with enough believable details to maintain the viewer's suspension of disbelief. And it's these seemingly trivial details that will move you, sometimes deeply.
The problems exposed by the film are the universal problems of poverty. Even if China were to become democratic in the US model tomorrow, all these problems will remain for some years to come and may in fact exacerbate in the short run. Watch the film, and try not to squander the good fortune you enjoy.