User Reviews

Wei Minzhi (played by Wei Minzhi, essentially playing herself) is a 13-year-old peasant girl pressed into being "Teacher Wei" at a small rural elementary school when the regular teacher must take a month off. She knows one song (a Maoist propaganda song) and that not very well. She hasn't a clue about how to manage a classroom. Her arithmetic is suspect and her people skills are those of a self-centered beginner. It's not even clear that she wants to do the job. In fact she seems more concerned about the 50 yuan she's supposed to get than anything else.

Thus acclaimed Chinese film maker Zhang Yimou sets the stage for a most compelling fairy tale which illustrates how the determined spirit of a little girl might triumph over poverty, ignorance, and the hard-headed reality of the post-Maoist bureaucratic society.

And is she determined! She is given 30 pieces of chalk and warned not to waste any of it. The lesson plans are to copy some lessons on the chalkboard and to get the students to copy the copy. That's it! Both the regular teacher and the town's mayor point to the other as the one who will pay her. When the regular teacher starts to leave without paying her, she chases after him. She is told she will get paid when he returns, and if all the students are still enrolled, she will get a ten-yuan bonus.

Thus we have the movie's title and the source of "Teacher Wei's" determination. When one little girl is picked to go to a sports camp because she can run, Wei hides her from the authorities. When Zhang Huike, the class trouble-maker (played by Zhang Huike), quits school and heads for the city to find work, Wei schemes ways to get him and bring him back.

At this point the magic begins. With this common goal both teacher and the kids figure out ways to raise money to send Wei by bus to the city and back.

They figure the cost for Wei's round trip and for Zhang Huike's one-way trip back, with the kids themselves taking the initiative at the chalkboard with the math. Wei makes them empty their pocketbooks, and when there is not enough she takes them on a field trip to a brick-making factory and together they move bricks to raise the cash. Again they calculate how many bricks they must move at so many "cents" per brick.

I mention all this because what is demonstrated, by the by, is some real teaching and learning taking place. In fact the mayor comes by and peeks into the classroom and is delighted to see that the substitute teacher knows how to teach math!

This sequence of events is very moving and is at the heart of the film. Any teacher anywhere in the world will recognize how brilliantly this is done. The kids become so eager to learn that they learn effortlessly, which is the way it is supposed to be. Furthermore, one of the phenomena of the profession is exemplified: that of the real teacher learning more (partly because she is older) than the students from the lessons they encounter.

Now, it is true that director Zhang Yimou does not show us the real poverty that exists in China nor does he point to the horrid dangers encountered by children who go to the city to work. Neither the little boy nor Teacher Wei is preyed upon in the manner we might fear. Recapitulations of the baser instincts of human beings are not part of Zhang Yimou's purpose here. This is in fact a movie that can be viewed by children, who will, I suspect, identify very strongly with the story. Zhang Yimou is talking to the child in all of us and he does it without preaching or through any didactic manipulation of adult verses child values. It is true he does manipulate our hearts to some degree, but with all the ugliness that one sees in the world today, perhaps he can be allowed this indulgence.

Although I would not say that this film is as good as Zhang Yimou's internationally celebrated films such as Red Sorghum (1987) (his first film) or Raise the Red Lantern (1991) (which I think is his best film) or The Story of Qiu Ju (1991) (which this film resembles to some extent), it is nonetheless a fine work of art exemplifying Zhang Yimou's beautiful and graceful style and his deep love for his characters and their struggles. And as always his work rises above and exists in a place outside of political propaganda as does the work of all great artists.

Perhaps more than anything else, however, one should see this movie to delight in the unselfconscious, natural, and utterly convincing "amateur" performance by Wei Minzhi as a most determined and brave little girl. She will win your heart.

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)

Wei Minzhi plays Wei MinZhi, Zhang Huike plays Zhang Huike, the village mayor plays the village mayor... As a matter of fact, and in a clear statement of sort, the whole cast of this movie are real and ordinary people.

Zhang Yimou has gone the extraordinary miles to let reality tell the stories, stories of the decline and poverty in parts of rural China, of heart-wrenching conditions for schools and education under such poverty, of heart-warming spirit of happy, lively and adorable children in Shuiquan school blissfully ignorant of their condition, and of the 13 year old peasant girl Wei Mizhi's single minded determination for "Not One Less".

This movie is Zhang's daring experiment to use "normal reality" to tell reality, and he has achieved convincingly his goal. All characters in this movie are real, as in reality real. They are real because they have no means of being unreal, and that is the whole point of using real people.

Wei Minzhi's self-display (since I can not use the word performance here) is what she is: a 13 year old poor, good-natured, no-nonsense, single minded and tenacious peasant girl. She quickly learns to use her toughness to discipline or even bully her students. She seldom smiles, but is actually a pretty good leader because of her no-nonsense and toughness and single mindedness. She is extremely tenacious and is obsessed with "Not One Less".

The blissfully happy 10 year old trouble-maker and prospect kid migrant worker Zhang Huike's display is just so good that it is almost unreal. The village mayor is a natural real. Sun Zhimei, the girl who lost Zhang Huike in the city, is also as real as you can get.

The people I really like in this movie are the three girl students who sleep in school: Zhang Mingshan, Jiao Jie and Ming Xinhong. Zhang Mingshan is just so pretty and adorable. She is also smart and is a "student cadre". Jiao Jie has a such vivacious smile and has already some good business sense as she comes up with the moving brick idea and the cheating on bus ticket idea. Ming Xinhong loves to run, and her fleeting smile in the car leaving for athlete training school is simply priceless.

Ironically, notwithstanding the poor condition in Shuiquan school, I feel very warm and touched by the good spirit of the children. Shuiquan school is actually working, and working quite well, thanks to good teacher like Gao, good village mayor like Tian, and also to the "student cadre" system, all of which are legacy of Mao's era. Just look at how smart, creative and participating the students are in trying to solve the bus fair problem for Wei Minzhi, you know something is very right in that school. One of the right things in that school is the "student cadres" like the pretty, smart and caring Zhang Mingshan who's title is "study commissar" (xuexi weiyuan), usually the most responsible student in class and a teacher's favorite. We also see a boy "student cadre" in charge of morning "military drill" and flag raise ceremony.

Wei Minzhi is most of the time an uncaring teacher, except the issue of "Not One Less" which involves her pay. The one who real cares and helps out the class is the beautiful "study commissar" Zhang Mingshan. She writes out a student name list for Wei to do roll calls. When Wei sits outside letting trouble maker Zhang Huike reign free, she tells Wei that it is her (Wei) duty as a teacher to do something. When Huike knocks the precious chalks off the ground, she picks up these chalks and telling the tugging and struggling Wei and Huike don't step on the chalks. She even criticizes in her diary (read out by Huike in class over her protests but at the insistence of Wei) that Wei is not taking good care of chalks like teacher Gao would...

A little girl living in poverty and in that utterly dilapidated school but still writes a caring dairy of what is going on in class, something is very right.

Unlike many other Zhang Yimou's movies which are persistently followed with complaint by Chinese audience for "being tailored and catering to foreign taste and curiosity", "Not One Less" is very well received in China. In a surprise reversal of Zhang's fortune with Chinese authority, this movie has even been promoted as a "propaganda material" of sort by the Chinese government in its campaign for better rural education.

Not One Less (1999), directed by Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, Shanghai Triad) is a bittersweet drama set in a poor public school in the remote Chinese village of Shuiquan in Hebei province. Based on a book by screenwriter Shi Xiangsheng, who worked as a schoolteacher in Xinjiang, Not One Less illuminates the conditions of children in rural China who have little access to education and are without schoolbooks or teachers with drive or experience.

As the film opens, the regular teacher (Gao Enman) must leave the school to take care of his sick mother and a 13-year old peasant girl (Wei Minzhi) with no previous teaching experience is hired by the Mayor to become the substitute teacher for one month. Teacher Gao, already upset by the number of students who have left the school, tells Wei that when he comes back the number of students must be "not one less". Wei, concerned about receiving her pay of 50 yuan, promises that no student will leave while she is there. The young teacher must control and teach 28 students, most just a few years younger than her. With little resources other than a few boxes of chalk, Wei can do little else than have the children copy an assignment from the blackboard while she sits outside the door to prevent them from leaving.

Teacher Wei runs into difficulty in keeping her promise to Gao when one student is recruited to go to a special sports school. Another student, a bright but mischievous 11-year old, Zhang Huike, is also taken out of school to find work in the city of Jiangjiaou to help his family's finances. The story takes a sharp turn when Wei, determined not to lose any more students, makes plans to raise money to go to the city to find Zhang and bring him back to school. The process of finding the money to allow her to take the bus to the city enables Wei to teach the eager students by constructing real-life problems in simple mathematics.

When Zhang gets lost in the city and lives on the streets, scavenging for food, Wei must summon all her inner resources to try to find him. The scenes in the city use hidden cameras during Wei's interactions with crowds to create a semi-documentary style that reminded me of recent Iranian films that blend fact and fiction. In the process of looking for Zhang, the naive girl from the countryside encounters bewildering obstacles and bureaucratic bungling that are reminiscent of an earlier Zhang Yimou film, "The Story of Qui Ju". At first, Wei's motives in finding Zhang are to make sure she gets paid when Gao returns. However, she soon develops a true affection for Zhang and the result is a desperate search that will take you on an emotional roller coaster ride.

While Not One Less is specifically about economic conditions in rural China, the appealing innocence of the nonprofessional actors (who used their real names to add authenticity to their performance) gives the film a direct emotional appeal that is universal. It may lack the scope and dramatics of earlier Yimou works, but Not One Less is a gentle and involving film that truly touches the heart.

6 March 2000

"Not One Less"

It's the first great film of this year for me. `Not One Less' is storytelling at its dead straightest - most like the work of the contemporary Iranians Makhmalbaf and Kiarostami but also directly connected to the great Neorealists DeSica, Rosselini and Bunuel. All revel in telling culturally specific stories that reflect universal human experiences that are resonant across all time and place. But as I sat there, freshest on my mind was David Lynch's `The Straight Story.' Both Lynch and Zhang take us on a small journey that reflects a world's worth of living. Both show us that harrowing experience and heroism, seemingly small scale in their films, can be writ in large and commanding script across the lives of ordinary people.

Shi Xiangsheng's script is a rural fable based on his own story set in remote China, Hebei - the dry high plains, an undoubtedly stiffening existence. It's shot as beautifully as any of Zhang's films - he's a deft colorist, one of the great painterly directors in cinema (see `Ju Dou' and `Raise the Red Lantern'). The children are crimson-cheeked with complexions warmed and toasted by the unfiltered sun - but they will surely, eventually become worn and parched like their elders, Teacher Gao and Mayor Tian. We see an honest poverty here in great detail. The film's camerawork lets every detail seep into us, allowing us to feel the film's atmospherics and making us thirst in its arid heat and dust. (When the 26 children share 2 cans of warm Coca Cola after a long and hard day, we, too, want to get in line for our sip.)

Thirteen-year-old Wei Minxhi is dragged along by Mayor Tian to the village' s ramshackle one-room schoolhouse to meet Teacher Gao. She is to become the school's substitute teacher for one month while Gao leaves to tend to his ailing mother. He can't in good conscience leave this child to shepherd his children but he is without a choice - it's the kind of hard rationalism that is part of everyday life here. Before leaving, he counsels her sternly and provisions her with only a ragged lesson book and one stick (and only one stick) of chalk for every day he will be gone. He shows her the narrow bed in the adjoining room that she will share with 3 boarding students.

Teacher Gao is an old man who has suffered a lot of dedicated and dictated poverty in order to improve the lot of his village's children. We come to know his commitment to his work even at this stage of his life when he warns her that conditions are hard in this village and that the vicissitudes of life weigh very heavily on the children here. When he says he has already lost 10 students you know he has felt the loss of every single one. He commands her to keep the body of his school together and that when he returns, he wants to see every one of his students present - and not one less.

`Not One Less' is about young Teacher Wei's struggle to meet his simple challenge. We see immediately that she has more reluctance than skill or gumption for this task. But in a culture that expects obedience, she has no recourse. And nowhere else to go. She is more like a sullen older sister than a teacher. And because they are children, the students begin to test her a little. They aren't bratty kids, just rambunctious and resistant to the discipline of schoolwork. She hasn't a clue about how to make them work, so she just writes the lesson on the board and posts herself against the door, barring any escape. Her handwriting is neat and orderly but as the film progresses, we come to see that Teacher Wei is only a little more schooled than her charges.

The great thing about `Not One Less' is its unstinting perspective on the innocence and naiveté that only a child lives in. Teacher Wei and these children are completely guileless, without a window on the wide world, and have none of the knowledge or calculation for the simplest complexities of modern life. The film's crisis is that the class troublemaker, eleven-year-old bumpkin Zhang Huike, leaves unannounced for the city so he can earn money for his destitute family. Wei feels the absolute fear of her failure to keep her pledge and is desperate to go and find young Zhang. Figuring out how to get to the city to find him - for her and these children, it might as well be a search for the Holy Grail. It seems as fraught with myth and legend. Yet she, in her naiveté, is undaunted. Many schemes are attempted and when each fails, she just begins walking, having no idea how far it is or how long it will take her or what lies ahead when she gets there. She just knows she must find him.

Her journey is the quest of her young life just as Alvin Straight's is the culminating quest of his life. It is a defining act for both. There are no earth-shattering twists of plot to keep from you. It is the unfolding of a redemptive story, a boldly honest portrait of a world away from our experience and a young girl's attempt to navigate it with all her will and perseverance and naiveté - and only that - to sustain her. In the end, we feel we have been somewhere we've never been before and, perhaps, learned something that we had long forgotten. It is the singular power of cinema to transport us this way, to jack us directly into a net of experience we can feel so deeply in our hearts.

PLOT SUMMARY

At a remote Chinese primary school, a thirteen-year girl, Wei Minzhi, was employed as a substitute teacher for the regular teacher, Gao, who had to leave for a month to look after his ailing mother. For her work she was promised fifty Yuan and Gao agreed to give her a bonus of ten Yuan if she managed to retain all his twenty-eight students, hence the title, Not One Less. As she was barely older than her students and her limited education she encountered difficulty in running the forty-five year-old school. She had to face a particularly disruptive boy, Zhang Huike. One day he failed to turn up to school as he was compelled to look for work in the city to cater for his ailing, debt-ridden mother. Determined as ever, Wei tried to raise the necessary funds with the help of the other students to go to the city and bring him back. To Wei and Zhang city life was alien and harsh as they struggled to feed themselves and sought shelter in the railway station. It was through the local television station's contact that they were finally reunited. Not only was her goal achieved but she managed to get other resources for the students and to rebuild the school, later renamed Shuiquan School of Hope.

ANALYSIS

Zhang Yimou, the producer of such colourful, mythified, melodramatic movies like "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Red Sorghum" had come full circle to produce this semi-documentary, realistic film. However, given his experience as a rural worker (1968 to 1878) during the Cultural Revolution, it is not too surprising that he had come up with this emphasis on real rural life in contemporary China, the prevailing poverty, children deprived of education and hardships faced by the inhabitants. This "realistic" film is underlined by the use of amateurs instead of professionals. Most played their real-life roles, for example, the mayor is actually Tian Zhenda, the teacher is Gao and two children Wei Minzhi and Zhang Huike played characters of the same name. Settings such as the school, the local television station and the city (Zhangjiakou) are real. The only connection with the Zhang Yimou of old is his preference for red which is depicted by the large red flower in front of the truck carrying the goods to the village. There are four major themes in this film. The first focused on courage and determination. Once Wei made up her mind to go to the city to bring Zhang back nothing could stop her. She was not concerned about her own safety in an alien environment and her limited resources. We first saw her determination when she tried to stop one of the girls from being taken away to the Sports academy. Although she was lost in the city and made to wait for one and a half days to meet the station manager she did not give up. It was her sheer courage and determination that won the day. These two qualities plus persistence and endurance are reminiscence of human qualities that we see in many of Zhang's films.

The next theme is the prevailing poverty in the rural areas. We see the decrepit school condition, the broken school furniture and children migrating to the city to work to support the family. The third is the importance of money, including the lack of it. Money permeates this film from beginning to end. Early in the film Wei asked Gao about her pay and later we saw how she tried to raise funds for the bus trips and at the same time the students learned how to count. The lack of money meant Wei and Zhang had to sleep in the railway station and rely on leftovers to fill their stomachs. On the positive side money was donated to rebuild the school and settle Zhang's mother's debts. The final theme is the urban-rural dichotomy. On one hand, we saw beautiful natural landscape relatively untouched by man, on the other we saw the busy, crowded and man-made city landscape with high-rise buildings. This dichotomy is also the rich and poor divide. Coming from the countryside where everybody knows and helps each other, Wei and Zhang were misfits in this new uncompromising environment. Not only were their clothing different, they encountered unfriendly and unhelpful people like the receptionist at the television station. Zhang Yimou raised these themes of rural poverty and rural-urban dichotomy to highlight the prevailing social inequality that exist in China and hopefully generate some support to alleviate poverty. His final message stated that one million children had dropped out of school annually because of poverty. Financial help from various sources had enabled fifteen percent to return to school. This is powerful message that he had sent out in this film.

Director: Zhang Yimou Duration: 108 minutes

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.

I'd like to examine the character arc of the young girl who comes to temporarily substitute at the poverty-stricken school: Teacher Wei. When she first arrives, she seems really disinterested and apathetic towards the whole situation. The only thing on her mind is the financial rewards that she is promised by the mayor if, in fact, she's successful in maintaining all of the children at the school without losing any. When she begins teaching, it's simply to fulfill an obligation: very routine-like.

She allows the children to fight with each other without intervention, has them write a ton of complicated characters on the board that they don't understand, and expects them to copy it verbatim without cry or murmur. It's obvious, at first, that she has no desire to help these struggling children. This suggests something poignant about her back story—that she, too, comes from the grounds of destitution. When given the chance to earn some money, she jumped immediately at the opportunity not knowing the full implications of how difficult it would be to Sheppard the wandering flock.

When the young boy, Zhang Huike, goes with some travelers into the city to make money for his family, Wei is determined to follow after him and reclaim him. This presents an interesting dichotomy in her desires: does she want to reclaim him strictly for financial rewards, or, is there a part of her that really cares for his well-being and wants him back in the fold with the other children? I think it's a little bit of both as the story unfolds (but more so out of love). Wei travels through tremendous moments of change to reclaim him—each moment testing her resilience to stay in the game. She has an objective (e.g. Zhang Huike), but she is thwarted.

She needs money to travel by bus into the city, but has none. She works for money by moving bricks, but is paid none because she and the children accidentally break them in the process. She sneaks onto a bus, but is thrown off. She hand writes a multiplicity of rescue flyers to find Huike, but none are seen by him. All of these moments show her steady dedication not to give up on the lost lamb. She is determined to find him. I believe this is where the theme of the story is revealed: the Sheppard of a flock will leave the 99 in order to rescue the wayward one: no matter the extremes.

This theme becomes clearer as you see Wei conquer one battle after the next, stopping at nothing to find Huike (especially when she goes on live television). There, on television, with tears in her eyes and a plea in her voice, she asks Huike where he has gone—why did he leave? In that moment, I became convinced that her care for him was genuine—not something strictly lucrative. After all, she wasn't crying crocodile tears. It's a real touching moment when Huike finally sees the broadcast, as he, too, starts to become emotional. He begins to realize all of the things Wei had to go through in order for him to realize her love for him. He reciprocates and goes home.

I think director Zhang Yimou was trying to portray the power of love one can have for a wayward child. With obvious Christ-like undertones, though perhaps not intentional, Not One Less is the story about what a person is willing to do when they feel separated from those who they love. It works really well in this particular story because I had ambivalent feelings of whether Wei's intentions were initially sincere, but as the story progressed I realized that she was being charitable, not selfish.

I believe Yimou intentionally shot the film, in some instances, like a hidden camera documentary because he wanted the aesthetics of the film to compliment the meaning of the theme. Since the Sheppard theme is one possible theme to the story, it makes sense to say that the camera-work acts as a hidden device, away from the eyes of Wei. Wei is looking for the lost child, but he remains hidden from her eyes. So, too, there is also an omniscient camera looking at Wei as she looks for Huike—a device that suggests perhaps the God of heaven watching over all of his wandering sheep (some respectfully more than others). One particular moment that heavily suggests the hidden camera is when Wei is asking the citizens in the city if they've seen or know the railroad instructor. The scene is shot montage as it shows her exhaust herself throughout the day. She looks helpless; always being observed from afar. The pity she feels in trying to find Huike is the same pity that the camera seems to have on her—always watching; simply observing.

David Thomson once suggested that the creative life-expectancy of any notable director nowadays is ten years; that the possibility of renewal available to the likes of Renoir or Lang are gone. It looks like Zhang Yimou's allotted decade is up, because this is a truly negligable film. Although in decline since 'Raise the Red Lantern', later films such as 'To Live' and 'Shanghai Triad' got by on sheer style and storytelling verve. But this is Zhang Yimou made for American consumption (it worked, see below). Gone is the adult eroticism (embodied in frequent collaborator Gong Li), the dangerous style, the insight into rituals of tradition and power, the astonishing colour, the capturing a wild, living landscape that both made a mockery of the 'naturalness' of power structures, and mirrored his transgressors' emotions. All the things that made him a continual thorn in the side of the Chinese authorities.

'Not one less' is an obscene fairy tale that makes a mockery of any social criticism, a narrative centred on kids to presumably conceal the lack of adult intelligence, bland views of a rural landscape that somehow contrive to make aridity and poverty picturesque, a glutinous Hollywood-style score, full of the Oriental equivalent of Riverdance, and, believe it or not, a product placement for a certain soft drink so blatant even Bond would have balked at it.

From the thrilling 'Red Sorghum' to this is a sad loss - I can only hope that it is laced in double-edged irony; that, like Shostakovitch under Stalin, Zhang is giving the authorities what they want, while covertly criticising them. I hope so, but I doubt it. The worst crime is that he has made his unique style more digestible - gone are the punishing long takes of 'Lantern', the expressionism of 'Sorghum', the fragments of 'Triad'; in their place is the conventional grammar of editing, camera movement, composition and close-up of a Hollywood film, so conventional that it might have been made by an American. Ah...

Even though it's hackneyed and obvious, the first third tries at least to show the reality of egalitarian communism in present-day China, the sterile desolation of rural outposts, where near-abandoned kids are taught in a tiny, dingy classroom, forced to copy out blodges of 'lessons' they don't understand; where the substitute teacher in charge of them for a month is only 13; where supplies are so low chalk must be preserved as sacredly as the Holy Grail, and the teacher hasn't been paid in months. The school building (i.e. a room) isn't half a century old, yet is decrepit and ancient-looking. Children are constantly dropping out; the poverty of the region is such that they leave for the big city to find work, even though they haven't reached puberty. The pinched selfishness of the average Chinese bourgeois is revealed, although they are no more callous than any urban dweller anywhere.

The film starts off as a weird variant on the 'Blackboard Jungle'/'Dangerous Minds' kind of school movie, with an unruly band of kids refusing to respect their sullen teenage teacher. But then sheer fantasy takes hold, and all the recognisable signifiers of the little-boy-lost movie reassure us of an untraumatic outcome. The agreeably disruptive lad gets lost, but he doesn't get too lost, he isn't a prey to paedophiles, he isn't starved. Likewise, the teachers' quest seems hopeless, but as the syrupy music kicks in, we know there'll be a kindly man in power who will sort out everything. The day-glo set of the TV studio where Wei makes her appeal suggests Zhang is as contemptuous of this story as we are.

The closing scene with the teacher and her reunited kids is hilarious, as they write words that express what they feel up on the blackboard, having gotten a 'voice' in a society that had ignored them; when one writes 'diligence' you could be watching one of those old Soviet musicals about tractors. Once again government responsibility is evaded, and 'charity' encouraged. How American.

Zhang uses the Kiarostami-like device of getting the actual participants of this true story to play themselves, and the brilliantly self-serving mayor is either a dolt or scrupulously self-aware or simply happy to be on film, such is the unflattering yet convincing power of his performance. Go see 'Kikijiro'.