A young boy starting school for the first time struggles to fit into a regimented, post-revolutionary Chinese society.

LITTLE RED FLOWERS

Dir: Zhang Yuan, Zhang Zuan

With: Dong Bowen , Li Xiaofeng , Xiaofeng Li , Yuanyuan Ning , Zhao Rui

Details:
2006, China/Rest of the world, Drama/Comedy, cert 12A, 92 mins

Philip French
Sunday January 7, 2007
The Observer

Since I was three, my favourite Potter story has been Squirrel Nutkin (though it wasn't one of Greene's). It contrasts the exciting perils of being a rebel and the dull rewards of diligent conformity and involves what I later came to recognise as symbolic castration. By an odd coincidence, Zhang Yuan's impressive Little Red Flowers deals sensitively with this very subject. The picture is seen almost entirely from the point of view of Qiang, a four-year-old boy placed by his unseen parents in a well-run boarding school for the small children of Communist Party officials and well-connected professionals in what appears to be 1950s China.

For the best of reasons, or so it seems to them, the teachers organise the little kids' lives from morning to night in a kindly manner. Everything is regimented, from the way they dress to the practice of communal defecation. Though keen to earn the eponymous little red flowers given for tasks properly executed, Qiang rebels against the officious rituals. Though he briefly gets the others to join him, he's finally ostracised by his fellow pupils. The story is told with simplicity and insight and is among the best films from China within the past few years.

 

 

Andrew Pulver
Friday January 5, 2007
The Guardian

Zhang Yuan's affecting drama is a return to the kind of Chinese cinema popular in a pre-John Woo/Jackie Chan universe, quietly and unfussily anatomising the traumas suffered under Mao.

In a "boarding kindergarten" in the late 1940s, a rebellious four year old won't sing the right songs, refuses to poop to order, and generally won't go along with the prevailing orthodoxies. As a metaphor for the fate of a free spirit under Chinese communism, it's all clear enough; and, underpinned by wonderfully natural performances from scores of toddlers, it's always thoroughly watchable.