FILM REVIEW--“NOT ONE LESS”
“Not One Less” is a film which can draw tears from those in the
audience who are not yet enveloped by hardness and cynicism. This film is directed
by one of the China’s great directors, Zhang Yimou.
Shi Xiangsheng’s story is of a small village school not too
distant from Beijing but light-years away from that country’s capital in
sophistication. The story turns on an unusual plot device. The sole teacher of
the rural school called Gao Enman was away from his job for a month to visit
his dying mother. Thirteen-year-old Wen Minzhi (Wei) arrives in Shuiquan
village to substitute for Gao while he is away. Since the school’s subsidy is
depends on the head count, she had to return to the full class to the
teacher—“not one less”. Keeping all the students in class is more important
than anything she teaches them, and indeed she isn’t a lot of more advanced
than her students. This showed that the inspired teacher awakens the minds and
the spirits of the class.
When one of the students, Zhang Huike (Zhang) run away to look for
work in the big city, Jiangjiakou, Wei determines to follow him and bring him
back. To her, this is not an easy task. It involves raising the money to buy a
bus ticket to the city. She puts the whole class to work shifting bricks for a
local factory in order to get some money. At last, she eventually gets to the
city.
The village scenes and the city scenes have a mysterious
connectedness. Wei search for Zhang, seen at several points in the story alone
and scavenging for food, becomes her passions. It can see that all her devotion
and wilfulness are wrapped up in this little boy’s plight. Wei further disappointed that
Zhang never showed up to work, but ran away from the girl he came with, as he
left her to go for a pee in the train station and never returned.
It now takes a radical
turn for the worst as the teacher decides to find Zhang and bring him back to
school no matter what suffering it takes on her part to do it. Supposedly she
is no longer doing it out of her own selfishness, but in her inarticulate and resolute
way she has learned what it is to be a teacher and care about her students and
all she's still missing are the teaching skills. Wei couldn’t manage to find
Zhang through police and she ends up listening to a stranger in train station
who tells her go TV station. But she stills cannot meet TV manager as the
receptionist only describes the manager as “a man with glasses”. She ends up
sleeping on the street and until the manager, who turns out to be sensitive to
her plight, get her on a popular show.
Luckily, she manages to
connect again with Zhang. Zhang was seen wandering the streets and begging for
food in a restaurant. What was interesting about his part of the film was
taking a gender at the city and how clean and boring and crowded it looked. But
the film never recovered from this artificial twist and concluded with the
Chinese TV donors sending money to pay off Zhang’s family debts as well supply
schools with things needed. The massage of the film about the poor conditions
of China’s rural schools was unfortunately delivered in a heavy-handed manner.
This film is a heart-wrenching, straightforward
and frequently comic tale of the difference one teacher can make on her
students. In this case, Zhang Yimou employs the talents of non-professionals,
with the most characters performing in the precise roles they follow in their
real life. The students at the ZhongXin primary schools are the students at
that very school. While the TV manager at the broadcasting station of the city
of Jiangjiakou is the TV manager at Jiangjiakou’s TV outlet. While watching
these people performance, I can’t wonder why people are still need to go to
acting school at all.
This film was so
adeptly done and looked and felt so good as it showed the power of human love
over all the coldness in the world. The parts where all people were played by
those playing themselves in such a natural way that I dint see its downfall
coming until it was too late. By that time I was really getting off on the film
and was amazed by the simple daily life rhythms of the schoolchildren and the
common villagers, that I was already hooked on liking the film. I especially
found the performance of Wei Minzhi to be impactful. I was taken in by the simplicity
of who she was and the truth in her character, and the way she was still an
innocent child. Because of her cultural background she was obedient and took on
the responsibilities of being a substitute teacher, something that she knew she
had no ability for but reluctantly had to do, even if she couldn't explain why.
I feel that this film
had bring to the audience that inadequate schooling will continue to keep the
rural population as poor as those of the previous generation. Such film is not
meant to propagandize the country’s plight, to evoke worldwide cries of the
sympathy or to embarrass the current government. I felt in this touching film,
the journey, not the destination, is the essence. The roads are rocky and
difficult and the excursions are slow and long, but the trip is ever so
worthwhile.
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