SYNOPSIS:
Qiang is a four-year-old little rebel, possessed of a pair
of luminous eyes and a precociously indomitable will. His
father deposits him at a well-appointed residential kindergarten
in post-1949 Beijing since his parents are often away. Life
at the kindergarten appears rich and colourful made up of
a variety of cheerfully sunny rituals and games meant to train
these children to be good members of society. But it's not
so easy for Qiang to adapt to this kind of carefully organized,
minutely scrutinized collective life. A fierce individualist
in miniature, he tries but fails to conform to the model his
teachers enforce. Yet he still craves the reward that the
other students win: the little red flowers awarded each day
as tokens for good behaviour.
MOVIE
REVIEW
Set
in the isolated confines of a post-1949 Beijing kindergarten,
Little Red Flowers is a study of interpersonal group dynamics
and a political allegory of the greater social currents sweeping
through China at the same time. The story of Little Red Flowers
story is not a particularly kind one to our resident dissident
Qiangqiang as he tried his best to escape from the overbearing
environment – his weapons of disinformation and escapism
overwhelmed by the mechanisms of brow-beating, peer pressure
and social isolation employed by the teachers.
These
thematic elements and more are expressed with all the subtlety
of wide-eyed five year-olds amidst the clash of characters
between the young rebel Qiangqiang and the authoritarian educators
– and amazing depths subtlety indeed we see from the
young actors. Director Zhang Yuan must have patience bleeding
out of his every pore at the end of the shoot managing the
huge number of children and getting them to listen to his
instructions. However, to his credit, he managed to coax some
amazingly real and textured performances from his charges
and brought the story to a higher level. For the adults, the
director is careful not to portray the teachers as unfeeling
caricatures – in fact, the teachers get progressively
more humane as Qiangqiang’s misdemeanors got more deviant.
However,
as endearing as this film gets, Little Red Flowers did not
manage to escape from the prison created by its own premise
– it did not become anything more than a metaphor.
SPECIAL FEATURES :
No special features.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
In faultless digital transfer, this feature is also available
in Chinese Dolby Digital 5.1.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD
RATING :
Review
by Lim Mun Pong
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