Not One Less

viewed March 3, 2000 at Landmark's Shattuck

For full information about this film, click here

I was hungry as hell because it was 9PM, I had just finished watching Flowers of Shanghai and had no cash left for dinner.  I had originally planned to go home after one movie, but having gone all the way to Berkeley I felt I'd might as well stick around.  So I put Not One Less on my Visa and starved for another hour.  For the following two hours my stomach was no longer an issue, even though (or perhaps because) I saw destitute children starving on the screen.  When I finally left for home, it was with a greater sense of gratitude for what I have -- a lesson I have forgotten since I returned from China.  This movie made me remember the value of my two years overseas, being among people whose actions and thinking can be downright confounding, but whose spirit, once set on a goal, is indomitable.

Zhang Yimou has made a wonder of a film, a true story with all of the real-life subjects playing themselves, a cinema verite par verite.  The centerpiece is Wei Ming Zhi, a 13-year-old girl who filled in as a substitute teacher at a one-classroom school in a rural village.  Her orders are to let none of her students, under any circumstances, quit the school.  Her reasons at first are selfish -- an extra 10 yuan if no one leaves -- but her own doggedness in keeping everyone at school becomes the conduit to gaining a greater sense of selflessness, a message that oddly brings the film into the fold as typical Chinese social propaganda.  

Watching Wei playing herself is surreal, especially as we see her as an untrained teacher doing a horrid job of teaching class, turning her back on the students as she scrawls the lesson on the chalkboard, then leaving them to copy it while she sits daydreaming outside.  One can do nothing but give credit to Wei and her fellow cast for depicting herself and the villagers in all their ignorance and stubbornness.  They are an accessory in Zhang's continuing lover's quarrel with the Chinese people, whom he sees as stupid, short-sighted, selfish and immensely perseverant. To Zhang, China is an absurd society whose people constantly conspire to put each other down, but somehow from this cruel dynamic heroism springs forth.  It's the same argument he delineated so carefully in The Story of Qiu Ju, only this time the targets of his satire are in on the joke -- or maybe they're not, which makes the joke all the more true.  Here, more than in any of his previous films, Zhang is reconciled to the system, though he gets in as many kicks and jabs along the way. 

This film would go very well as a double feature with The Straight Story, since they're both based on true stories of incredibly stubborn people who go at great lengths and personal sacrifice to put things right.  Who knows how true-to-fact either story is, but I prefer Not One Less because it seems more intimate with its subjects (how could it not be when it uses them as the cast?).  Because of that, the filmmaker's feelings towards his subject are laid out more openly, in all their complex entanglements of scorn and admiration.  It is a brave, beautiful work.

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