•
Rating:
China,
a country of strong contrasts, of diversity, of metropolises and villages, where tradition and modernity often clash. An immense country, so immense it’s intimidating, making man seem like a tiny black speck on a billion white sheets of paper.
China has two faces: the industrial one of an economic powerhouse and the rural, backward one. The face of the Olympics and that of the rice paddies. And it is the latter face, the poor and invisible one, that is the main subject of this film. "Not One Less" tells the story of that part of China stuck fifty years in the past, isolated from the world yet so vast as it occupies nearly all the western part, and not only, of this giant nation.
In one of these many villages scattered across the country, Mr. Gao, a teacher at an elementary school that is more of a shack than a school, must leave for a month to care for his sick mother and asks Wei, a thirteen-year-old girl, to replace him. He advises her to keep the children constantly in check and watch over them, not a single one should be absent upon his return. The task is anything but easy, and the situation worsens when one of her pupils runs away to work in the city. Wei must find him, but in a big city, as we know, the chances of finding someone without knowing much about them are quite slim. The city is chaos, confusion, it’s another world, enough to get lost, even for those who live there. The smell of fried food, the market, Chinese on bicycles, and then so many people. It’s strange that it is this very crowd that helps her find that child, whereas in reality, everyone would care less. Yet there, they even let her make a television announcement, this is perhaps the only note of fantasy in the film, which seems to want to end with a happy ending, if not impossible, at least hard to believe. Unfortunately, most happy endings seem always unbelievable, while stories that end badly are increasingly real. But reality we already live every day, and occasionally it doesn’t hurt to see a film end differently, where everyone reunites and returns home.
This film truly shows you China from a different perspective. Forget martial arts and Buddhist temples with incense. Here, there is a raw China, made of earth and cement. Everything, from the environment to the actors (who are not professional actors), is taken from the street, from that slice of daily life that is so strange to us, and who knows if there can ever really be stories like these with happy endings.
Loading comments slowly
