This year's movie #69 is Zhang Yimou's
Not One Less.

The VCD--yes, legally acquired and has
cost me half an arm and much muttering
under my breath-- has been lounging on
the unwatched pile for a couple of months.
I want to kick myself for seeing it just
now: it has all the rawness of untrained
acting and none of the pseudo-
spontaneity of scripted reality television.

Zhang Yimou is from China's Fifth Generation
and specializes on what I like to call
as the cinema of the constipated. His
films are all about delayed or denied
gratification, of people who are punished
for succumbing to lust and other strains
of human need. His China is impoverished,
repressed, and his lead actresses all look
like Gong Li, primarily because it was
Gong Li. In this particular feature though,
his ensemble is composed of clerks, teachers,
pedestrians--workaday people who give
workaday acting that resonates with so
much truth that no Strassberg workshop
can give.