Not One Less (1999) – DVD

一個都不能少
Yi ge dou bu neng shao
***/**** Image A Sound B-
starring Wei Minzhi, Zhang Huike, Tian Zhenda, Enman Gao
screenplay by Shi Xiangsheng
directed by Zhang Yimou

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Zhang Yimou's Not One Less, while suffering from a disease of nonspecificity, nevertheless manages to make its points with style and grace. It's not an especially deep film, railing as it does against a poverty that has no known source and, thus, no possible remedy. But even as nonspecific as it tries to keep itself, the film does sink you deep into the problem of poverty in China. The film is at least a cri de cœur for the lost futures of China's rural children, trapped as many are between education and supporting their families. And the cry is voiced beautifully by Hou Yong's cinematography, giving even an impoverished village and dirty city the visual élan that is the hallmark of Zhang's craft. If some subtler analysis gets lost in the interim, you can't have everything.

Based on a true story, the film examines the results when a village's schoolteacher has to be replaced for a month by a 13-year-old girl named Wei (Wei Minzhi (suggesting documentary, the actors retain their own names for their characters)). Wei has been told that she must write the lessons on the board for a whole month, and to pretty much keep the troublemakers in line, whereupon she will be given 50 yuan for her troubles. When she asks for her money up front, she is refused but promised a bonus of 10 yuan if she can ensure that all of her charges are left in class by the end of the month. At first, she is bitter at her unmonied plight, and doesn't take much interest in her duties–she merely writes the lessons on the board with her one-a-day chalk ration and spends the rest of the day outside moping. But with time, she becomes an authoritative presence, dishing out as much as her students, including a grin-faced troublemaker (Zhang Huike) who she has to chase around, can give her. All is right with the world.

Then her students begin disappearing–along with her bonus. One girl who proves to be quite a runner is carted off to an athletic academy despite Wei's attempts to hide her. The mayor (Tian Zhenda) calms her down, saying that such an event doesn't count against her, but things get worse: the class troublemaker is sent to the city in order to work, because his mother is too sick to support him. This gets Wei thinking about how the classmates could spring him from his city job, with everyone trying to figure out ways to get the money to follow the student and retrieve him. They invade a brick-maker's yard to move bricks, and hopefully raise some money. Out of pity, he gives them a pathetic amount, too little to catch a bus. So Wei hitches to the city, and finds when she gets there that her former charge has been lost without a trace. The rest of the film deals with her dogged attempts to hunt down her student, stopping at nothing until she finds him.

I put off writing this review for a long while after seeing it. Why? Because I didn't quite know what to say about it. While I was completely engrossed during its hundred minutes, I'm still not sure what I was supposed to take home with me. Zhang's style here is highly ambiguous. While it avoids the pitfalls of a social-realist approach, which would have focused on standard-league "filthy-peasant" imagery and thus condescended to its subjects, it doesn't seem to have any opinions of its own. Not One Less is beautiful, in its way, as are most of Zhang's films, but its style looks good instead of creating a mood or imparting information. One winds up admiring the imagery instead of concentrating on the narrative, in which the director doesn't seem particularly interested. The film lacks urgency, never really reaching the heart of darkness of its subjects' plight. Instead of pain or outrage at the trials of our teenage heroine on her mission to rescue her student, we just accumulate details of a restless pursuit and take the emotions as read.

Furthermore, the film never resolves the issue of what exactly the student's family is going to do once he is returned to the fold. Is he going to spontaneously generate income for his sick mother, who cannot work to support him, or are provisions going to be parachuted in by the Chinese authorities? Details like this are constantly elided in this film, which takes a straight-as-an-arrow narrative through a great patch of rough terrain. What, exactly, does the town do for money? It's strongly hinted that it's agricultural, but Zhang never gets around to specifying. Where are the parents of these children while they are at school? Why are we treated to myriad exchanges with the mayor of the town when his townspeople are MIA? And while we're on the subject, where did 13-year-old Wei come from in the first place?

While there is mention of the fact that no one else would take a job in such a far-flung corner of the nation, her origins are sketchy, to say the least. So much has been boiled away from the picture that it almost begs for critics to admire its "simplicity," which means it's not very taxing and doesn't ask too many questions which might have painted a more complex picture of the issues at hand. Nevertheless, the film's glancing attempts at addressing the issues it raises do result in a gripping film. While the style continuously baffles our attempts to identify or sympathize with its protagonist, the story itself is both serviceable and timely. Even the best efforts of the filmmakers to slash their own throats intellectually speaking cannot hide the fact that their subject is important and that the drama of the situation is high. Things are especially tense once Wei arrives in the city and tries to find her student.

She tries everything from public-address systems to written messages to an attempt to get on television, desperate to get the word out that her student is missing and in great danger. Her efforts are intercut with her student's wanderings, his wide grin long ago erased by his misery and poverty, as he looks for food and is ultimately taken in by the proprietor of a roadside restaurant. There is no getting around the plight of these two people–just as there is no getting around the plight of her students back in the village on their one-chalk-a-day ration and their perilous attempts to remain in the system.

So Not One Less ultimately works because of the strength of its subject matter, not because of the non-committal work of the filmmakers. That it doesn't explore the subject beyond the assertion that poverty is bad is a serious weakness, and it hobbles itself dramatically through its listless style and lack of firm grasp of its issues. But the seriousness of the problems it depicts makes up for these admittedly significant flaws, and exposes us to a problem that must be solved. If it doesn't know where to go from there, as I said earlier, you can't have everything. Originally published: February 28, 2000.

THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Not One Less looks beautiful on DVD. A rare widescreen-only presentation from Columbia TriStar, the film is letterboxed at 1.85:1 and enhanced for 16×9 televisions. The video could quite honestly be praised as flawless were it not for a pesky vertical scratch in the print that appears often enough to cause (mild) distraction. Regardless, the image has a depth unsurpassed by any Chinese-language film currently available on disc–that I've seen, I should qualify. Audio is another story: It's not that the Mandarin dialogue is inaudible (no dubbed tracks are available, for the record) in this two-channel Dolby Surround track, but that the mix itself seems to come up short. Little effort has been expended on bringing the sounds of China to life, at least as communicated by this disc. We see, for example, Wei traipsing down a crowded street, yet the speakers are so bereft of noise that you expect tumbleweeds to start blowing past her. Maybe that's a stylistic choice. San Bao's music has also been recorded at tentative levels so as to become a ghostly presence at best. Special features include a spoilerish trailer for Not One Less as well as sneak peeks at The King of Masks and Zhang's own The Story of Qiu Ju and Shanghai Triad.

106 minutes; G; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); Mandarin Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles (optional); DVD-5; Region One; Columbia TriStar