NOT ONE LESS

NOT ONE LESS (1999) ****

Reviewed 2/18/00

Until recently, the most famous of the Chinese Fifth Generation directors, Zhang Yimou, had always been too formal a stylist. In Zhang's first feature, Red Sorghum, his style was still rough enough to produce a peculiar poetry. Sorghum, one of the most beautifully shot films you will ever see, remains his best and most under-appreciated film. Sorghum and the films that immediately followed -- Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern -- were period pieces that resonated with a mythmaking quality. The beautiful, colorful images (Zhang started off as a cameraman) came with a distanced coldness. This wasn't the coldness of a Stanley Kubrick, whose Ophuls-influenced moving camera and perfection in scene-blocking brought precarious energy to his films, even when Kubrick was the least precarious of directors. Zhang's early films are dead in comparison. It is to the merit of his actors like Gong Li and to his films' cinematography that they became so popular with the arthouse crowd in the U.S. Zhang's films became increasing stilted with his formal vigor until The Story of Qui Ju, his first indulgence into the neorealist style. Qui Ju was unsuccessful however because Zhang continued to keep the characters at so far a distance, not just stylistically but also in story. To Live and Shanghai Triad retained his style of old if not to the same degree. Then in Zhang's 1997 comedy Keep Cool, he adopted a Godardian handheld-camera, jump cut style. Now with Not One Less, Zhang takes a page from the Iranians. Zhang shoots again in a neorealist style, using a nonprofessional cast, most of whom sport their real names and in a sense are playing themselves. The primary subject in Not One Less is children like so many films in Iranian cinema, and the events concern ordinary people in ordinary settings.

Ironically, Zhang has reversed directions with regards to his contemporary, Chen Kaige, who started off with the slice of life Yellow Earth and now pursues huge, ponderous epics like Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin. With Keep Cool and Not One Less, Zhang works with smaller-scale stories.

In Not One Less's poor rural village, Wei Minzhi is substituting for Teacher Gao who must go away for a month to see his dying mother. At age 13 however, Wei is just barely older than her charges, the 28 members of the first through fourth grade classes. The town mayor has promised Wei 50 yuan for the month, and skeptical Teacher Gao will give her an extra 10 if she keeps all the students as many have dropped out already.

Wei starts off not only as an uncaring teacher, but also an oblivious one. She jots down the day's lesson on the chalkboard, then sits outside while the class copies it down, though given all the commotion going on inside, it sounds like the class is doing anything but that. The usual instigator of pandemonium is Zhang Huike, the class clown, who often sports a grin in which his large front teeth threaten to take over his face. Not until Zhang inadvertently destroys much of Teacher Gao's prized chalk and Wei sees the pain it causes does she realize the scope of her inaction. This is the essence of her character, that she simply does not know better. It is the source of all her troubles, but also proves to be the solution as well.

The central conflict arises when Zhang leaves school to find work in the city. Wei tries to figure out how much it will cost to get there and bring him back. She has the class do the mathematics that seem beyond her own means, then tries everything from moving bricks to generate the revenue to simply stowing onto the bus. Wei's focus on that extra ten yuan from Teacher Gao makes it irrelevant that she might have to spend ten times that amount to retrieve Zhang. The hopelessness of finding Zhang is so great that any normal person would give up, but Wei simply does not know better.

Not One Less does rely on a contrived heart-tugging ending, but it is forgivable given the extreme lack of artifice that precedes it. All of the nonprofessional actors furnish utterly convincing performances. None of the children ever seem overly precocious as in American films. They are cute with Zhang Huike being the scene-stealer, but they are never presented as in-your-face cute. They are exactly what they appear to be, young children with all of their naivete, hope, and zest. Not One Less is easily Zhang Yimou's most moving and most human movie.