Told in the form of a memoir, the oddly titled “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” harks back to the early 1970s when the children of people judged bourgeois and enemies of communism were sent to re-education centers. Two young men, Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu) are assigned to a remote village where they must perform such menial tasks as carrying and dumping barrels of excrement.

The director of the village is an ignoramus as well as illiterate. He thinks Ma’s violin is a western toy that he wants to destroy. But he is conned with the story that the Mozart that Ma plays is Mozart’s tribute to Chairman Mao. Western books are banned, but Ma and Lou do some further hoodwinking, taking stories from Western classics and making them sound like reverent communist tales told at village gatherings.

Enter the captivating Chinese seamstress (Xun Zhou), with whom both Ma and Luo fall in love, although Lou is the one with whom the bond develops. The young men, having discovered a cache of banned books, take to reading from the works, including those of Flaubert, Dumas and Balzac, with the latter becoming especially captivating to the Little Seamstress.

The film does a beautiful job of following the way in which the world is opened up to her through literature in a bridging of the gap between the limited horizons of her village with its imposed doctrines and what lies beyond. The relationships and the intellectual stimulation are enhanced by excellent cinematography that captures the beauty of nature in tandem with the filmmaker’s emphasis on the human spirit and capacity for change.