Little Red Flowers

Harry Potter? Pah - lightweight....

I've just watched Little Red Flowers (看上去很美) with my kids. It's a marvellous film - certificate here is '12' (because of one use of the F word), but watching it with smaller children adds a lot to the experience. Reading kids can cope with the subtitles, and even pre-readers can follow the story. First because they identify with Qiang, the protagonist (and the film really draws you into the child's world), but also because talking to children about what you're seeing makes you think more about what you're seeing.

The constant 'Why's he doing that, Mum?' makes you elaborate on the action, and wonder how it looks to other audiences. And I think that even if you take out the 'strong language' ('What's strong language, Mum? Is "poo" strong language?') the whole idea of the boarding kindergarten is quite disturbing for the average cuddly kid. ('No, we don't do that - how could I send my boys away?') Our explanation is that Qiang is acting up because his mother works away from home, his grandmother can't look after him any more and his pilot father is either away or busy; he wants to feel cared for - he wants to go home - and is embarrassed/irritated when he is singled out for not being able to dress himself or for farting in class... how else do we explain that? Are most of Qiang's classmates happy enough to be boarding at the age of 4?

They both found the ending quite frustrating and were convinced that there was a Little Red Flowers 2 to come. They like a satisfying resolution to a story, and I am a weedy sentimentalist who has to feel that even the stroppiest small boy deserves a happy ending (I was the mother who added the epilogue to Angry Arthur where his parents come to rescue him...)

But need to watch it again, without kids, to see how it works then...

And then I watched the extras... and the Making of... documentary is actually quite troubling. You see director and crew walking amongst the sleeping children in the dormitory and they [children] are beautiful... but then in other passages you feel the children are being manipulated to produce effects on screen. In one interview with Zhang Yuan, he comments that it's hard to tell if one child can tell whether what he has experienced is fiction or real life - is there not an ethical problem with that?

And... (update July 2008) it made an impression... last time I asked Insomniac Kid why he comes to visit every night, he said he was afraid (a) of the monsters under his bed and (b) that we would send him away to boarding school. When I said we wouldn't do that for a kid of his age, he asked 'What about the Chinese boy in the film?' I've ordered Cave of the Yellow Dog, but I will watch it without them first, this time.