ocations used. This is basically the stuff of a traditional Hollywood, or French, melodrama—two guys in love with the same innocent girl, separation, loss—and then a coda in which, years later, the men meet and wonder whatever happened to the girl they once loved.”

Film gives us a distinct sense of history, and even of time, by filling our consciousness with more perspectives and places than we could provide ourselves; and sometimes film criticism is less the exegesis of a cinema text than the examination of one’s memory of perceptions of a film: rather than taking apart a material thing such as a clock, it can be like trying to dissect an impression. Impressions do matter—they build on one another and are transformed into a feeling or idea. One idea that occurs to me after watching the film is that if one wants the best for someone, whether friend or unknown peasant, one probably wants his work made easier, his health preserved, his pleasures more intense and plentiful, his knowledge greater and his choices many.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a kind of true-life fable, and it offers lessons in survival, knowledge, beauty, and joy: the film has given us a vision of hope where it might have given us a vision of horror.