Those are two understanding—appreciative, deep, intelligent—comments by significant film reviewers whose responses I do not always share, but I discovered what I consider a reprehensible opinion when reading The Indypendent, a small newspaper that advocates independent media and progressive causes, a project of the New York City Indymedia Center. In an article titled “Beware ‘Refinement’” in the July 21-August 10, 2005 issue (page 14), Diane Mason began by stating that “The problem with the new Chinese film Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, based on the international best-seller by Dai Sijie, is that it glorifies refinement, and the bourgeois brand of European refinement at that.” She accuses the film of trivializing the Cultural Revolution, and referred to the film’s detailing of the young men’s trouble as part of what she called the grievance literature of the formerly privileged. “History is told by isolated anecdote,” Mason complains. Diane Mason seems to want a more didactic film—but a more didactic film would probably not be art. The facts of history can be researched in a good library—and film, which gives us not merely facts and ideas, conveys experience, an experience that can make such research seem important. What is most disturbing to me is when Mason declares:

The bourgeois world was horrified at the Cultural Revolution. And sure, discomfort and even great suffering can ensue from how ‘unwashed masses’ deal with their former rulers when given power over them. But why should we be horrified when we barely bat an eyelash over the mass impoverishment and degradation that precipitate rebellion in the first place?

That reads to me like evasion of acknowledgement of the torture and murders committed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in