The story that he told is also Chinese, one based on his experience from 1971 to 1974 when he and three other teenage boys from professional urban families were sent for political "re-education" to a remote peasant village as part of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

In the novel and the movie, there are just two boys, Ma and Luo, both 17, who find themselves carrying human waste to nearby fields under the watchful eye of the village chief. For the peasants, though, the arrival of these city boys was just as strange: one played something called a violin, the other had an alarm clock, both could read and write.

The story takes off when the boys meet "the little seamstress" (played by Xun Zhou in the movie), who helps her grandfather, a local tailor. Both Ma (Ye Liu) and Luo (Kun Chen) fall for her. She loves the attention, but is even more thrilled when the boys find some Chinese translations of Western classics and read the likes of Balzac, Flaubert and Dumas to her. In her mind, she has found the key to freedom.

It was precisely here that Mr. Dai ran up against problems. Chinese authorities banned the book, and then, having allowed him to make the film in China, they also banned the movie. "It wasn't that I touched the Cultural Revolution," Mr. Dai said over lunch in this town west of Paris near studios where he is editing his new movie. "They did not accept that Western literature could change a Chinese girl. I explained that classical literature is a universal heritage, but to no avail."

For Mr. Dai that is the point of the story. It is semi-autobiographical in that he took some liberties by inventing a couple of scenes - as when Luo, a dentist's son, extracts the village chief's rotten tooth - and fusing the experiences of two young women. But, he noted, there was a "little seamstress" whose life was changed by her exposure to Balzac. "My aim was to pay homage to literature," he added.
    -PROFILE : Artistic Odyssey: Film to Fiction to Film (ALAN RIDING, 7/27/05, NY Times)