What did you think of "Not One Less"?   Good 68% 83   Bad 22% 27   Somewhere in between 3% 4   Haven't seen it 7% 8 Total Votes   122

Grade: A-

Verdict: Small movie, big impact.

Details: Starring Wei Minzhi. Directed by Zhang Yimou. Not rated, but there is the trauma of a child lost in a city. Subtitles. 1 hour, 46 minutes.

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Review: The lesson that sometimes less is more is hardly one that one would expect to be imparted by Zhang Yimou, the world-renowned director of such visually sumptuous, emotionally passionate films as "Raise the Red Lantern" and "Ju Dou." However, his lovely new film, "Not One Less" is about as pared-down as a movie can get.

It's a deceptively simple story about a 13-year-old Chinese peasant girl named Wei who's assigned to be the substitute teacher at a rural one-room school while the regular teacher spends a month with his sick mother. Before he leaves, the schoolmaster offers her some advice ("Don't write too small and don't write too big") and some incentive. Because of the dire economics of the region, he's been losing students. If, when he returns, every single one of the students is still attending class, he'll give her a bonus. Hence the title.

Wei, who's barely older than some of her charges, at first is at something of a loss when it comes to classes. But she's determined to earn that bonus. When 10-year-old Zhang Huike, the class scamp, doesn't show up one day, she learns that he's been sent to the city by his impoverished mother to find work. So she goes to the city as well, looking for him with the same dogged stubbornness that John Wayne showed in "The Searchers." And, like Wayne, she discovers that the motivations for her search aren't what she thought they were when she began.

"Not One Less" has the charm of a Truffaut childhood film — "Small Change" comes to mind — and the spare but powerful emotional impact of the Italian neorealist classic "The Bicycle Thief."

And here's the kicker: Every single member of the cast is a nonprofessional. Wei is played by Wei Minzhi, a village girl from the region. The town mayor plays the town mayor. The television station manager, who serves as the film's unexpected fairy godfather, is an actual television station manager. And all those adorable schoolchildren are just that — adorable schoolchildren.

The movie is so unembellished — on occasion, the director hid the camera from his "actors" — that at first you don't feel its deeper currents. But there's a lot going on here, from the political implications of rural China's imperiled education system to its wondrous character study of a young girl who simply refuses to give up.

The daunting poverty of Wei's tiny village is masterfully counterpointed by the dizzying, often heartless, chaos of the city. In other words, the film sucks you in almost without your realizing it. And when Wei and her students turn her quest to get to the city into an all-for-one-one-for-all math lesson, the feeling is palpably triumphant. You half expect Julie Andrews to show up and lead them all in a round of "Doe, a Deer."

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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