Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

A man thinks he's a scarecrow. He meets a Russian clown on a train.

In August 1966, the Cultural Revolution in full swing, 13-year-old Tian Ben is arrested for playing a pop record; he's sent to a remote mountain camp in Niu-Peng. There he's called "Four Eyes" and, with about 16 other older boys and men, he's made to carry muck up a mountainside, make bricks, saw logs, and sing daily to Chairman Mao of his faults. There's camaraderie among the five youths, especially with a young pickpocket named Baimao, and Tian is also drawn to a silent monk who cares for him when he falls ill and the others expect him to die. The camp is remote, so there are no fences or walls. Tian longs to escape.

At the house of a famous Chinese botanist teacher his daughter and a female intern fall in love with each other - a forbidden love that must be kept secret.

Restaurant owner Tang the 11th, learning his older brother, Tang the First is ill, returns to the his remote native village, long plagued by leprosy. Superstition holds that a cure can be obtained when a family of five sons and five daughters makes possible the death of a fish from the Lake of Heaven, since the leprosy remedy is in the flesh of this fish. It just so happens that Tang the 11th has five sons, four daughters, and a pregnant wife.

Liu Yifei plays Elso, a reputed French flutist who travels from Paris to Chengdu. Her life is compared to the one of a night peacock, an eternal conflict between life and death, love and time. A night peacock, by Fabre’s definition, is a moth with the life goal of finding their soul mate.