Not One Less (1999) ½
cast: Wei Minzhi, Zhang Huike, and Tian Zhenda
director: Zhang Yimou

"Not One Less" is Zhang Yimou's tenth film on a widely celebrated and locally controversial filmography. The story focuses on a desolate mountain village in rural China and a substitute teacher called to tend to a classroom of children barely younger than she is. Zhang's latest film slides into his impressive collection with a quiet ease, despite the filmmaker's usual cloud of controversy from the Chinese government.

Oddly enough the Cannes film festival (where Zhang has often been a regular contender) had such a hard time figuring out the film's simple themes and moral conclusion that Zhang withdrew it.

In a rural mountain village an elementary teacher is called away to tend to his dying mother. The mayor of the village (Tian) hires a stubborn 13-year-old girl with rosy red cheeks as a substitute. *She's played by Wei Minzhi who like many of the other children in the film are non-professional actors and use their own names for their characters. By doing this they serve as metaphors for the thousands of children in rural China who go uneducated because of their need to work in their poverty ridden environments.

At the conclusion of the film we see estimations of just how many drop out of elementary school a day to help their family's income.

"Not One Less" is the spoken instructions the mayor gives to Wei: to be paid she must have all children accounted for when the teacher returns. The school budget is non-existent and she is only given one piece of chalk for every day she substitutes, which isn't enough considering she is only there to rehash on the board what the book says. The school is unequipped in nearly every way and earlier I mentioned that Wei is barely older than her student body.

We are often left with the feeling that she isn't academically fit considering a 13-year-old is hardly a fitting age to be teaching a class of children. Though we are also led to believe that Wei's days as a student have long since passed which foreshadows the conflict later in the film.

When the squirrelly-cheeked class clown (Zhang Huike) decides he has had enough with his new superior he leaves the school to find work in the city of Jiangjiakou to help support his parents' invisible income.

Raising money for a bus ticket by having the entire class move bricks for a local mason: Wei travels to Jiangjiakou in search of Zhang--a student she constantly butted heads with, but now desperately needs back.

Like other Zhang Yimou films "Not One Less" is compelling without being complicated. The film echoes Zhang's own past of working in rural China during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from the middle '60s to the middle '70s in which China was undergoing a communist utopia that left the country scarred for years.

Roger Ebert pointed out in his review that this is not a film about a life-changing teacher who challenged her students' minds and broke all the rules. Those stories (some of which are skewed from actual accounts) are for Hollywood to dabble with, alter, and rearrange. Here Zhang uses his young cast as metaphors even though some of them undoubtedly are living in the same kinds of environments as their characters, which is why they opted to use their real names in the film.

"Not One Less" is not based on a true story; it's reality.

* Wei Minzhi noted in an interview that during her first meeting with Zhang Yimou she couldn't figure out what he was holding in his hand while he walked around her. Later she found out it was a video camera. Wei also went on to mention that Zhang and his crew were very kind to her, but school came first and her studies were to be done every day without failure.