Little Red Flowers

Were it in English, and  not Mandarin, one imagines that the Mail would get hot under the collar about this Chinese film, with its ample shots of kids’ bums and genitals and scenes of four- and five-year-olds exploring each others’ bodies. But this period tale of life in a boarding kindergarten in post-1949 Beijing is cutesy not exploitative and, despite a heavy dose of whimsy and a rambling narrative, has some smart things to say about kids’ discoveries of their bodies. Dressing and undressing, peeing and pooping, are everyday stuff for the kids of this school, where corporal good management is the order of the day (‘You must form the habit of pooping every morning,’ declares the same teacher who sniffs bottoms to investigate the origins of a fart). Our focus is Qiang (Dong Bowen), whose boisterous ways and bed-wetting upset the school’s natural order. It’s based on a novel by Wang Shuo, a bestselling author, and is interesting in patches, losing momentum only when the inquiry shifts from ensemble pieces to a stand-off between Qiang and one of his teachers.