Ruoma de shi qi sui

"When Ruoma Was Seventeen" is a beautiful film. Director Zhang Jiarui's is an excellent artist. No wonder "When Ruoma Was Seventeen" has been invited by 28 countries to be in their international film festivals and it has won several awards.

The setting of the story is in Yunnan Province that is famous for its beautiful scenery and landscape. The story is told as beautifully as its' background scenery. After I watched the film, I just feel refreshed and purified. And watching this film is a wonderful and happy experience. I kept thinking about this film once I finished it.

The film is about a 17-year old Hani girl named Ruoma and its' story is about the things happened to Ruoma when she was 17 years old. Hani is a minority ethnic group living in Yunnan province. Although the modern world surrounds them is so sophisticated, busy, and noisy, these people still preserve their simple life style and the self-sustaining way of living pretty much unaffected by the outside world. Hani people have good hearts and simple mindset, and they are sincere all because of the simple and pure life style they have. So you can imagine how lovely, pure, naive Ruoma is. She is the uncontaminated gem and jewel in this modern world. Everyday Ruoma makes a short trip to the town to sell roast corn. The interaction between her and the modern world takes place gradually. The outside world fascinates her and she is curious about a lot of stuff she did not know.

When Ruoma appears on the screen, she is so pure and beautiful like the beautiful mountains and rivers that nurtured her. And she always amazes me with her way of thinking because we would never expect a person to be so sincere. Somehow I wish people could be all like that, then how beautiful the world would be. I think this is why the city boy photographer Ruoma met likes or probably loves her. Ruoma on the other hand is longing for the experience she did not have before such as experience in the elevator in the skyscrapers. People just long for something they could not have.

At the end of the movie, Ruoma grows up a bit after she had some interesting experience and some sad experience when she was seventeen. She is still pure and uncontaminated, but what she has experience definitely is good to her.

It is an excellent film. It is a journey of art from the beginning to the end of the film.

This movie was shown to our class by our Chinese teacher, and the entire class disliked it. The entire plot is basically some old pedophile stalking a teenage girl. Half the scenes are pointless, like a view of the kitchen with the characters' backs to the camera, doing something that we can't see. The acting is also very bad. You can tell that most of the actors are not pros, just locals hired to be in it. The plot line can be seen as realistic, but boring. It's just following the uneventful life of a farmer girl. I know that there's supposed to be some sort of love thing involved, but that's hard to picture when it's between a teenager and a 30-year-old man. It would be nice if the movie gave some background info about the culture, because we couldn't understand half of what was going on, like the random celebrations they do. Also, there was no resolution, and it ended as it began.

It's slow, it happens on a small scale, it's layered like lacquer, and at the center of it is a story that has happened everywhere in the world. But "When Ruoma Was Seventeen" takes this story -- the coming of age and first disillusionment of a young girl -- and sets it among the silvery terraced rice paddies of Yunnan (which, based on this film, has to be one of the most picturesque places on earth) and inside the heart of a simple and ravishingly beautiful 17-year-old member of the Hani Tribe, one of Southern China's many ethnic groups.

Most of the story actually takes place in Ruoma's face. The young woman who plays her is incapable of a false note. She is guileless and transparent, living with her grandmother and working in the local village selling grilled corn on the cob. Into her life comes a wanna-be photographer from the big city, a nice enough guy who wants to prove to himself that he's an artist. Hard up for money, and seeing how many foreigners want to take Ruoma's picture, he sets up a business charging tourists to pose with her. He keeps most of the money, but the bits he gives her are more than she's ever seen before. Slowly, she begins to fall in love with him.

They couldn't be more different. He's a city-dweller, a person who has made the compromises modern life seems to require. She's a girl who has probably never told a lie in her life and who doesn't even have the guile to try to hide her growing love. By now I'm sure everyone has guessed the ending, but it doesn't matter: this is a film about spirit, not story. Nothing big happens but what happens is shattering. And yet there's also recovery and resilience, and always beauty, beauty, beauty. I saw this film four days ago and I've thought about a hundred times since then. See it for yourself.