Award-winning director Zhang Yimou tugs at the heartstrings once again with Not One Less, a poignant tale of one young girl's plucky determination in the face of overwhelming odds. Without being heavy-handed, the film provides a startling snapshot of rural Chinese life and shows in graphic fashion how poverty can negatively affect the lives of children. But despite these high social aims, the film doesn't come across like an in-your-face exposé. There's a real story here as well.

When the elderly Teacher Gao (Gao Enman) has to leave his tiny rural village to take care of to his sick mother, the town mayor (Tian Zhenda) hires a headstrong thirteen-year-old girl (Wei Minzhi) to temporarily fill the position. Despite reservations about her young age (she's not much older than the students she'll be teaching), Gao agrees to the proposition, but leaves her with a warning: lose just one of the students, and you don't get a bonus. Since she hasn't been paid upfront, Minzhi readily accepts Gao's terms, but has no idea what she's gotten herself into.

Unfortunately, Minzhi's woeful inexperience with children almost proves to be her undoing. Untrained as a teacher, the young woman does little more than scribble the daily lessons on the board and yell at her students to copy them, spending most of her time outside guarding the front door. This curious approach to education leaves all twenty-eight of her students alone and unsupervised in a small room—a surefire recipe for disaster.

Things get worse when a feisty ten-year old student (Zhang Huike) leaves the village for the big city in the hopes of finding work to help care for his debt-ridden family. Once Minzhi learns of Huike's departure, she resolves to reclaim him, no matter the cost. Using the classroom as a forum for discussion, Minzhi unintentionally (and comically) creates an atmosphere conducive to the learning process, as many of the children compete to figure out how much money it will take for Minzhi to go to the city and bring Huike back. But even once the cash is raised, Minzhi's troubles are far from over as she steps into the vast labyrinth of urban China to search for one lost young boy.

Thankfully, Not One Less doesn't stoop to tell a clichéd story of an idealistic young teacher who comes to "enlighten" a mischievous group of poor rural kids. As a protagonist, Minzhi is refreshingly flawed, stubborn, and ill-equipped to deal with her present situation. By the same token, the children are in no way stereotypical "bad kids." Instead, we have normal, rambunctious children who run amok only in reaction the teacher's obvious inexperience.

The initial scenes between the substitute and her class play out with a palpable sense of realism; the emotions that register in Minzhi's face ring true as she begins to lose the power struggle with the children almost from the very beginning. But once the adversarial relationship between Minzhi and her students is set aside, the film really hits its stride. The classroom sequences with our heroine unconsciously "teaching" the children as they try to raise money for her bus fare rank as some of the film's more memorable moments.

While telling this rather straightforward story, director Zhang Yimou provides the audience with a glimpse into a world where poverty, child labor, and homelessness are a normal part of everyday life. One simply does what he can to survive. And although the film ends on a glorious high note, the director smartly undercuts the celebration—ever so briefly—with a rather bleak sentiment from the missing boy. Neither overly sentimental nor crassly manipulative, Not One Less elicits real tears and laughter in its simple, inspirational, yet truly provocative story. All in all, it's a great little film. (Calvin McMillin, 2003)