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At the height of the cultural Revolution, 12 million "young intellectuals"—teenagers who made the mistake of attending secondary school—were exiled to the Chinese hinterland. There the sons and daughters of the urban bourgeoisie were re-educated by the virtuous peasantry, chiefly through backbreaking manual labor. The victims had no idea if they would ever be allowed to go home again or if they would spend the rest of their days shoving an antique plow through country mud.

But even the bitterest of adolescences can turn sweet with the passage of time and the onslaught of nostalgia. Author and filmmaker Dai Sijie proved this when he hit literary gold in 2000 with Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, his semi-autobiographical tale of discovering literature and love as a member of China's lost generation. Now Dai, who spent 1971 to 1974 exiled in a village in the mountains of Sichuan province, has directed a big-screen version of his fable, The Little Chinese Seamstress (naming it "Balzac," one suspects, wouldn't sell tickets).

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Though its pace drags and its tone is too unvarying, the movie shares the sweet melancholy of the novel. Both versions evoke a wistful longing for the irretrievable drama of youth. Teenage pals Ma (Liu Ye) and Luo (Chen Kun), inheritors of the bourgeois crimes of their doctor parents, are sent for re-education to the primitive if not remarkably picturesque mountain village of Phoenix on the Sky. The work is tough and the conditions harsh. Even worse, all books are banned—except little red ones. Western music is equally verboten as Ma, the film's violin-playing narrator, discovers when the village chief threatens to punish him for playing a Mozart tune. Quick-witted Luo saves the day by explaining that the name of the song is "Mozart Is Always Thinking of Chairman Mao." You can see the forlornness in the boys' eyes as they begin to sense the worst fear of every teenager: they are going to die of boredom.

Salvation arrives, as it often does, in the form of a beautiful girl: a local seamstress, played by rising mainland starlet Zhou Xun. Zhou lights up the screen like a fistful of fireworks. The boys don't have a chance against her charm, by turns girlish and devilish. The darkly handsome Luo, ever the leader, stakes his claim first, his brooding eyes tracing Zhou with a hunger neither quite comprehends at first. Introverted Ma plays the third wheel but struggles to suppress his growing feelings for the seamstress.

As if finding a gorgeous girl in a remote mountain village weren't miracle enough, the boys make an even more amazing discovery: a hidden cache of translated foreign novels by Dostoyevsky, Rousseau and, of course, Balzac. The effect the writings have on Luo and Ma is revolutionary. They undergo an intellectual and romantic awakening that stokes the inevitable sexual one. Soon the boys are smoking like Continental philosophers and making grand statements about love and human nature; in other words, they begin behaving like the college freshmen they would have been were it not for the Cultural Revolution. (Good thing they didn't come across any works by Schopenhauer.) Luo and his seamstress accelerate from a shy, teenage crush to a sensual coupling ripped from the pages of Flaubert. Luo even uses the novels to tutor her, inadvertently opening the innocent girl's eyes to the possibility of a life outside her village—one that doesn't necessarily include the boys.

Because Dai uses Ma's voice-over narration sparingly and because the act of reading is tough to dramatize, his film loses some of the novel's eloquent and original meditations on the power of books. The Little Chinese Seamstress too often falls into the well-worn treads of a traditional coming-of-age tale. It doesn't help that Dai seems to forget that the boys are living in the middle of the Cultural Revolution; with its postcard-perfect vistas and the endless free time the trio enjoys, life in Phoenix on the Sky seems less re-education camp than Mao's Outward Bound. But Seamstress, which earned a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign-language film, achieves moments of quiet beauty as well. Ma sheds confused tears at the mention of Balzac's Chinese translator, punished as a reactionary like Ma's father; Luo reads Ursule Mirouet out loud as if it were freshly written, while the seamstress lies in his lap and dreams of a new world.

Dai literally drowns the film in nostalgia during its unfortunate coda, turning the movie into a Chinese version of The Big Chill. Luo and Ma, two decades older, watch a video Ma has shot of the village that was their prison, now fated to be flooded because of the Three Gorges Dam. The video focuses on the little Chinese seamstress's room, long empty, long fled. Their tears fall quick, tears for that small gift of time when joy and pain were so closely bound that neither could be felt without the other. Which is, of course, the very definition of youth.

• Bryan Walsh
• Chinese teens discover sex and literature during the Cultural Revolution in The Little Chinese Seamstress