A 12-year-old boy dies of AIDS and becomes the voice-over narrating the vicissitudes of a small Chinese village.

The eldest son of the Zhao family, greedy and cruel, as well as father of the dead 12-year-old, had induced villagers to donate their blood in exchange for quick cash. Grandfather Zhao, also the father of De Yi, who is also sick with AIDS, decides to make the local school available to the community as a nursing home for the sick.

Several thefts will occur in the community despite the good intentions and rules provided by the old grandfather.

A girl dressed in pink, Qin Qin, arrives, and it will immediately be love at first sight for De Yi, who is disenchanted and shameless in facing death.

The two young people are both married and have been disowned by their spouses because of illness. They will have to struggle against village respectability and try to love each other to ward off death.

Qin Qin had sold his blood to buy a fancy shampoo seen on TV, and the perpetrator of the massacre writes on the school wall the number to call for coffins...

And as the old father tries to fight against the corruption of customs and the advancing myth of business and money they build coffins carved out of inlaid tree trunks and covered with soft leather, at least "it's worth dying for!"

The two boys want to get married to flaunt the legality of their love, and Qin Qin's husband is only interested in granting a divorce in exchange for a bigger house for his new woman.

And as the uncle rides around on his motorcycle singing about his properties and women he will marry off his dead 12-year-old son to the adult daughter of a wealthy businessman with whom he can go into business and build a classy cemetery.

The last scenes of the love between Qin Qin and De Yi are as overwhelming and lacerating as those in the most illustrious Greek tragedies.

This is the 1990s, at the height of China's capitalist explosion, and the film is a wonderful metaphor for the myth of money as an acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Extraordinary and unmissable.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice