Wang Han (Liu Wenqing), an 11-year-old boy in a small, poor village in southern China, leads an ordinary life of school, playmates and trying to placate a strict mother. It is 1975, the waning days of Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution, and the local students spend a chunk of the school day in activities meant to exalt their leader.
Still, the anxieties of grown-ups barely register with the boy, whose main problem in life is his desire for a new shirt — until the day a corpse washes up from the river. The man was murdered, and as Wang Han slowly pieces together why, he also gains the first bits of understanding about why his intellectual father is working in a factory, and why the adults are afraid even to sing old songs.
“11 Flowers” boils down to a coming-of-age tale merged with a why-dunit — not unlike “To Kill a Mockingbird” — but the plot is molasses-slow, as threads are dropped, picked up and dropped again. While the actors — especially Liu, and Yan Ni and Wang Jingchun as his parents — are wonderfully unforced and natural, there are a few drawn-out scenes that shade into torpor.
But the movie lingers in the mind, largely because director Wang Xiaoshuai’s theme is poignant and classic: The more a child perceives of what the adults around him are doing, the more childhood slips away.