F FOND RECOLLECTION
Director Feng Xiaogang’s new film Youth recalls his time in a military opera troupe. Xu Fan reports.
or most youngsters, the screening hall of the 1954-built Beijing Exhibition Center may be too old to create a comfortable environment for watching movies.
But director Feng Xiaogang insisted on holding the opening ceremony of his upcoming movie Youth in the theater on Dec 6, describing the venue as the artistic cradle that inspired his cinematic dreams.
“Around 50 years ago, I watched a number of shows and movies in this theater. Now I return here with the cast of Youth, hoping the place where my dream began will help Youth sail further,” says the director.
A nostalgia for the past similarly pervades the movie, a coming-of-age drama plotting the ups and downs of a group of singers and dancers in a Chinese military art troupe between the 1970s and 1990s.
After a two-month halt from its previously scheduled release date of Sept 29, the 136-minute feature will simultaneously open in China and North America on Dec 15.
For the 59-year-old director, whose name has become synonymous with the lucrative Chinese New Year blockbusters thanks to a string of hits since 1997’s The Dream Factory, Youth is somewhat of a radical departure.
Blockbusters usually boast a star-studded cast and an appealing theme tuned to please mainstream audiences, but Youth relies on neither of these two premises.
Except for actor Huang Xuan, who rose to prominence for the 2014 TV series Red Sorghum, the remainder of the cast is made up of mostly lesser-known performers.
Domestic reports say Feng selected the six young actresses, including Zhong Chuxi, Miao Miao and Yang Caiyu, from around 1,000 aspirants, placing harsh demands on their appearance and dancing talent.
“I asked all the audition members to wash off their makeup and put on simple clothes. Only natural faces could match my memories of those young, innocent female soldiers in the military art troupes,” Feng explained in an earlier interview with host Jin Xing on her television talk show.
Before becoming a director, Feng had served in the People’s Liberation Army as a stage designer for a military Peking Opera troupe between 1978 and 1984. In his 2002 biography Wo
Ba Qingchun Xiangei Ni (I Present My Youth to You), he wrote that his military life evoked many of his best memories.
He recalled his earliest memories of sexual attraction after he watched wethaired, bare-necked female soldiers leaving a public bathhouse after taking a shower.
“When they passed by, the air smelled sweet,” he told reporters in an earlier interview.
In the book, Feng also expressed his desire to shoot a film as including this romantic scene.
But his dream did not turn into reality until he met Yan Geling, the famous ChineseAmerican author, with similar military background.
Yan served in the Chinese army for 13 years as a ballet artist in a military art troupe. She has also penned tales for some of China’s top filmmakers, such as The Flowers of War, directed by Zhang Yimou, and Siao Yu, helmed by Sylvia Chang.
After accepting Feng’s invitation, she first wrote the novel for Youth, and then adapted it into a movie script.
From harboring a restrained crush, to secretly longing for pop culture, to the unprecedented transformation brought about by China’s reform and opening-up, the tale is likely to strike a chord with most Chinese people born in the 1950s and ’60s.
To recreate this history, director Feng spent 35 million yuan ($5.3 million) building film sets at a studio in South China’s Hainan province to bring to life all the typical facilities that a military art troupe had access to in the 1970s. The movie sets brought various buildings back to life, from a canteen and dormitories to a training room.
Feng even required the cast members to train dance and live together in the complex for five months before the principal photography began, to help the actors immerse themselves in this fictional world.
“Cinema should allow different genres to coexist and give audiences many options. But films like Youth seem to have almost disappeared from Chinese screens. I believe Chinese people need such a movie and I hope they will enjoy it,” says Feng.
Recent test screenings of the movie gained a rating of 7.8 of 10 on the popular film review site Douban.
While some viewers say they were moved by the heartbreaking scenes in the epic, others felt the storytelling was a bit loose and failed to focus more closely on the main protagonists.
Cinema should allow different genres to coexist and give audiences many options.” Feng Xiaogang, director