Feng Xiaogang’s ‘Youth’ pays homage to idealism and endurance
BEIJING: Mainland Chinese cinema is bloated with youth romances wallowing in ’ 90s nostalgia, yet this pivotal stage in life has never appeared as pure, beatific and cruel as depicted in Youth, the latest from Chinese box office king Feng Xiaogang.
Tracking the tempestuous fates of a People’s Liberation Army ( PLA) dance troupe from the Cultural Revolution to the ’90s, the film serves as a paean to idealism and endurance, yet the word “heart-breaking” comes to mind scene after scene.
The narrator Suizi ( Zhong Chuxi), a stand-in for screenwriter Yan Geling ( The Flowers of War and Coming Home), whose semi-biographical novel was the film’s literary source, belongs to a military dance troupe stationed in the Great Southwest. However, the central figure is actually Xiaoping ( Miao Miao), whose father has been branded a Rightist and thrown in a reeducation camp. She is recruited from Beijing by the good-looking and kind-hearted lead dancer Liu Feng ( Huang Xuan).
The pristine surroundings of their training centre and dreamy soft focus that accompanies the young dancers whenever they rehearse revolutionary ballets exude a rarefied atmosphere that reinforces how privileged the troupe is, shielded from hunger, violence and back-breaking labour at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
And yet, a hierarchy based on political pedigree is firmly in place in the so- called classless society. Shuwen ( Li Xiaofeng) the daughter of a general and hospital supervisor, is the queen bee. Dingding ( Yang Caiyu) scores with her looks, while Mongolian Drolma ( Sui Yuan) plays her ethnic minority card.
Xiaoping’s blemished parentage condemns her to the bottom of the ladder, and most of the drama revolves around her being picked on, as when she is shamed for slipping into Shuwen’s army uniform to pose for a photo.
While the film is unabashedly romantic in its evocation of the dancers’ physical beauty and innocence, a furtive sensuality ripples beneath the surface of their cloistered lives, as in a locker room scene when the girls’ lingerie glisten with water droplets, or when Dingding has a tryst with a soldier who spoonfeeds her orange marmalade in a dark alley.
The film’s ubiquitous display of military regalia and the characters’ awed veneration of the PLA ostensibly smacks of jingoism, but the colossal human sacrifices depicted, and eventual unceremonious phasing out of the troupe as their propagandist function wanes, demonstrate Feng’s subtle departure from the conventions of “main rhythm” (government endorsed) cinema.
The epilogue, set in Hainan in 1991, is arguably too drawn out, yet it’s an unconventional inversion of the Chinese youth nostalgia formula in which grassroots protagonists all become corporate execs and entrepreneurs.