Youth review: The screen incarnation of writer Yan Geling’s part-memoir novel is an extremely interesting commentary on war and its inhabitants— and it only has a single battle scene.
Youth review by Abi Silverthorne.
But what a battle scene it is. Reminiscent in every way of Xiaogang’s previous work on his epic 2007 drama Assembly, the director chooses once again to lend his lyrical camera work towards the distraught inhumanity of the situation—blood and dirt fly at the lens from all angles as a PLA troop featuring one of the characters the film has followed growing up for a solid hour beforehand, be nearly decimated amongst their peers. The most elongated death scene occurs, rather than a martyr hail fire of bullet, simply as a young man slipping in the chaos of the front line and sliding into a muddy sinkhole, drowning before his friends’ eyes. A dirty, pointless, implosion of youth, sudden, and without a hint of glamour to it.
Such is the story the film is trying to tell.
It is clear through the grand, sweeping odyssey of a handful of key characters that what Xiaogang and Geling, themselves previous member of their parties Arts Troupes for many years, are truly concerned with is shining a light on the young people that are lost so frivolously in war. This film painstakingly returns the gravitas, worth and complexity to their lives that some war epics have all too hastily lost sight of when treating characters as expendable targets for neat fight sequences.
This is achieved mainly through the fact that we, as an audience, spend most of our time with these kids before real war was even a shadow on their horizon.
The film opens with the arrival of bright-eyed Xiaoping’s introduction to the Cultural dance troupe, a tangent of China’s army that uses it’s visibly thrilling (they are, truly, the films most stunning, if uncanny, scenes) performances to propagate patriotism and spur on the troops. Xiaoping is the focal point, but the narrator, and the protagonist as a witness to the new kids’ difficult journey is golden girl Suizi (Elane Zhong) who observes mildly and with all-too-late pity as Xiaoping is rejected again and again by her peers in a series of fraught humiliations. It starts with a borrowing of a roommates uniform without permission, and escalates until nothing the girl does is passable to her comrades. In this, actress Miao Miao does a stellar job as a do-gooder constantly at odds with everyone and anything she turns her nervous hands to. Equally watched by Suizi through their time at the Arts centre is Liu Feng (Huang Xuan), beloved by all his peers for his earnest helpfulness, his fall from grace after a grave misstep with troupe singer DingDing (an unerringly sweet and sour performance by Yang Caiyu) is a tricky one to watch.
Over the course of half a decade together we watch the 1976 class, in particular, Xiaoping and Feng, draw closer and further apart in the slightest increments before war comes to rip them apart.
Delicate moments are played to perfection; the film lingers on the strange sensation that happens in the dwindling section of our youth that causes every sublimity or hardship to be felt in technicolor, excruciating vividness. It helps that the cinematography treats everything the girls do—diving into a pool, biting into a new tomato, clambering over each other’s bare legs in the changing rooms, walking into the rain— with the same immense sense of beauty and pathos as it does with the later shots of war and revolution.
At times it is wonderfully clear that a film largely about a group of young women was written by a woman who lived the exact same experiences as them: they are all of them handled with an incredible sense of completeness. Youth may call itself a romance but, fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on what the audience bought their ticket for, the friendships and feudships between the female dancers are more compelling than the romances with the boys. Relationships that last over years, with all their frustrations and profound loyalties, when well portrayed like this, are truly powerful. Even the nastier ones such as snobby Shuwen and DingDing are given their moments of light, as easy as it would have been to put them in ‘mean girls’ territory, Youth is all the more mature for its understanding of the undefinability of all of us when we are young, and foolish, and malleable.
The film is as many shades as it’s characters and adolescence itself; funny and sweet to the point of saccharine at some points, and brutal in the next, it mesmerises with its slow and steady world building. The arc of the protagonists is as precisely measured as the dancers’ balletic choreography, leaving you invested and emotionally entangled in their sprawling stories before you can help yourself. The coming-of-age wonderment makes the film a winning drama; but what arguably makes it a commentary on war is what lies beneath. Economy is subtly key, with many girls actually there for social vanity or as an escape from financial destitution. The bullying, class politics and harmful hivemind approach that Xiaoping must constantly fight against is a pithy microcosm of war, and the way in which nationalism and patriotism (shown literally and in the way the girls and boys tend to love to homogenise themselves against the newcomer), while instrumental in the beautiful youth of some, is wreaking thoughtless havoc in someone else’s world.
If Youth had more satirical conviction at its look at the era’s patriotism it would have left a bolder impression, and the at times melodramatic style of Xiaogang’s work will turn off some, but as a whole this is a moving, human story instead of an overtly political one, leaving its thoughts on the nuances of national pride and the military in-between the lines of its characters experiences.
Perfect for fans of Atonement, this is another powerhouse from Xiaogang. Youth is a masterwork of cinematic style and the director’s usual melodrama flourish with a warm place in its heart for flawed, but valuable, young people.
Youth review by Abi Silverthorne, May 2018.
?Youth is available on Dual Format (Blu-ray & DVD) ?and Digital Download now from Cine Asia
