At the film’s denouement, there is a bittersweet sense that despite China’s current prosperity, it has lost its idealism and spirit, those things that only youth possesses.
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Commercial Chinese director Feng Xiaogang has been called the Chinese Spielberg and his latest film Youth showcases Feng’s talent at big-sweep historical storytelling while not losing sight of the smaller human stories that make up history. Adapted from screenwriter Yan Geling’s semi-autobiographical novel, the film follows an ensemble of adolescent troupe dancers in the People’s Liberation Army as they live through the Cultural Revolution and the Sino-Vietnamese War in the late 1970s.
The central characters are Xiaoping (Miao Miao) and Liu Feng (Huang Xuan). Xiaoping is a new dancer, convinced to join the dance troupe by Liu Feng, an altruistic, almost saintly, do-gooder who is held up by his superiors and peers as an exemplary role model. Xiaoping, whose father is currently interned at a re-education camp for being a Rightist, has had a difficult childhood and determines to start afresh at the dance troupe after being convinced to join by Liu Feng. But a minor incident, in which Xiaoping took her fellow dancer Dingding’s (Yang Caiyu) uniform without her permission, turned Xiaoping into an outcast and a victim of bullying.
When Liu Feng is unjustly dismissed, Xiaoping decides to stop dancing for the troupe by feigning illness. But her guise is discovered by her superior and, as punishment, Xiaoping is sent to be a combat nurse on the battlefront. It is here that the film shifts from the Cultural Revolution to the Sino-Vietnamese war and centers on Liu Feng and Xiaoping’s individual struggles before they reunite in Hainan in 1991, when China has progressed into capitalism. At the film’s denouement, there is a bittersweet sense that despite China’s current prosperity, it has lost its idealism and spirit, those things that only youth possesses.
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