Not YOUTH/2015, Paolo Sorrentino/Michael Caine's film about an aging, blocked composer, but YOUTH/2017, a big soapy saga by under-exported Chinese director Xiaogang Feng on the hopes & dreams, lives & loves, careers & missed opportunities of the members of an entertainment unit in the People’s Republic Army. Looking back from today (the film wraps with epilogues & reflections), we follow the pathetic path of Xiaoping He (debuting Miao Miao) as she hesitantly joins the troupe and immediately faints in class, a real ‘little wren’ type. So many clicks and BFF among the largely sex segregated unit, how will she ever fit in? Thank goodness for the inexhaustible goodness of handsome, resourceful Feng Liu (an excellent Xuan Huang, best reason to watch), always on hand to buck her up physically & emotionally. If only his eye wasn't already set on flirty, undeserving, two-faced Dingding Lin. And so it goes with a dozen or so moderately differentiated characters (lots of girls/two or three boys), until disappointments and injuries start breaking up that old performing gang o’ mine and an Act Three change in location when our two leads transfer to the fighting army for some gory war action. (Him: bravely wounded in a showy one-take battle sequence/Her: up to her elbow in blood as a front line nurse.) Starting at the end of Chairman Mao/Gang of Four days, then continuing for the rest of the ‘70s, plentiful tears, renunciations, an amputation & reunions. Xiaogang Feng certainly brings a lot of craft to this kitsch, but stages half his set pieces as if they were musical numbers. Fine at camp, but at war? When nurses set up tents for a field hospital we might be watching outtakes from BYE BYE BIRDIE/’63. How did this ever get taken seriously?
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Zhang Yimou’s TO LIVE/’94 covers similar terrain and has its own problems, but is far less sticky.
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