Youth [Fang hua] **** (2017, Xuan Huang, Miao Miao, Caiyu Yang, Elane Zhong) – Movie Review

Xuan Huang stars as Feng Liu, Caiyu Yang as Dingding Lin and Elane Zhong as Suizi in director Xiaogang Feng’s haunting and stirring 2017 romantic drama based around the lives of the young members of a Chinese Military Cultural Troupe in the Seventies.

Made on an epic scale, it is luxuriously shot and beautifully handled by Xiaogang Feng, whose last work was the admired I Am Not Madame Bovary (2016). It combines, music, dance, personal drama and war action as the years roll by the characters’ earnest and hopeful youth is no more.

After some sentimentality and romantic moments, the war action when it comes is extremely disturbing and depressing, with a brio-handled battlefield sequence that sees men killed in a realistic, graphic way. It is the Sino Vietnamese war. Inevitably, I suppose, the ending is pretty depressing too. Youth is no more, all hopes and dreams are long gone.

It is the kind of film you just have to relax into and let wash over you. As such, the 135 minutes go rushing by. Eventually, it is all calm and reflective, with the past another country, and possibly the idea that youth is wasted on the young. Art seems to be being measured against war as a legitimate pursuit. The simple long take of the last scene is excellent, as brio in its very different way as the steadicam battlefield sequence.

It is a slight drawback that the sub-titles are small and hard to read, moving very quickly.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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Xuan Huang (born on March 3, 1985) stars as Feng Liu in Youth (2017).