It's their life! This is their youth! Feng Xiaogan’s new film, Youth, or Primaryflower in the original language, is a picture warmly received in the West and has long been postponed in China due to the strict supervision of local censors. The film delivers a real aesthetic pleasure - each frame, like a light and elegant movement of the dancer, fascinates and delights, makes you empathize and miss the events of the main characters, perfectly selected musical accompaniment in the form of compositions of the times of the Cultural Revolution, complements the overall action and sets the mood. However, the complicated and sometimes unsaid plot does not leave the hall with a sense of complete satisfaction.
In some places, Youth echoes the Soviet film Devachata, which also tells the story of Soviet girls. Feng Xiaogan’s film has this spirit of building communism and the sense of change that has come since the death of Great Nursing Mao Zedong. And we should pay tribute to the creators, they managed to perfectly avoid the politically acute moments, completely without focusing on them.
There are a few downsides to the movie. First of all, all actors and actresses are so much alike that only by the second half of the picture you begin to distinguish between the characters, and this is despite the fact that I have lived in China for quite a long time. Secondly, in the second half of the film, the main storyline is lost in the vicissitudes of dozens of secondary plots, and not finding its logical conclusion. Thirdly, more than two and a half hours, still a lot for such an author's film, and by the end you feel not only moral, but also physical fatigue.
However, the pluses of the picture are no less. The most striking fact for me personally was that 20 percent of the audience in the audience were people in their 60s, people who, during and after the Cultural Revolution, 1976-1980, were the very young people who were telling their stories on screen. Sitting next to me was an elderly couple who occasionally sang songs and indulged in nostalgic reflections. But we have almost nothing created at least a little interesting for the older generation!
The atmosphere and tone that is set at the very beginning is maintained until the very end. Thanks to the excellent directing and camera work, a feeling of complete presence is created, as if the viewer is one of the members of the dance troupe of the theater of the revolution or the simple wartime Sino-Vietnamese conflict, shown with incredible cruelty and bloodlust.
The main plot tells the story of the girls-fighters of the ensemble of the revolution, involved in various dance and song productions. Each of them has its own dreams, its own aspirations, its own interests, but one idea embodied in loyalty to the red banner, and even the most unexpected turns of fate, can not lead them astray. It's their lives! It's their youth! That's why the movie is so interesting to watch!
7 out of 10