Far East Film Festival 22 (online)
He Xiaoshi [Dong Bowen] and Lin Xiaoyu [Ning Yuanyuan, also director and co-writer] are students in a secondary school in Taizhou (Jiangsu province).
Xiaoshi is literary but innocent while Xiaoyu is one of the stars of the class.
After studying together, the school head finds them ‘holding hands’. In fact, he is reading her palm but the head assumes that something more inappropriate is happening and demands that they write a self-criticism to be read out in class. It is apparently a rule that students do not go out with each other.
Xiaoshi’s first (florid) effort is rejected for not taking their behavior seriously enough and the film looks at how the two try to write more convincing criticisms (albeit that nothing happened in the first place).
I am not sure who this film is really aimed at though I assume I am not in the target demographic. But, for me, it does not really work. Director Ning does approach the school film from a new angle and avoids the clichés of angst and/or gaokao which feature in most such films.
Unlike the hyper-drama of Better Days (which won the FEFF audience award), there is hardly any drama at all in this movie. But it is also not a realistic portrayal of school life. The two leads are noticeably older than their characters which makes their innocence harder to accept, the dialogue never rings true, and the head teacher and Xiaoshi’s father are cardboard cutouts.
The film is set in 2008 for no obvious reason except that the film-makers may have thought that the target audience would suspend belief more if the film was set in the distant past.
It’s the first film from a young director and Ning Yuanyuan (daughter of director Zhang Yuan and screenwriter Ning Dai) is quite assured in her approach so one could look forward to her next films with interest.
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