Farewell My Lad

再见，少年

China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 109 mins.

Director: Yin Ruoxin 殷若昕.

Rating: 5/10.

Fairly conventional story of a high-school girl drawn to a bad-boy classmate lacks narrative drive and tension.

STORY

A police station in Yunnan province, southern China, 2017. Under arrest, Li Fei (Zhang Zifeng), 32, is interrogated by police (Dong Bo, La Mei) about her long-term relationship with her male accomplice. (In Sep 2000, on her first day in senior high, the shy but intelligent Li Fei, then 15, had been appointed deputy class head; the equally intelligent Song Juan [Qu Mengru] had been made class head. An object of curiosity among the other girls, Li Fei had been the only one to come from the mining area of town, which was reachable by a small train. Classmates had said they’d heard that workers were being laid off there. Li Fei was living in a rented flat near the school and next day had bumped into classmate Zhang Chenhao [Zhang Youhao] who lived in the flat opposite. He had a reputation for being a brawler and lazy at studying; he had pushed his way into her acquaintance and arranged to share a desk with her in class. On a visit home Li Fei had learnt that her father [Hong Chang] had laid off people in his department and himself hadn’t been paid by the mining company. At home Zhang Chenhao had a drunken father [Jiao Gang] to deal with, and a mother who was in a coma from a car accident. His gang friend Sheng Ming [Xu Changpeng], whose father had died recently, had come by and wondered why he hadn’t been hanging out with him. Zhang Chenhao had kept on flattering Li Fei and she finally agreed to help him with his studies, as she secretly quite liked him. He’d been determined to “create a miracle” and get to university. In the end-of-term grades he’d shown an improvement. But then Wang Yu [Wu Shiyu], chief hoodlum of the gang he used to run with, had tracked him down and demanded some money. Zhang Chenhao had said the little amount of his mother’s compensation money had been used up, but he’d promised Wang Yu to find some more. Li Fei had overheard their conversation. After giving Wang Yu some money, Zhang Chenhao had announced he was quitting the gang – and was, surprisingly, let off by the gang’s leader, Liu [Liu Shuai]. At school Zhang Chenhao’s marks had continued to improve, as had his relationship with Li Fei. He had started calling himself Sisyphus, after the Ancient Greek god sentenced to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity.) In the police interrogation Li Fei is asked who Sisyphus was. (Zhang Chenhao had found his father had gambled away the family’s savings. And in Jul 2001 Lei Fei’s father had heard he would be losing his job as a department head. Zhang Chenhao had found himself drawn back into gang life, despite Li Fei’s entreaties. And at school, during the second year of senior high, the two had been split up in class, as their teacher [Wang Honggang] had told Li Fei that by associating with Zhang Chenhao she was imperilling her chances of winning a place on a student-exchange programme to Sweden in November. Li Fei had later learned that she’d lost out to Song Juan in winning a place. By Chinese New Year in Feb 2002 Zhang Chenhao had been pressured to rejoin Liu’s gang as a way of paying back his father’s debts, though Li Fei had still tried to help him continue his studies. But by the following year he had effectively stopped studying, and that summer had become seriously involved in a crime committed by Liu.)

REVIEW

Shot prior to her impressive family drama Sister 我的姐姐 (2021) but only commercially released after that film’s unexpected success, Farewell My Lad 再见，少年 was the feature debut of writer-director Yin Ruoxin 殷若昕 but is nowhere close to her subsequent film in quality. A fairly conventional high-school tale of a girl’s attachment to a bad-boy classmate, it’s told (rather unnecessarily) in flashback and lacks the small incremental detailing of characters and relationships that made Sister so involving. Starring the same young actress, Zhang Zifeng 张子枫, though in a much less complex and “grown-up” role, it was originally set to be released on 16 Apr this year (two weeks after Sister) but was suddenly pulled three days before, for “technical reasons”, despite already having been certified in early 2020. When finally released in late August, it made no impression at the box office, with a weedy RMB20 million compared with Sister’s astonishing RMB860 million in the spring.

After graduating from the Central Academy of Drama in literature and directing, Yin worked on several theatre and TV productions, and started developing the story of Farewell in 2016. Originally known as 南方，有雾 (literally, “In the South, There’s Mist”), and as White Sun in English, it was co-written with Chengdu-born You Xiaoying 游晓颖 (Love Education 相爱相亲, 2017). Officially credited on the film with “script planning” 文学策划, You was to go on to receive sole credit for her script of Sister. Shot in the small town of Gejiu, down south in Yunnan province, Farewell, then with the new Chinese title 再见，少年 (“Goodbye, [Early] Youth”), wrapped in spring 2019. During postproduction the English title was changed to Farewell My Lad.

At the time of shooting, Zhang, then 17, had been acting for over a decade, initially in small parts (such as the child survivor in Aftershock 唐山大地震, 2010) and then more and more noticeably in films like My Old Classmate 同桌的妳 (2014), Detective Chinatown 唐人街探案 (2015), high-school comedy How Are You 李雷和韩梅梅 昨日重现 (2017) and youth movie Go Brother 快把我哥带走 (2018). Where her role in Sister was a game-changer, marking her passage into adult roles, that in Farewell (shot only a year or so earlier) is still in the mould of her earlier, high-school characters, and especially her more expressionless ones.

Zhang teams well with baby-faced Zhang Youhao 张宥浩 – six years her senior but also playing a mid-teen – who had a lively role in the virtual-reality action drama Dream Breaker 破梦游戏 (2018) but not much else of note on the big screen. In Farewell he’s much more believable in the lighter, flirtier moments than he is in the darker ones as a street hoodlum, an imbalance which weakens the film’s tilt towards drama in the second half. But Farewell’s main problem is its script, which delivers very little that is new in the high-school genre (recycling cliches like strolling along railway tracks, and so on) and signally lacks any narrative drive or dramatic tension. The turn-of-the-millennium setting (when Yin herself was roughly the same age as the heroine) allows for an economic background of unemployment and failing state companies (in this case a mining concern) as China’s economy shifts focus, but this is only thinly developed via the characters of the girl’s parents (played, with some gratingly fey dialogue, by Hong Chang 洪昌 and well-known actress Xu Fan 徐帆, as her father and mother). Other roles also seem to have been cut back (or edited down) in order to focus on the central pair: that of the girl’s main intellectual rival in class, fleetingly played by newcomer Qu Mengru 屈梦汝, and a talented male student, hardly visible, played by fellow newcomer Yu Hailiang 虞海亮. Given the shortage of drama at the centre of the film, more development of supporting roles like these would at least have helped give the film more texture.

As it is, Farewell would lose little from being tightened by at least 10 minutes: most of the story can be seen coming way in advance, making the second half quite a plod. On the technical side it’s generally fine, with good clean widescreen photography by Zhao Jianqiao 赵剑桥 (short Forgive My Youth 原谅我的青春, 2012) and okay, if predictable, music by Taiwan’s Yu Zhengxian 余政宪. In the present-day scenes (actually 2017), where Zhang Zifeng’s character is aged 32, the actress is discreetly photographed in half-shadow, which is reasonably but not totally convincing – rather like the whole crime subplot that’s tacked on in the final half-hour and then just happens to be solved some 14 years later by the police.

The film was originally set to premiere on 18 Jun 2020 in the Shanghai festival’s China Movie Channel Media Focus Unit but, after the festival was moved (because of Covid restrictions) to late July/early August, when Yin was already shooting Sister in Chengdu, the film’s premiere was moved to the Hainan Island film festival, in southern China, in Dec 2020.

CREDITS

Presented by Dadi Century (Beijing) (CN), Beijing Firefly Film (CN), Emperor (Beijing) Motion Pictures (CN), Shanghai XY Cultural Communication (CN). Produced by Dadi Century (Beijing) (CN).

Script: Yin Ruoxin. Script planning: You Xiaoying. Photography: Zhao Jianqiao. Editing: Liao Qingsong, Zhang Xiaojin. Music: Yu Zhengxian. Art direction: Lv Dong. Costumes: Zhang Juan. Styling: Qi Lei. Sound: Bian Yajun, Li Ke. Visual effects: Li Guoliang, Wen Maoyu. Executive direction: Luan Guohua.

Cast: Zhang Zifeng (Li Fei), Zhang Youhao (Zhang Chenhao), Xu Fan (Li Fei’s mother), Jiao Gang (Zhang Chenhao’s father), Liu Shuai (Liu, gang leader), Qu Mengru (Song Juan), Jin Zihe (Liang Mu), Yu Hailiang (Gu Wei), Cheng Honglin (senior high first-year teacher), Wu Shiyu (Wang Yu, head hoodlum), Hong Chang (Li Fei’s father), Che Liqiong (Guo Fenfang, Zhang Chenhao’s mother), Xu Changpeng (Sheng Ming), Wang Honggang (senior high second-year teacher), Li Moyan (He Lan), Dong Bo, La Mei (police interrogators), Yang Zhiyan (Xiaoyanzi, hairdresser).

Premiere: Hainan Island Film Festival (H! Future), China, 10 Dec 2020.

Release: China, 27 Aug 2021.