Youth’s Radiant
青春真好
China, 2014, colour, 2.35:1, 95 mins.
Director: Meng Yan 孟艳.
Associate director: Chai Puyou 柴菩佑.
Rating: 3/10.
Teenie-targeted dance musical is relentlessly positive, without any edge or drama.
STORY
Beijing, the present day, October. Yuan Sidi (Jin Mengqi) and her best friend Fang Xue (Wang Xinyu) are both students at Haidian Foreign Language Shi Yan High School and also members of Jin Fan Dance Club, run by Mo Fan (Chen Qing). Mo Fan tells Yuan Sidi that she would like her in the team for a forthcoming National Student Dance Performance. However, because exams are nearing, Yuan Sidi has been forbidden to attend the club by her mother (Meng Xiu), who wants her to study instead. Because dance is her dream, Yuan Sidi agrees to keep coming, as long as the team keeps it a secret. Meanwhile, the club has a new dancer, the arrogant Hu Yingying (Li Mengyu), whom nobody likes but who is selected as a backup for the performance team. Mo Yang also tries to convince Yuan Sidi’s mother to let her daughter carry on dancing but fails. Fang Xue injures herself and is hospitalised for a while; she becomes jealous that Yuan Sidi is dancing with male club member Xia Yang (Hu Xiaopu), whom she fancies. And then Yuan Sidi’s mother finds out what is going on.
REVIEW
Targeted at teenie girls who just wanna dance, Youth’s Radiant 青春真好 is a relentlessly positive “motivational film” 励志片 centred on a high-school student whose mother wants her to concentrate on passing her exams rather than attend her favourite dance club. Full of exhortations about following your dream, and “the sunbeams in your heart”, this first feature by dance academic Meng Yan 孟艳, a high-school teacher for over 20 years, has almost no plot, solidly one-dimensional performances and some truly terrible dialogue. But as China’s first youth-dance movie made by high-school teachers, students and parents, it just about scrapes across the hour-and-a-half finishing line thanks to its can-do singlemindedness and technical finish, with plenty of bright widescreen photography and smoothly gliding camerawork.
With dance on screen and songs on the soundtrack, it’s not a sung musical in the traditional sense. Dance sequences are conservative, without the street flavour and edgier choreography of other Chinese youth musicals like Hong Kong’s The Way We Dance 狂舞派 (2013) or Mainland-set Kung Fu Hip Hop 精舞门 (2008) and Kung Fu Hip-Hop 2 精舞门2 (2010) but at least isn’t a cultural mish-mash like the US-aping Disney High School Musical China 歌舞青春 (2010). The triumphant finale, set at a national showcase and including one song in English, is impressively staged; and the coda number, with all the students on bikes and set to the song Let’s Dance, wraps things up in sunny style. Performances, led by recent graduate Jin Mengqi 金孟琦 as the girl with a dream, and students Wang Xinyu 王馨羽 and Hu Xiaopu 胡晓璞 as her best friend and the boy between them, are vanilla, overshadowed by that of the taller Li Mengyu 李孟钰 as a snotty new recruit. Among the adults, Chen Qing 陈庆, as the kindly dance teacher, is saddled with lines like “growing up is more important than being successful”.
The Chinese title means “Youth’s Really Good”.
CREDITS
Presented by Beijing Happiness and Harmony Film & TV Cultural Communication (CN).
Script: Meng Yan. Photography: Jia Zi. Editing: Zhao Lei. Music: Hu Kun, Wang Jiang. Songs: Xu Wei. Art direction: Wang Haijiang. Visual effects: Beijing Jiamu. On-set direction: Xie Jingjing.
Cast: Jin Mengqi (Yuan Sidi), Wang Xinyu (Fang Xue), Hu Xiaopu (Xia Yang), Li Mengyu (Hu Yingying/Marina), Zhang Shuoqi (Han Xiao), Chen Qing (Mo Fan, dance teacher), Meng Xiu (Yuan Sidi’s mother), Hou Xinrui (mathematics teacher), Xie Yiwen (nurse), Zhang Hua, Hasibagen, Cao Hongjing, Wang Xiaotong.
Premiere: Beijing Youth Welfare Film Festival (Opening Film), 31 May 2014.
Release: tba.
(Review originally published on Film Business Asia, 17 Aug 2014.)