The Day We Lit up the Sky
燃野少年的天空
China, 2021, colour/b&w, 2.35:1, 106 mins.
Directors: Zhang Yibai 张一白, Han Yan 韩琰.
Rating: 6/10.
High-school musical gets by on technique and charm but in undercut by flashy editing and average songs.
STORY
Haikou city, Hainan island, southern China, the present day, September. Arriving from Guangdong as a transfer student to retake the university entrance exam, Li Zelin, nicknamed Lao Gou (Peng Yuchang), is met by his paternal aunt (Li Ruotong) who dumps him outside Yangguang High School, a shabby school for boys that’s directly opposite the smart and snobbish Fulin Girls’ School. Wandering into the latter, which is renowned for entering winning teams in the Strictly Come Dancing 舞动奇迹 competition, he notices a girl called Xiaohuang (Xu Enyi) who blithely does her own thing in the school’s opening day mass ceremony. A talented dancer, she’s scorned by the other girls for smelling of fish, as her father (Huang Jue) runs a salted-fish shop; she also keeps being rejected from the school’s team by the snooty dance teacher (Wang Ruijia). Lao Gou is kicked out by a security guard but not before Xiaohuang has noticed him. At Yangguang, Lao Gou quickly becomes friends with his three loser roommates – Dragon (Zhang Youhao), a wannabe leader who has his nickname written on his arm in traditional Chinese, the girly Ze (Siwaige), and chubby Li (Hu Yuxuan) – and learns that the girl he saw is nicknamed Little Sea Maid 海的女儿. Lao Gou tries to persuade Fulin’s headmistress (Liu Mintao) to take him on as a student, because of his own love of dance, but she has him thrown out. Xiaohuang invites his as her “date” to the High-Schools Dance and, to help pay for the formal wear, the boys get a job in the salted-fish shop, not knowing the owner is Xiaohuang’s father. He’s always pretended to her that her absent mother is the famous Hong Kong singer Sammi, whom she should try to emulate by dancing, and for the dance he’s bought her a pretty white dress. On the night, the boys turn up in colourful gear and create havoc with a chaotic dance routine. Afterwards, Lao Gou tells Xiaohuang he’s determined she should realise her dream and get into the dance team somehow. His father having remarried and too busy to look after him, Lao Gou is as lonely as Xiaohuang, so the two quickly bond during the Mid-Autumn Festival break. Lao Gou and his loser pals decide to prove everyone wrong by entering the competition themselves, and recruit an old friend from junior high, champion gymnast and sportsman Yang Qianhua (Yin Zheng). Despite Sammi (Zheng Xiuwen) being announced as this year’s head judge, Xiaohuang, who is desperate to finally meet her, is still rejected from the team by the dance teacher. Lao Gou finally persuades her to coach his team instead for RMB200 a session, despite the fact that he and his pals don’t have any money and she’s never actually taught dance before.
REVIEW
Some of the key creators and cast behind online youth drama series Run for Young 风犬少年的天空 (2020) re-assemble for The Day We Lit Up the Sky 燃野少年的天空, a generic high-school movie with the added attraction of also being a song’n’dance film. Musicals are traditionally not an easy sell at the Mainland box office, so, despite the popularity of Run, it was still a risky proposition for the team, again led by creative producers 监制 Zhang Yibai 张一白 (a skilled commercial director in his own right) and Xing Aina 邢爱娜 (regular producer for, and wife of, director Ning Hao 宁浩). Zhang, re-teaming as a director with young Han Yan 韩琰, writer Li Zelin 里则林 and star Peng Yuchang 彭昱畅, turns in a typically slick production that’s sometimes technically inventive but too often undercuts the song’n’dance with restless cutting and visual trickery. What charm the film has is largely down to the chemistry between its two young leads rather than the rote realise-your-dream plot and the-power-of-Gen-Z slant. The result scored a ho-hum RMB161 million, not helped by the general sluggishness of the Mainland box office this summer.
Zhang, 58, has turned increasingly to producing in recent years but as a director he’s kind of been in Sky’s territory before, not only with Run (set during senior high in his hometown Chongqing) but also with his youth-to-adulthood romantic drama Fleet of Time 勿勿那年 (2014), which married classy technique with a strong screenplay and largely good performances. The difference is that Sky is wholly concerned with 18-year-olds during their final year at senior high, rather than following them into adult life as well, so Zhang has sensibly re-teamed with one of Run’s directors, Tianjin-born Han, 40, to shore up the youth angle. Prior to Run, Han directed the feature Dream Breaker 破梦游戏 (2018), a virtual-reality action drama aimed at teenage tech-heads that had a nothing script and crashed at the box office. Unfortunately, Sky also has the flimsiest of original scripts by Guangdong-born tyro writer Li, 31, whose only previous credit was Run, based on his own novel.
The plot is basically centred on two outsiders – a transfer student re-sitting his final, pre-university year and a girl in the school opposite who’s a talented dancer but stigmatised by her snooty classmates. She dreams of getting into a dance competition, so he tries to help her achieve her dream. So far, so generic. The minor twist is that it doesn’t end up with a nail-biting competition finale as expected; instead, it ends with scenes of mass dancing that celebrate the untapped power and future potential of Gen-Z, as shown in some of the film’s posters (see left). As such, it’s not only close to an “inspirational” film but also fits neatly into the new official line that winning isn’t everything.
Zhang & Co. have given the script a handsome set of clothes to disguise its thinness: a setting on the southern island of Hainan (thankfully the capital Haikou, not the trendy southern resort Sanya), plenty of tropical rain at key emotional moments, a dreamy, semi-fantasy edge with a prominent Big Wheel as a symbol of hope, and some technically elaborate staging that’s show-offy but effective. The last include a seemingly uninterrupted five-minute take – actually four shots overlapped – that follows the heroine onto a bus and off again, and an energetic musical number that ends with pupils simultaneously dancing in 12 rooms at once, thanks to some spiffy VFX. The latter sequence, also running five minutes, is typical of the film’s musical staging, which undercuts itself with so much restless and flashy editing that it’s impossible to appreciate the choreography (by Japan’s Kikaku Akane アカネキカク) or the songs.
That’s an especial shame in the case of young newcomer Xu Enyi 许恩怡, 17, who’s clearly a trained dancer but is ill-served by the choppy, musicvideo way in which she’s presented. The daughter of British-Chinese-Malay actress-singer Bai Anni 柏安妮 [Ann Bridgewater], a face in late 1980s/early 1990s Hong Kong cinema but now retired, Xu shows a likeable, sunny personality, with a facial hint of actress Zhang Zifeng 张子枫, and melds beautifully with her co-lead, the boyish Peng (Our Shining Days 闪光少女, 2017; An Elephant Sitting Still 大象席地而坐, 2018; Bath Buddy 沐浴之王, 2020), who’s 26 but makes a passable 18-year-old, and here animates the whole film as a never-say-die optimist. Peng is backed up by a solid group, including Zhang Youhao 张宥浩 from Run, as his loser roommates, while the experienced Huang Jue 黄觉 brings some older heft as the girl’s proud working-class father. Well-known names pop up in brief cameos, including Mainlanders Huo Siyan 霍思燕 as a surprise wife, Zhang Yi 张译 as a promo driver and Qiao Shan 乔杉 as a headmaster, plus Hong Kong’s Cai Yizhi 蔡一智 as an eccentric rural uncle. But none of the cameos are quite as glamorous as that of Hong Kong singer-actress Zheng Xiuwen 郑秀文 [Sammi Cheng], 48, here almost unrecognisable despite playing herself.
The handsome widescreen photography by Taiwan d.p. Yu Jingping 余静萍 (Zinnia Flower 百日告别, 2015; SoulMate 七月与安生, 2016) has much of the same texture and depth of colour as her work on foodie rom-com This Is Not What I Expected 喜欢你 (2017) and high-school drama Better Days 少年的你 (2019), though in a generally brighter way. Of the songs, which are mostly in the second half, only a couple are at all memorable. The film was shot in Haikou itself, largely between Nov 2020 and Jan 2021. Its Chinese title, which echoes that of Run, literally means “The Sky [i.e. World] of Youth Burning Wild”.
CREDITS
Presented by Shanghai Such A Good Film (CN), China Film (CN), Lian Ray (Shanghai) Pictures (CN), Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN), C2M Media Group (Shanghai) (CN), Beijing Le Grand Films (CN). Produced by Shanghai Such A Good Film (CN), Hainan Such A Good Film (CN).
Script: Li Zelin. Photography: Yu Jingping. Action photography:: Liu Yin’gang. Editing: Zhou Xiaolin, Zhang Yibo. Music: Zhang Yadong. Music supervision: Zhang Yadong. Lyrics: Tang Tian. Art direction: Zhai Tao. Styling: Wu Lilu [Dora Ng]. Sound: Zhao Man. Action: Chen Shuo, Lei Changlong. Visual effects: Cai Meng, Zhang Fan (MoreVFX). Choreography: Kikaku Akane. Executive direction: Cai Erduo [Cai Jing].
Cast: Peng Yuchang (Li Zelin/Lao Gou/Old Dog), Xu Enyi (Xiaohuang), Zhang Youhao (Fanti Long/Traditional Dragon/Dragon), Yin Zheng (Yang Qianhua/Da Hua), Sun Rui (Panpan), Siwaige [Swag/Liu Zhi] (Ze/Handsome), Liao Yueying (fat girl), Hu Yuxuan (Li), Huang Jue (Xiaohuang’s father), Cai Yizhi (Third Uncle), Liu Mintao (Fulin Girls’ School headmistress), Li Ruotong (Li Zelin’s paternal aunt), Zheng Xiuwen [Sammi Cheng] (Sammi), Qiao Shan (Yangguang High School headmaster), Wang Ruijia (Fulin dance teacher), Han Liu (girls’ school security guard), Ning Tianhe (infant Xiaohuang), Ning Tianxi (young Xiaohuang), Jin Huaqing (older woman), Jing Tianyi (high-schools dance MC), Zhang Yi (competition promo car driver), Jing Gangshan (Hong, drunk), Liu Yiwei (Dragon’s father), Liang Jing (Dragon’s mother), Yang Ruoxu (PE teacher), Huo Siyan (Yang Qianhua’s wife), Zheng Jialing (Third Uncle’s wife), Tang Shiyi (Xiaohuang’s mother), Xie Nan (dance competition MC), Cai Jing (dance competition photographer), Lang Jialei (tourist in boat queue), Zhang Shiyuan (competition worker).
Release: China, 17 Jul 2021.