Young Style

Art-house auteur Liu Jie takes a swerve toward commercial cinema, but stops at the mid-point. He fills this coming-of-age story with jokes, but insists on casting non-professional in all the roles except the female teacher. Qin Hailu gets a bunch of hilarious lines admonishing her students to work tirelessly toward the holy grail for every Chinese high-school student, namely passing the all-important national entrance exam and enrolling in a prestigious university. Here is one: "Sacrifice yourself for the happiness of all your family".

Liu pushes the envelope by dwelling on a teenager's fixation on pursuing his love interest, which is a big no-no under current guidelines of movie content. But he dodges the bullets by having the romance as the cause for the protagonists' academic failure hence turning the story into a cautionary tale. Dong Zijian, son of China's super-agent in the entertainment industry, did not disappoint his mother, or the audience. It's a very auspicious debut for an insider.

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