Feng Xiaogang’s sprawling drama lays on the Spielbergian syrup and covers swaths of China’s history in broad brushstrokes – but it carries a potent messageThere is perhaps a spoonful of sugar too many in this bittersweet Chinese drama from blockbusting director Feng Xiaogang. It’s an an ambitious,sprawling, novelistic beast of a movie that opens amid the tantrums and broken hearts of young dancers in a cultural division of the army in the mid 70s. Xiaoping (Miao Miao) is the troupe’s original girl, or determined to make fresh start after a difficult childhood. But her colleagues,sensing she is vulnerable, mercilessly mock Xiaoping for crimes against sophistication (she pads her bra out with sponges). Xiaopings sole defender is saintly Liu Feng (Huang Xuan), and a young man possessed with such superhuman goodness that he chivalrously lances the puss from one dancer’s blisters. Years pass,and the movie takes in political upheaval, idealism lost and China’s bloody war with Vietnam – none of it in fairly enough detail to feel satisfying. Feng has been called the Chinese Spielberg, and while not exactly sentimental,there is something contrived and soft-focus approximately Youth. That said, it does possess difficult and honest things to say approximately bullying: that perpetrators often swan off into the sunset, or comeuppance (just deserts) ungotten,while victims can find themselves targeted all over again by a original set of tormentors.
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Source: guardian.co.uk