Youth (芳华) is a Chinese film by popular director Feng
Xiaogang with a screenplay written by Geling Yan. The film follows a group of
young people in a military art troupe in the People's Liberation Army during
the Cultural Revolution, through the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, and on into
middle age. It was the 6th highest-grossing domestic film of 2017 in China, and
has won a number of awards at Asian film festivals. Youth and Feng Xiaogang
also won Best Picture and Best Director at the
first Marianas International
Film Festival. So how has Youth ‘translated’ to the West? And I don’t mean its subtitles (these were
adequate, though nowhere as idiomatic as Tony Ryan’s, in Jia Zhangke’s films).
What interests me is what the ordinary film-goer, non-China-specialist, will
make of it, what they are likely to take from it, and what will go right over
their heads.
My gut feeling to start
with was that films are much more likely to ‘translate’ well than novels. We
all know that Chinese literature is finding it hard to go west, despite the
best efforts of writers and their translators. But surely a film, with a
relatively simpler story-line, luscious cinematography and gorgeous music and
dancing, will have universal appeal?