The sensitive, quirky indie youth romance is a genre well-represented in some Asian film industries (Japan, Hong Kong), but for mainland China it’s something rather fresh. Tang Danian’s Young and Clueless slots this format into present-day Beijing. He modulates the genre in interesting ways through amusing, thoughtful, and sometimes disturbing moods, all the while building securely on the genre’s popular entertainment underpinnings.
The film is really in two parts: a high school youth romance prologue, followed six years later by an urban twenty-something light drama with spooky undertones. It focuses on two best friends: quiet, dreamily romantic Xi (Tian Yuan), and her perkier, more spiritually obsessed buddy Qi Qi (Po Po). Xi has a crush on handsome high school athlete Yihuan (Song Ning). He knows it, and plans his high-school level seduction like an old pro. When Xi finds out that what she took as her first true love was for him merely the latest fling, she is haunted by a recurring, troubling dream, in which she is lost in a dark, cavernous space and panics trying to find a way out.
Qi Qi, on the other hand, floats through high school seemingly oblivious to the crush that dorky, bespectacled Yong Liang (Wu Xiaoliang) has on her. Her adolescently spiritual advice (she’s deeply into tarot cards, Daoism, and oneiromancy) for love-lorn Xi has a new age flavour, and she seems to bounce through life unhindered by her more thoughtful friend’s emotional fears and needs.
Six years later, Qi Qi and Xi are both young professionals in Zhongguancun, Beijing’s glossy high-tech high-tower district. Xi bumps into Yihuan, who’s now a DJ, just as Qi Qi meets Yong Liang at work. Both romances rekindle, though this time they take a more adult, twenty-somethingish turn. But a series of unexpected obstacles inevitably cause them to rethink their new adult selves, and their relationships to their adolescent pasts.
Complicating and enriching the plot is a new character, young migrant worker Yi Sheng (Tang Yinuo), who, utterly lonely in a harshly alienating city, can only contemplate Qi Qi in glimpses he catches of her apartment from the height of the construction crane where he works days. At nights, he discovers a special use for the redial button on Beijing’s payphones: he calls the last number in the phone’s automatic memory, and tries to engage whoever answers in a gentle, anonymous sort of conversation, seeking solace. As luck would have it, only Xi is willing to talk to him, and pours out the contents of the dream that is still haunting her six years after graduation.
This is Tang Danian’s second film as director: he is known for his locally flavoured screenplays for Beijing Bastards (1993) and Beijing Bicycle (2003). He refreshes a well-trodden commercial genre (much of this film is reminiscent of the Taiwanese and Hong Kong beach romances of the 1980s) with a vivid, playful visual sense and a fine control of his young actors’ performances. Two emerging “alternative” young stars are cast as the two female leads: Tian Yuan (who won a best new actress Hong Kong Film Award in 2004 for her role as a lesbian in Butterfly) continues to stake out a claim to being one of China’s most characterful and solidly professional young actresses. And Po Po, branded as an alternative youth idol and model in China, brings a zany, manic energy to Qi Qi that gives the film much of its sparkle.