Campus Confidential is a romantic comedy aimed at the internet generation, an era which has brought about an army of invisible nerds who worship new sex symbols similar to those on the small screen. The “Legend of Lake Ju” has been making the rounds of the old college campus: the curse is revealed which should bring together a nerd and his goddess in a theoretical “preordained love,” exploring the various facets of a chain of events ranging from the comical, the surreal and the mysterious, which will lead to the conclusion of the story.
Campus Confidential is set in a college which has existed for only about 100 years. Xiaoqi, one of the prettiest girls on campus, has long been the object of desire for the nerds who hang around her; when one of her friends falls in love with one of them, in a fit of rage, Xiaoqi publishes a post on the internet entitled “Ten reasons I’d never fall in love with a nerd,” definitively alienating their entire species. One evening when the college lake is almost totally dried out, Xiaoqi bumps into the king of the nerds, Jinshun, and soon finds out about the legend of the lake: if a boy and a girl meet when the lake is drying out, they will fall in love for evermore.
Partly thanks to the news circulating on the web, the pretty and haughty Xiaoqi and the spotty-faced Jinshun suddenly become the protagonists of the “Legend of Lake Ju” and, what makes things even weirder, is that from that moment forth, they keep bumping into each other on the campus.
There is a Chinese term for eternal love which goes “until the sea dries out or the stone crumbles,” and the dried up lake of the film is both a reference to this and an overturning of it, masterfully locating a mysterious and ancient image of love into the modern-day setting of internauts, where everything is put on display for all to see.
The two main characters of Campus Confidential, Wilson Chen and Ivy Chen, have already worked together on Silent Code; in both films, the story is set around posts published on the internet, the hunt for the virtual man, etc., with the criticisms of the web users adding intensity to the sense of oppression. However, this piece avoids making any serious moral judgments, limiting itself to reflecting on the classic nerds’ dreams of love and the goddesses they worship, in cartoon form, without making any comparisons between the virtual world and the real one.
The Campus Confidential story was brought to life in the mind of the producer Su Chao-Bin, who was already well-known, thanks to the screenplays for The Cabbie and Better Than Sex; this film maintains the same headstrong spirit, bordering on madness, in the search for love by the main character, along with the classic coupling of the “beauty” with the “beast.” In order to play Jinshun, Wilson Chen not only had a hump put on his shoulders, but his eyes were also taped to make them appear smaller; the scenes he shares with Ivy Chen, the doe-eyed Venus, from when they knock down some bicycles, domino style, to when their cheeks end up glued together, right to when they stand up simultaneously to volunteer as student representatives, unfurl before our eyes at an accelerated pace, as if we were turning the pages of a Japanese comic book.
Thanks to his experience in the field of animation and special effects, the director Lai
Chun-Yu allows us a privileged glimpse into the world of the nerd and the goddess, weaving a touch of the romantic fable into the tale. In the end, is the “Legend of Lake Ju” a blessing or a curse? The riddle can only be solved by taking a look at ourselves in our most natural state, while putting aside any pretence and prejudice.
Chinese to Italian translation by Francesco Nati
Hsiang Yifei