Art College 1994
It’s odd and amusing to see a year referenced in the title of “Art College 1994,” a Chinese animated college dorm rom-com about young people and their great loves, themselves. This feature length cartoon could happen just as easily somewhere else or at another time without losing much of either its particularity or universality. Swap out a Nirvana poster or a multi tiered tape deck stereo and you’d still have an unsentimental, quietly pitiless portrait of idealistic undergraduates at the very moment when they start to understand how small they are in the world that waits for them after graduation.
Director/co-writer Liu Jian’s fondness for his impulsive young protagonists adds a twist to the usual pre graduation coming of age story’s post-college life concerns funny because it’s true, not only to these subjects’ fickle values. These art students take themselves too seriously (like most art students) but also live in a beautiful oasis where navel gazing is fostered as few places on Earth outside of remote Indian ashrams might allow. “Art College 1994” is unassumingly sweet because it’s about kids and their forever quest for freedom and self-expression mostly inside their own navels.
“Art College 1994” is a time capsule about that gauzy period when you think you know what you’re talking about but don’t know anything yet at all Liu (“Have a Nice Day”) has an unusual patience with his characters’ overlapping stories, which tend to wander more than progress. Some intrigue gathers around who will go where after school and who’s dating whom, making fair weather partners out of musical prodigies Hao Lili (voiced by Zhuo Dongyu) and Gao Hong (Papi), fine arts majors Zhifei (Shaoxing) and Xiaojun (Dong Zijian). But there’s also a frequently rotating cast of supporting characters who receive and project their own ideas back at the central quartet.
Since his tunnel visioned twentysomethings only think they know what they want, and then only in terms that are vaguely personal, Liu is more interested in the academic setting. Jokes about the art world and its youthfully impressionable adherents abound, some more amusing than laugh-aloud funny though that too feels right since most people in this movie don’t appear to have an outdoor voice.
A “manifesto” by a museum curator is met with shoulder shrugs “I know every word here, but I don’t understand a thing.” A baffled student asks a Taiwanese artist (the great filmmaker Jia Zhangke) a quasi Daoist question “Is the moon more beautiful abroad?” and is immediately shut down by an embarrassed administrator. “Please don’t bring up things unrelated to today’s topic.” Art is burned for freedom and portfolio’s sake, and love affairs are begun and called off with dizzying regularity. Also, really, you’re engaged to him you, so soon?
“Art College 1994” doesn’t gain momentum so much as it drifts along with its characters, obsessing over contextualizing details in both the movie’s depopulated sound design and mostly music free score. The ambient noises you hear on the soundtrack tend to stick out given the “social realist” design that has become the center of Liu’s now-signature visual style. Human figures move stiffly across ornately designed background screens crowded with eye catching decorative flourishes.
It’s not naturalistic but stylized in a mannered way that feels true to the nature of this kind of story as a snapshot of students who drink too much and philosophize more than they understand themselves to be doing while justifying their choices with quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce and Pablo Picasso. They ponder “tradition art” versus how to make new art either combining old media or maybe burning it all down (“I’ve already got a title [for an exhibition]. ‘Flame of Ideas!’ ”).
Also Read: The bitter edge to “Art College 1994”’s humor is significantly undercut by its matter of fact poetry and arthouse friendly toggling back and forth between impressionistic details: Look at these ceiling rafters, cut to Yingjun in bed, staring up at nothing. The movie’s music cuts out mid space out. Soon we’ll join Yinjun again as he trudges around campus at night, hands in his pockets, headphones on and a chorus of crickets on the soundtrack. Then it’s off to the Casablanca Club, with its marquee’s flickering purple and green halogen bulbs, which buzz on the soundtrack like a bug zapper.
This is not really nostalgia because it remembers too vividly what it means to be young and only responsible for yourself with no frame of reference but your own narrow, constantly fussed over headspace. It’s a coming of age story that admits that yes, life was beautiful when you were younger and more passionate about your future but only because of some confluence of timing and circumstances having to do with you but not often involving you as a primary subject.
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