It’s been a few days since I watched Forever Young (无问东西), and I’ve kept feeling there’s not much point writing about a film like this. Beyond its fairly handsome cinematography, its nostalgia card, and its star-studded cast, I don’t think there’s anything especially remarkable about it. And yet, the endless stream of commentary that followed has only made the film seem more substantial than it is — some reviews even go so far overboard as to label it “the most … film of [whatever].” This flood of varied opinions has gotten me thinking.

First there’s the wave of overwhelmingly positive reviews — from major websites to social media feeds, and now even Douban shows a high rating for this film. I jumped on this bandwagon myself and went to watch it. But it felt, as someone put it, like “meeting in person doesn’t live up to hearing about it.” Some analysts say its steadily climbing box office is the result of word-of-mouth, pyramid-style promotion; others say it’s the product of deliberately engineered media hype.

Then there’s a very different camp, which holds that the film is simply bad — its narrative is disorganized, overly sentimental. Plenty of viewers left confused, walking out before it ended. There are also accusations that parts of the film aren’t handled with proper seriousness, suspected of deliberately glossing things over. Someone even asked on a forum what connection the film actually has to the real history of Tsinghua University.

All the various opinions essentially boil down to these two camps. The first urges the second to look at it from a different angle, to see its sincerity and the century of Tsinghua’s history behind it; the second harshly attacks the first’s earnest emotional appeals… I won’t take sides here. What I find interesting instead is the official stance. The film wrapped production in 2012 but wasn’t released until 2018. Given the Cultural Revolution tragedy depicted within it — one death, one injury — I doubt any politician would feel comfortable with that content. The only solution was to position it as an “art-house film,” a “youth film.”

I’ve said this before: art-house films are nothing more than a small, awkwardly-positioned collection of movies. When people find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place with no other way out, humanity tends to rationalize by setting a new precedent.