The film focus on the Chinese Gaokao, which is one of the most important things for every Chinese students. The story is simple, Ju Ran is a 12th grade students who confessed to the girls he had a crush on for three years using Tagore’s verses in front of all students and teachers when taking the graduation pictures. And then the most of the movie focuses on he repeating is 12th grade, because he messed up his Gao kao.
The movie revolves around four emotion lines, the friendship of Ju Ran and his classmates, Ju Ran with his parents, his teachers, as well as his feelings for Xiao Fan. I found the film quite hilarious, and it surely showed some typical phenomenons in the Chinese societies, parents holds high expectation on their children as well as high pressure and the typical Chinese exam-orientated education, students sits in classroom having endless exam. Students like Zhou Qiang, who comes from a poor family background, treat Gao Kao as his only way out, his only chance to change his life as well as his families. So he is always the student who worked till late night and he eventually when to Qing Hua university which is the very top university in China. A interesting plot is when the teachers encourage Qi Mingzhi to get into good university, she said that ‘ you don’t have rich dad and a powerful family, and you are not working hard on your own …. if you can’t go into a decent university, what other options do you have’. It seems like that we are all acquiescing to such social rules, we are to extend powerless to change, it is always easier for those who have a better background, the ‘ceiling’ that you try your best to reach is someone else’s starting point. There are lots of interesting line in the movie and i actually grew up being told so, such as ‘without pain it isn’t senior year, without effort it isn’t life’, ‘ even you break a leg, you must get in university’, ‘one point higher, you are surpassing thousands of people’ ‘if you can make it, make it, if you can’t, still you must make it’ ‘there is not retreat there’s only victory’.
Another plot that i remember the most, is the speech that the teacher gave in front of students parents. She said that ‘ Gao kao isn’t just for students, its also for the parents, so right now, i am going to ask the parents for a favor, nothing is more important than you children’s Gaokao, so if you are about to go bankrupt, hold on a bit longer,one hundred and fifty eight days longer, as to those who want a divorce, please hold it together,for another half year,the highest priority of yours is gaokao’. This is very true-to-life, i have seen too many real life cases that parents do not tell their kids that they have divorced and still pretend everything is fine and live together, sometimes even illness, they won’t tell their kids to distract them. This year, there’re around 10.71 million students who are going to taking Gao Kao, and Gao Kao is on 7th July this year. So i recommend to anyone who is interested in Gao Kao to watch this film Young Style.
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