Italo Calvino famously said that memory must be strong enough to enable us to remain the same person, but also weak enough to enable us to keep moving forward. Coming-of-age drama “Fleet of Time” 《匆匆那年》 revolves around a group of upwardly mobile post-80 Beijingers who – despite being outwardly successful – are fixated on their pasts, particular their lost loves.

Image courtesy of Baidu

The film starts promisingly, with the characters playing the drinking game, “我曾经” which is the Western drinking game “I have never” in reverse (people talk about the crazy things they have done). The film then flashes back to 1999 when the main characters, a group of lifelong friends, are high school students.

The scenes set in the past have a dreamlike quality. People wear brighter colours and some of the shots look as photoshopped as Chinese wedding photos. The period details for the scenes that stretch from 1999 to 2002 are all accurate in terms of fashion, technology and pop music and contrast with the bleak winter scenes set in 2014.

However, the film, adapted from Jiu Yehui’s novel of the same name, is clunky and confusing, with too many subplots for its 119 minute running time. The novel was also adapted into a TV series, which is a more suitable form when attempting to bring a novel, with all its characters and events comprehensively to the screen.

Robert Mulligan’s 1962 adaptation of “To Kill a Mocking Bird” cuts out major incidents and characters so it can focus on the central “mocking birds” Tom Robinson and Boo Radley. Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of “Lolita” merges three major characters into the character of Clare Quilty played by Peter Sellers. In the case of “Fleet of Time,” the love story between Chen Xun (Eddie Peng) and classmate Fang Hui (Ni Ni) is the only strand that is even close to well developed.

Even that story is full of things that have become clichés. Fang Hui is demure and virginal while Chen Xun is a star for the basketball team (in one particularly impossible-to-follow basketball match, Chen scores the decisive points with the last throw). Chen Xun is also a keen musician who writes the title song for Fang Hui (will China ever make a romantic movie about people who can’t sing?). Fang Hui ends up needing an abortion (as one Sina Weibo user pointed out, nowadays abortions have become clichés in mainland Chinese coming-of-age movies).

This movie makes a commendable attempt to show the lighter side of Chinese society. There are drinking games, street performances, and students deliberately flunking parts of their National College Entrance and Examination so they can go to the same college as the people they care about most. This contrasts nicely with most of the China stories that have received international news coverage in recent years, from Foxconn suicides to baby milk powder scandals.

Unfortunately, the stronger parts are weakened by the sloppiness of the storytelling. There are several fight sequences, all of which seem to have been edited by random select. The emotional immaturity of the characters also makes them less than likeable sometimes, getting into fights at the slightest provocation.
The characters would be more appealing if their memory were weak enough to keep them moving forward.