Our Times (2015) — Frankie Chen/Yu Shan Chen
What is it about nostalgic teenage love films that makes them so appealing even now?
Whether it is ‘Grease’, ’13 Going On 30' or those old Elvis Presley Hawaii flicks our grandparents used to love, the nostalgic teenage love theme is an infallible hit. That is, of course, when well explored. A shallow Netflix-last minute plot can be easily distinguished from others that, although similarly seductive, are in another level of ‘~feels~’. Good throwback teenage films bring up feelings of nostalgia the same way Disney or Hanna-Barbera still manage to do. In other words, they pull the right strings to acknowledge how much we’ve outgrown our old selves and at the same time make us wish we could go back and have a little taste of youth all over again.
‘Our Times’, directed by the Taiwanese TV-hit maker Frankie Chen, is one of these teen nostalgic features that spot their audience perfectly, as seen in the 90s hard-to-miss references spread throughout the scenes. A safe play for a director transitioning from the small screen to the big one, since this genre had already proved itself more than successful among Taiwan viewers. ‘You Are the Apple of My Eye’, made back in 2011, was its antecessor and happened to generate enough publicity to Chen’s feature, which was accused of plagiarism. It had a similar nostalgic and romantic plot, but so had thousand of other films. Both just happened to be made in Taiwan in a short period of time. As the director pointed out in one interview, ‘Our Times’ presented its own narrative surrounding its own particular characters, aesthetics and, although it could be compared to its 2011 precursor, couldn’t be accused of intentionally cribbing it. If worth noticing, the Korean 2004 film called ‘100 Days with Mr. Arrogant’ — part of the basis of what it is now known as Korean comedy genre — has a much similar plot and humoristic appeal to ‘Our Times’ than its Taiwanese comparison.
The film opens with Lin Cheng-hsin (Joe Chen), who is a white collar employee probably in her late 20s, trapped in a boring routine and badmouthed by her colleagues. Carried by a feeling of misery, she goes back to a time when a light kind of joy filled her surroundings: school years. Lin Cheng-hsin, now 17 years old and played by Vivian Sung, is a regular girl with friends, bad grades and a major crush on the popular guy, Ouyang Fei-Fan (Dino Lee), who doesn’t seem to know of her existence. But everything changes when Lin, after discovering a chain letter under her desk, desperately decides to pass it on to the three other people from school: the punk, Hsu Tai-yu (Darren Wang); the beauty queen, Tao Min-min (Dewi Chien); and the Math teacher. Confusion arises when Hsu Tai-yu gets hurt after reading it and vengefully starts seeking the person responsible for sending the letter. As he finds out about Lin Cheng-hsin, Hsu starts torturing his classmate into doing his chores and playing a fool of herself in front of everybody. So, as it always is, they get closer and, even though actually chasing after the two popular kids, Ouyang Fei-fan and Tao Min-min, they end up realizing how the feelings developed for each other are as a matter of fact much stronger than anything else they ever felt.
No spoiler intended, the plot counts on other artifices to enrich the feature and provides the spectator with a fun and loving well spent time in the theatre. The plus — the extra plus — goes to the casting, which was just pin pointed. Vivian Sung and Darren Wang had great chemistry, and Dino Lee and Dewi Chien were as plain as they should’ve been. Director Frankie Chen knew what she wanted to do and didn’t make the mistake of being pretentiously demanding of the material she had in hand. That by itself explains this film’s success.
