Online review: The youth subculture and identities in “The Way We Dance”《狂舞派》

“The Way We Dance” is a rare local film in 2013 which emphasizes on the dreams of the youth. The film is about a hip hop girl – Fa (Cherry Ngan) who is obsessed with dancing and joins the dancing group – BombA in university. She is going to challenge the top dancing team - Rooftoppers with her teammates and favourite leader – Dave (LokMan Yeung). However, her rival in love – Rebecca (Janice Fan) teases about her new dancing poses as like as crabs. Therefore, Fa decides to leave her dancing group and join the Tai Chi club by chance. The Tai Chi practice inspired Fa in creating new dancing steps. She decides to go back to BombA again. Unfortunately, Fa's leg is hurt in accident and she thinks her dream is disillusioned. Luckily, the leader of Rooftoppers helps Fa to step on the stage again.

The reason I chose to analyze this film is that “The Way We Dance” is something different with the mainstream local films nowadays. Hong Kong like producing films with the theme of KungFu, comedy and crime. There is no such kind of film type about the youth dreams so it brings a feeling of freshness to me and attracts me to watch the movie.

In “The Way We Dance”, it creates a youth subculture of chasing their dancing dreams in university life. It is not similar with the mainstream university students do in Hong Kong. The university students in Hong Kong are under great pressure with their parents' expectations, peer influence and society issues. Therefore, it is hard for Hong Kong students to chase what they want. As the youth are under great protection from parents in Hong Kong nowadays, the youth start to lose their directions of the future and follow the ways which the adults guide. The teenagers depend too much on their parents and hardly recognize their identities nowadays. In the film, one of dialogs of Fa is very impressive to me. When her leg is hurt and she is very disappointed, so she said that whatever she do and wherever she goes, she thinks of dancing. She cannot recognize who she is while she cannot dance anymore. From above, we can see the youth identify themselves with their dreams in life of the film.

Besides, the language use of the film can also represents the youth identities nowadays. For example, there are many foul and vulgar words in the film dialogs such as the Chinese words “柒”, “頂”, “低能” and etc. These Chinese words can represent the local youth culture in their unique communication way. Moreover, one of the scenes shows that Rebecca becomes pseudo model through dressing up as the character of animation in a competition. This shows a common trend of the youngsters' images in Hong Kong nowadays as some teenagers try to earn money by being pseudo model. They usually have negative images as same as Rebecca in the film.

Finally, in this youth film, I want to share a special scene which is about our youth collective memory. In the last performance scene of BombA, Fa uses her fingers to dance with the effects of light and shadow. I think it is a kind of “toy” to most of teenagers since they were young. This film is really “new” to Hong Kong and leads the film industry to a new successful page.

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By Yeung Ching Yu (10509854/21238696)