I have heard of this Taiwanese film during its release last year, but I didn’t have that intention or desire to watch it in the beginning. After a while, there are ample of other movies back in the end of last year waiting for me to watch, until to the point that I almost forget the existence of this Mandarin-language film. Then, last month, I discovered that ‘You Are The Apple Of My Eye’ gets overwhelming positive response. ‘I Love Hong Kong 2012’ reminded me of this film, when the former had a scene making a funny spoof out from this film. Hence, I finally spent around 2 hours for this film just now.
那些年，我們一起追的女孩 (You Are The Apple Of My Eye): It is a 2011 Taiwanese romance film which is based on a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Taiwanese author, Giddens Ko who also directed this film. The love story revolves on a prankster and mischievous student who eventually put effort on study and finally became a writer after encouragement and help from a beautiful girl sitting behind him in the classroom who is very popular among boys in the class. Both of them then started to develop love, but until the end the love does not reach a perfect ending, but their past emotions have transformed into a profound friendship and ever calmness in their hearts. A relationship that never did happened but remained close in their hearts. Sweet. I like how the story flows, from the high school (longest) to university and the aftermath which every different phases on the relationship between the two main characters are delivered very brilliantly. The story development, with some narration from the male lead, is very good.
The story is simple, the script is simple (eventhough I still had some hard time trying to understand all the words because I do not know Mandarin well), but the effect delivered from this film is very clear and impacting. Simple yet meaningful. Less is more! The film reminds us on our memories we had when we are in high school (secondary school) and even in university level, further influencing if we had a girl in the past that we have tried to date before (but for me, no…) Ahh, back to the film. I can pretty much agree with Serena Lim, a reviewer from ‘Today’ Singapore’s newspaper, that this film is a ‘gentle tale of a teenage romance’. Eventhough I have not had that during my teenage years, but I can still feel the strength of this film on delivering that particular theme to the audiences.
The performance by the casts, which centred on that particular group of the 5 boys and 2 girls, is good, especially the two main casts, Ko Chen-tung and Michelle Chen. In the recent Golden Horse Awards, the Best Newcomer award goes to Ko Chen-tung who is the male lead in this film, and all I can say is that he truly deserves it. ‘You Are The Apple Of My Eye’ is a film centred in love that reminded us that it would be still good despite with not a very perfect ending, alongside with some other supporting themes present like humour, social life of teenagers, and friendship.
I particularly like the theme song for this film too, entitled ‘Those Years’. I have read the English translation for that song, and I felt touched from the lyric and the melody itself. That is a very good love song, which gets almost 20 million views from YouTube as of now, breaking every notable viewership record set by a Chinese video on Youtube. For this film alone, I would give quite a high rating; 8.3 out of 10. The film performed very well in Singapore, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan too. This simple and nostalgic film certainly captures our deep emotion and provokes memories of our past in those years.
——This movie is the first Taiwanese film released last year that I have watched, and also the 60th films overall released in year 2011 that I have watched. —–
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