Art College 1994

Art College 1994 is unassumingly sweet because it’s about young people and their eternal quest for freedom and self-expression, mostly inside their own navels.

There’s a sense that this gently meandering, sketchbook-like work is aware of its own cinematic precedents. It certainly seems to suffer from an anxiety of influence as it tries to carve out a space for itself somewhere in the region of Eric Rohmer wistful romances, Richard Linklater ensemble stories, and Sixth Generation semi-underground Chinese filmmakers like Jia Zhangke.

The precise contrast of stasis and flux, of the sublime and the quotidian, of simple personal dreams swallowed up by massive national ambitions, characterizes Liu Jian’s latest.

In re-creating life out of life, Liu is quite successful; whether he makes it into drama is another question. Like its characters, Art College 1994 gives the impression of having just too much time on its hands.

It evokes a specific time and a place so vividly that you can almost taste the stale cigarette smoke and cheap beer. But while the picture affectionately skewers the youthful pretensions of the aspiring artists, it also allows the students an overly generous space in which to pontificate and navel-gaze.