A scene from Ever Since We Love starring Fan Bingbing Photo: CFP

What is youth? If you ask the filmmakers of all those popular Chinese teen movies, they would give you hundreds of answers. It is the smell of hormones in the air, it is the sound of a quickening heartbeat when a boy sees the girl-next-door and it is the regret over mistakes you made or things you wished you had done.

Most importantly they would tell you, it is a kind of feeling that is shared among audiences nostalgic about their youth instead of that of a certain person or experience. This is the renewed teen movie genre that these Chinese filmmakers have created - full of crazy, dramatic feelings of love, hate and regret instead of a logical and persuasive story.      

A different point of view

Ever Since We Love, starring Han Geng and Fan Bingbing, just hit theaters over the weekend, generating 96 million yuan ($15 million) in five days, becoming the only survivor to withstand the pressure from Fast and Furious 7.

The film is an adaptation of novelist and poet Feng Tang's book of the same name and part of his larger Beijing trilogy. Feng, a former doctor of gynecology and obstetrics and later a successful businessman, developed a large female fan base with his sentimental writing style supported by his medical background.

The book tells the story of a medical school student and his relationship with three women: One was his first love, the second his college girlfriend and the third, who is also the lead female role in the story, a sexy and attractive woman he met at a hotel.

Director Li Yu is famous for art house films such as Dam Street (2005), Lost in Beijing (2007) and Buddha Mountain (2010). However, as time went on Li and Fang Li, the producer of almost all of Li's  well-known movies, decided to move on to artistic-styled commercial movies instead.

This decision led them to make Double Xposure in 2012, a suspense movie that generated over 100 million yuan in box-office revenue - a record-breaking result for the duo.

Li's films often focus on female protagonists and their complicated romantic relationships with one or several men. Although Ever Since We Love is a story told by a man, it retains many characteristics from Li's previous films. 

The biggest issue with Ever Since We Love, is the same as in all other teen movies and even most Chinese movies: It lacks a well structured storyline and basic logic when it comes to several plotlines. These teen movies are mostly the opposite of the industrialized scripts produced in Hollywood. Characters just suddenly fall in or out of love or suddenly become emotional for apparently no reason.

It shows a huge lack of creativity in terms of script development as many plots are purely driven by emotions. The director likes to employ music and slow motion to give power to these emotions and fill a film void of conflicts or incidents, but falls far short of his goal. 

Capitalizing on memory

Today's era is one in which everyone in the movie industry talks about Intellectual Property (IP).

One of the main reasons being that movies within an extremely popular IP don't really need to be good to make money. This is the same for Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey as it is for Tiny Times and other Chinese teen movies.

Fleet of Time generated 570 million yuan, So Young generated 700 million and My Old Classmate earned almost 460 million. Also coming in May is The Left Ear and You are My Sunshine, while later this year a number of films focusing on stories happening during high school and college will make their way to theaters. Almost all these teen movies are adaptations.

Many of the owners of these IPs are online writers. Their path began by posting stories on online forum to gather fans as well as attention from publishers. Thus, they needed to ensure their stories often contained cheesy stereotypes or clichés that would attract readers. Such features as these are even more exaggerated in the movies.

The discussion about why Chinese audiences are so into the youth genre has been around for a while. The first explanation was mainly a consideration of demographics. Audiences who were born in the 1980s and 1990s, especially women, have now reached an age when they are a crucial target market in China. Thus, films about school life are the perfect selling point that can capitalize on a generation's collective nostalgia.   

The good and bad

The common problem with these movie adaptations, according to Movie critic Mu Weier, is: "Just whose youth is this anyway?" In a review of Ever Since We Love published in the Beijing Youth Daily, Mu explained some of the ridiculous elements almost all Chinese teen movies seem to possess - actors in their 30s play high school students, boys get mad and fight for no reason while girls always cry and shameless and irresponsible actions are portrayed as sentimental and innocent moments.

Netizens joke that the subjects of Chinese teen movies seem to be limited to a certain few: abortion, gang fights, love triangles and the death of a supporting female character.

Although stereotypical plots may be a problem, it is still a big step in the right direction that such subjects can be tackled in China. In the past, the unwritten rule was that teenagers were not allowed to have romantic relationships and if they did the ending shouldn't be a happy one. For college students, getting married and having children was something left for after graduation. In those days, a film like Juno would have never passed muster here.

While not all teen movies have been money-makers, enough of them have succeeded that studios still see them as lucrative investments. Although no single genre can guarantee box office returns, many industry insiders predict that this trend towards teen movies will continue long after 2015.