A Little Red Flower

Wei Yifan is seventeen and being treated for cancer. The operation went well, but there is a risk of recurrence and he lives conscious of it. His family tries to make everything look normal. In the hospital he meets a girl called Ma Xiaoyuan whose file is similar and whose attitude is completely different. She pushes him to leave the hospital, to make plans, and to try not being ill for a day. Han Yan directs. Yi Yangqianxi plays Yifan and Liu Haocun plays Xiaoyuan. The family, not the patient, is at the centre. The strongest scenes are the ones where the mother and father talk between themselves out of the boy's hearing, about money, the length of treatment and the arithmetic of the future. The narrative does not present illness as a lesson. Yifan's bad temper, selfishness and anger are not softened, and the film does not turn him into a likeable victim. It opened in China at new year in 2021 and took very large money, among the most watched domestic productions of the period. Its weaknesses are length and music. The film keeps raising the emotional pitch in the last half hour and several scenes run on too long. Yi Yangqianxi was first known in China from a popular music group, and this part is among the roles that established him as an actor. Who it is for: viewers who like Chinese youth drama and family stories built around illness. Who it is not for: the emotional manipulation is plain, the ending is too long, and the template is familiar.