“When Youth Ends (And Nothing Begins)”
At 22, the world is supposed to make sense at last: diploma in hand, résumé in order, possibilities abound. The films in this series suggest the opposite. Moving between university dormitories, cramped apartments, and decadent dance floors, they follow young people who did everything “right” and still fail to find a place in the script they were promised. From Beijing in the 1980s (Summer Palace), to the post-graduation limbo of Kicking and Screaming, the enclosed fervor of Paris in May ’68 (The Dreamers), the precarious drift of twenty-somethings in Frances Ha, the anxious social choreography of The Last Days of Disco, and the intoxicating rise-and-fall momentum of Boogie Nights, the passage from university to adulthood appears less as achievement than as prolonged disorientation.
These are stories of unfinished romances, unsatisfying jobs, and parties that are already over yet refuse to end. Taken together, the series asks a simple but unsettling question: what does it mean to grow up in a moment when youth no longer ends, and adulthood never quite begins?
Schedule:
Monday: Kicking and Screaming (Baumbach, 1995)
Tuesday: Frances Ha (Baumbach, 2012)
Wednesday: The Dreamers (Bertolucci, 2003)
Thursday: The Last Days of Disco (Stillman, 1998)
Friday: Boogie Nights (Anderson, 1997)
Saturday: Summer Palace 颐和园 (Lou 娄烨, 2006)
—Mystery Double Feature with a recent film by Lou Ye
To be screened in the Film Appreciation Room in Library
on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (March 9-14) from 19h to 22h.
