It
was a big hit in China, but its theatrical release was mysteriously delayed by
the increasingly censorious and censoring state film authorities. Outsiders
were baffled what led the Party to also pull the film from international film
festivals, but we might hazard a few guesses. For one thing, the punky Xiao Bei
is keenly aware of the surveillance cameras posted throughout the city. Perhaps
more fundamentally, the Chongqing police always side with the privileged, no
matter how viciously their entitled teenagers bully the children of the less
fortunate. The students of Hong Kong can definitely relate. However, one smart
but socially disadvantaged girl finds an unlikely guardian angel in HK
filmmaker Derek Tsang’s Chinese-production, Better Days, which releases
today on BluRay.
China’s
“gaokao” national university entrance exam is fast approaching, but one of Chen
Nian’s classmates will not be sitting for it after all, because she just killed
herself. It wasn’t the academic pressure. It was the bullying from Wei Lai and
her clique. Unfortunately, Chen becomes their next target, after she covers the
face of their dead classmate, to prevent even more social media posts.
Chen
Nian is one of the smartest in the class, but she rarely sees her mother, who
is constantly on the run, from creditors and unhappy customers for her dodgy,
distribution-marketed cosmetics. She really has no support system, until Xiao
takes it upon himself to protect her (after she tries to interrupt a group of
thugs who jumped him). He initially intimidates Wei, but when she returns to
her old ways, he escalates the violence—perhaps fatally. Or not. Just what happened
on that fatal night is a secret screenwriters Lam Wing Sum, Li Yuan, & Xu
Yimeng will tease out over the third act.
Better
Days is
in fact a film brimming with social conscience and moral outrage. None of its
bite is softened by the ludicrous tacked-on epilogue, wherein lead actor
Jackson Yee reads off a laundry list of recent government initiatives to fight bullying.
That many programs proves the government really doesn’t care, because if
Xi-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed Jinping really wanted to stop bullying, he would just
tell his underlings to have it stopped.
Regardless,
Zhou Dongyu is quite extraordinary as Chen Nian. It is a tough performance that
is quiet, but deeply intense. She never makes cheap plays for viewer sympathy,
but the totality of her character’s pain, alienation, and resentment is just
crushing. Yee is also quite a brooding presence as Xiao Bei, but his “bad boy”
turn is far more familiar and conventional. Zhou commands the film, but Yin
Feng adds further layers of moral ambiguity as Zheng Yi, a formerly bullied
police detective, who probably fails Chen Nian worse than anyone.
This
is a scrupulously realistic film, but cinematographer Yu Jing-pin and composer
Varqa Buehrer give it the look and texture of vintage 80s and 90s HK art
cinema. It is also easy to understand why Xi’s apparatchiks would consider its
brutal honesty to be bad for business. Very highly recommended, Better Days is
out today (5/5) on BluRay.
