Bet­ter Days

“This used to be our play­ground.” An adult Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu) is explain­ing to her stu­dents the dif­fer­ence between the past and present tens­es in Eng­lish gram­mar. Bet­ter Days opens with this alle­gor­i­cal flash-for­ward, elic­it­ing an intan­gi­ble sense of nos­tal­gia and loss to draw us into the har­row­ing sto­ry of two trou­bled teenagers falling in love.

Their ​“play­ground” is bound by the perime­ters of a high school com­plex sit­u­at­ed with­in a con­crete jun­gle, where togeth­er they rise up against a cru­el world of sys­temic sup­pres­sion, omnipresent vio­lence and col­lec­tive apathy.

Adapt­ed from author Jiu Yue Xi’s web fic­tion of the same Man­darin title, this is Hong Kong direc­tor Derek Tsang Kwok-cheung’s inci­sive­ly earnest dis­sec­tion of main­land China’s high-pres­sure exam-ori­ent­ed edu­ca­tion sys­tem, from which ram­pant school bul­ly­ing derives.

The film’s non-lin­ear, mul­ti-faceted nar­ra­tive cen­tres around the lead-up to Gaokao, China’s annu­al Nation­al Col­lege Entrance Exam­i­na­tion. It starts with a high school senior’s sui­cide due to bul­ly­ing led by her class­mate Wei Lai (Zhou Ye), who in turn tar­gets Chen Nian as her next vic­tim. Mean­while, Chen Nian helps small-time gang­ster Xiao-bei (Jack­son Yee) get out of a street fight. To return the favour, Xiao-bei starts pro­tect­ing Chen Nian from Wei Lai’s abuses.

From here Tsang exper­i­ments with a genre-bend­ing approach, trans­form­ing this sen­si­tive sub­ject mat­ter into a teenage melo­dra­ma that in turn becomes a neo-noir crime thriller in which Chen Nian and Xiao-bei are dragged into a mur­der mys­tery; their fates becom­ing pro­gres­sive­ly entan­gled as their bond deepens.

Tsang show­cas­es his mas­tery of film lan­guage: close-ups high­light Zhou and Yee’s mea­sured per­for­mances; hand­held track­ing shots fol­low Chen Nian and Xiao-bei into the city’s under­bel­ly; over­ton­al mon­tages height­en the sense of weari­ness felt by a young gen­er­a­tion sur­viv­ing on false hopes; and claus­tro­pho­bic fram­ing accen­tu­ates the stress of cram­ming for Gaokao and the peer pres­sure of par­tic­i­pat­ing in bullying.

At times Tsang bites off more than he can chew, mak­ing unnec­es­sary attempts to touch on off-top­ic soci­etal issues. This results in a lack of space in which to ful­ly devel­op the cen­tral narrative’s sup­port­ing char­ac­ters, espe­cial­ly school bul­ly Wei Lai. Despite this, Tsang’s exe­cu­tion large­ly match­es his ambition.

Con­tem­po­rary Chi­nese-lan­guage films like Bet­ter Days are hard to come by. Despite being pulled from the Berlin Film Fes­ti­val and pushed back from its ini­tial release date, this film has sur­vived cen­sor­ship and become a domes­tic box office hit. Ben­e­fit­ing from the co-pro­duc­tion between Hong Kong and main­land Chi­na, it’s a prime exam­ple of how cin­e­ma can facil­i­tate mean­ing­ful sociopo­lit­i­cal exchange between the two regions.