‘Better Days’: Film Review

‘Better Days’: Film Review

"This was our park. This has been our park. Does anybody know the difference between was and was ?" A grownup Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu) quizzes her pupils, who can not really answer. It is a distinction many native English speakers may discover difficult to pronounce, except to state the astonishingly poetic solution Chen Nian provides feels appropriate: was "carries with it a feeling of loss."

The young English teacher seems wistful as she says that, but in Derek Kwok Cheung Tsang's grasping, superbly performed melodrama -- a profoundly moving if sometimes overwrought exposé of bullying from the mathematically aggressive academic pressure cooker of a Chinese high school -- it is difficult to imagine that she could be nostalgic for her school days. Following this short flash ahead, we are plunged back into the past with her, then starting the afternoon a bullied classmate jumps to her departure at the building's enormous courtyard, and Chen Nian's little act of kindness covering the entire body marks her out because the bullies' second target.

Chen Nian is one of the very best students in her year despite coming out of an undercover, debt-ridden history, since the latchkey daughter of a mother forced to sell counterfeit products to make ends meet. She's merely a few months off from Gaokao, the two-day examination that will explain her future prospects:"Score 600! Get in the college of your decision!" Goes the chant since the children run round the sports area. Indoors, pupils sit cramming amid chin-high heaps of books and papers; sometimes they build into neat lines and lines not a pledge of allegiance or a college motto, however a"vow" to not disappoint teachers or parents.

The authorities arrive at the school to look into the suicide. However, the younger detective Zheng (Yin Fang) requires an interest -- particularly from the pulled Chen Nian after she's bothered by her own conscience for not intervening in the deceased girl's manuscript, reports the gang accountable, led by fairly, cosseted classmate Wei Lai (Zhou Ye). However, Zheng's good goals achieve small, and once the government let down her one too many occasions, Chen Nian rather turns to petty criminal Xiao Bei (pop-star-turned-actor Jackson Yee) for protection against frequent assaults. Unexpectedly, the movie begins to grow into a tender love story, punctuated with short but viscerally disturbing scenes of physical and psychological peer-group abuse, through which people who don't actively participate only stay quiet, averting their eyes.

But at nighttime time, as Chen Nian and Xiao Bei's romance blooms like a bruise, so too does the cinematography: Colours become punchier, light more stylized, casting this Chinese Romeo and Juliet at a night glow of illegal glamor.

There are times when this genre-inflected narrative of star-crossed love gets so powerful it threatens to undermine the movie's social realist qualifications, and also the very considerable thing it's producing about the unchecked (in actuality, systemically encouraged) ruthlessly Darwinian social sequence of Chinese education. But nevertheless archetypal the characters act -- sometimes it seems just like Xiao Bei is your bad-boy fighter and Chen Nian is your good-girl hope-for-redemption out of a traditional film noir -- the electrifyingly real performances, notably by a riveting, guttingly empathetic Zhou, convince us of this psychological truth of the very schematic of spins.

Therefore, despite having an underdeveloped subplot about a serial rapist, the unnecessary accent of Varqa Buehrer's sentimental scoring plus a few slightly overworked chronology-jumbling so as to earn the pacing a little more thrillerish, the more heightened dramatic register works well overall, enjoying merry havoc with all the heartstrings and construction to a genuinely moving spectacle of mutual repudiation and cross-wired self-sacrifice in adjoining authorities interrogation rooms.

Was pulled away from competition at the Berlin Film Festival, it was subsequently pushed back by its initial Chinese launch date -- a movement broadly thought to be linked to the government' increased skittishness across the 70-year anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. But since then, similar to its springy heroine, it's triumphed over adversity, currently grossing over $217 million in China (where it started Oct. 25, two weeks prior to a small U.S. launch ). Maybe we can expect that for equally sensitive, fashionable and affecting explorations of modern Chinese culture, the joyful ending that Tsang's exceptionally deserving movie appreciated, does indeed signify much better days ahead.