Better Days
2019 · Derek Tsang Kwok-Cheung
A bullied teenage girl forms an unlikely friendship with a mysterious young man who protects her from her assailants, while she copes with the pressures of her final examinations.
dir. Derek Tsang Kwok-Cheung · 2019
A bullied schoolgirl in the crucible of China's gaokao — the college entrance exam that decides everything — finds her only protection in a street kid the system has already discarded. Derek Tsang Kwok-Cheung, son of Hong Kong stalwart Eric Tsang, shoots their alliance in bruising close-up: faces filling the frame, handheld cameras pressing so near that the film becomes a study of skin, shame, and watchfulness. Zhou Dongyu, tiny and ferocious, plays against pop idol Jackson Yee in his first dramatic role, and their wary tenderness carries a film that is part social exposé, part crime melodrama, part doomed romance. Its path to screens was as fraught as its subject — yanked from the Berlinale, delayed by censors, then a colossal domestic hit that forced a national conversation about school bullying. It went on to an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature, the rare mainland-set drama to move festival juries, censors' critics, and multiplex audiences alike.
Lines of influence
- Soul Mate (2016) — Tsang's own prior two-hander pins the camera in extreme intimate proximity to a female dyad (again anchored by Zhou Dongyu), rehearsing the skin-close handheld shot/reverse-shot grammar Better Days scales up to a boy-girl pair.
- Under the Hawthorn Tree (2010) — Zhang cast the unknown Zhou Dongyu as a fragile first-love innocent shot in soft available-light close-ups — the exact vulnerable-ingenue persona Better Days both inherits and roughens.
- Suzhou River (2000) — Lou's restless subjective handheld that presses the lens into a doomed urban couple's faces — and his career-long tangle with mainland censors — is the Sixth-Generation template Better Days works within.
- Rosetta (1999) — The Dardennes' unbroken handheld that trails a precarious teenager from behind the nape and holds on her face in tight social-realist proximity is the physical-camera method Yu Jing-pin adapts to shadow Chen Nian.
- In the Mood for Love (2000) — Doyle's cramped, telephoto intimate framing that isolates two bodies in slivers of foreground clutter gives Better Days its Hong Kong grammar of yearning held at suffocating close range.
- The Devotion of Suspect X (2008) — Higashino's plot engine — a devoted protector who conceals a body and engineers a false confession to take the fall for a beloved — is the crime-melodrama machinery driving Better Days' second half.
- Confessions (2010) — Nakashima's cold, stylized anatomy of classroom cruelty and revenge established the East Asian school-bullying-as-thriller register that Better Days converts into social-problem drama.
- Beijing Bicycle (2001) — Wang's Sixth-Generation portrait of a working-class adolescent abandoned by every institution supplies the theme of social abandonment and the grimy realist texture beneath the melodrama.
- Infernal Affairs (2002) — The Eric Tsang–starring HK crime melodrama of doubled identities, moral loyalty and self-sacrifice is the industrial lineage (through Derek's father) that Better Days inherits as pedigree and tone.
- You Are the Apple of My Eye (2011) — Ko codified the Chinese-language campus template of exam-pressure, nostalgic voiceover and an idealized classmate crush — the youth-film scaffolding Better Days darkens with gaokao dread.
- So Young (2013) — A defining mainland campus-nostalgia hit that, like Better Days, mines the collective anxiety of Chinese student life for melodrama, sharing the youth-cinema commercial wave.
- Us and Them (2018) — A contemporaneous mainland doomed-romance weepie built on a two-hander of precarious young lovers, extending the same tear-jerking youth-melodrama market Better Days topped a year later.
- Cry Me a Sad River (2018) — A near-simultaneous Chinese youth film that centers school bullying and a girl's social ostracism, sharing Better Days' subject matter and its problem-drama framing.
- A Silent Voice (2016) — Yamada's bullying drama uses tight intimate framing (feet, averted faces, crossed-out expressions) to render victim shame — a parallel formal approach to interiorizing classroom violence.
- Sister (2021) — Post–Better Days, it rides the same wave of intimate handheld social-problem drama anchored by Zhang Zifeng as an against-type young lead carrying institutional-abandonment stakes.
- Better Days–era idol casting (Jackson Yee) (2019) — Tsang's stripping of TFBoys idol Jackson Yee into a bruised, shaven-headed street kid modeled the against-type serious-role pivot mainland idols (Yi Yang Qianxi's later films) now use to shed pop personas.