135 min | NR | November 8, 2019 | Well Go USA
A quiet, bullied student preparing for China’s brutal college entrance exam crosses paths with a young street thug. He becomes the only person who protects her. Their alliance forms in the gap that adults and institutions refuse to fill.
Chen Nian is a top student in a Chinese provincial city counting down the days to the gaokao, the college entrance exam that decides her future. She is bullied at school after a classmate’s suicide, and the adults around her treat the violence as a distraction from test scores. Xiao Bei is a small-time street fighter with no family and no prospects. Better Days puts these two outsiders together and watches them try to survive a system that has already written them off. The film is about how a society that worships academic achievement abandons the children it grinds through the machine.
Zhou Dongyu plays Chen Nian as a girl who has learned to make herself small. She keeps her head down and her face blank, and Zhou lets the fear leak out through small physical tells. The way Chen Nian flinches at a hallway, the way she rehearses an answer before speaking. Jackson Yee plays Xiao Bei with a coiled wariness that softens only around her. He carries the bruises of a kid who expects every kindness to come with a price. The two actors build the central relationship through silence and proximity rather than declarations, and the restraint makes the bond believable.
Derek Tsang directs from a screenplay by Lam Wing-Sum, Li Yuan, and Xu Yimeng, adapted from Jiu Yuexi’s novel. Tsang shoots faces in extreme close-up, filling the frame with skin and eyes until the city itself disappears. The technique traps the audience inside Chen Nian’s claustrophobia and makes the few wide shots of crowded exam halls land as a shock of scale. The handheld camera stays tight on the two leads through their long nighttime walks, and the grain of the digital image gives the streets a raw, unglamorous texture. The film loses some of this discipline when the third act turns into a crime thriller and the plot mechanics start doing the work the performances had been doing.
Better Days is strongest when it stays small. The exam-pressure drama and the bullying are observed with specificity, and the indictment of the institutions lands because the film never lectures. The closing stretch strains credibility as it reaches for a resolution that ties the characters together too neatly. What stays is the central pairing and the precise portrait of two kids deciding to protect each other because no one else will. Tsang trusts his actors to carry that idea, and they do.