Better Days

The flood of emotions together with the cinematic originality and agonisingly gripping themes of young love, adolescence and bullying give me the impression that I find myself taken back nearly two decades. At that time, Asian cinema brought out breathtaking films that provided a spectacle many times more intense, original and progressive in comparison with Western productions. For a long time, however, I had not felt such excitement and enthusiasm from Asian films, either because of my own jadedness or because productions from the Far East had become mired in mundanity and no impressive new talent had emerged that would disrupt the monopoly of established names and their expected standards (of course Parasite, for example, is a work of pure genius, but one doesn’t expect anything else from Pong). Better Days evokes the same enthusiasm and engulfs the viewer in an absolute fountain of emotions like Go by Isa Jukisada and All About Lily Chou-Chou by Shunji Iwai, with which it shares, in addition to the above-mentioned themes, boundless empathy for its characters, pop-formal energy and captivating narration. It is not specifically subject to chronology, but is governed by emotional and dramatic dramaturgy. The film conceals certain information from viewers, but simply only fragile moments from the relationship between the central couple and releases that information only when it has the appropriate emotional impact. Thanks to that, Better Days continuously adds new layers to its characters while bringing elements of a thriller into the formula of a high-school drama and teen romance. ________ The utterly agitprop conclusion and the exceedingly rosy depiction of the police, which make the necessity of appeasing the Chinese censors conspicuously apparent, are drawbacks. On the other hand, however, these aspects do not erase all of the good and emotional tension of the preceding two hours. ________ Derek Tsang Kwok-Cheung grew up in a family of Chinese migrants in Hong Kong, established himself as a character actor and now, with the aid of leading Hong Kong filmmakers in the role of producers, creates great co-productions that impress critics and, mainly, viewers in China and Hong Kong. Such success straddling the border between those two diametrically different markets and audiences is very rare. Tsang thus not only confirms his status as a major emerging talent, but together with, for example, Chinese director Bai Xue, whose social drama The Crossing become a hit in Hong Kong, also fills this long-time fan cinema from that part of the world with hope for the future. (11.01.2021)