Better Days (2019)

Better Days arrives with the weight of a national conversation about school bullying and the college entrance examination, and it carries that weight with a straight back. Derek Tsang's film follows Chen Nian, a girl whose classmate's suicide turns her into the next target, and Xiao Bei, a street thug who becomes her self-appointed bodyguard. The performances are raw, the Chongqing locations are damp and unkind, and the film's central relationship has a desperate tenderness that keeps the melodrama from tipping into soap. It is a serious work about institutional failure and adolescent cruelty, and it earns its grimness.

The film's social consciousness is of a specific and limited vintage. Its critique of a system that leaves bullied children to fend for themselves has a faint gendered edge, since the camera never flinches from the particular humiliations visited upon Chen Nian, but the story does not organize itself around a feminist argument. The cast is Chinese because the film is Chinese, not because a casting directive demanded it. There is no racial thesis, no environmental sermon, no class-warfare subplot, and no attempt to retrofit the narrative with contemporary identity markers. The shaved heads are a gesture of solidarity and shared trauma, not a body-acceptance manifesto.

The closing sequence, however, drops the film's careful restraint and hands the audience a policy presentation. Screens list anti-bullying measures and stricter punishments, followed by a plea for collective responsibility toward the young. This is lecture energy of a mild but unmistakable sort, the cinematic equivalent of a public service announcement appended to a tragedy. Better Days remains a strong and sobering drama, but it ends by telling us exactly what to think, which is a shame for a film that had already shown us.