Better Days, 2019
High school student Chen Nian (Dongyu Zhou) is relentlessly bullied by high school mean girl Wei Lai (Ye Zhou), something that only worsens after another student who was a target of Wei Lai commits suicide. As the bullying reaches the level of outright physical assault, Chen Nian ends up in a precarious arrangement with street gangster Xiao Bei (Jackson Yee), a young man about her age who agrees to protect her as she prepares for the national exams that will determine her future.
Something that I think this movie is capturing really well is the way that so much of the harm of bullying comes not just from the bullies themselves, but from the structures in place around bullies and their victims.
What we see in this film is really extreme in terms of what happens to the main character. Honestly, that level of pre-meditated, sadistic physical and psychological assault is not something I've ever (thank goodness) really encountered either as a person or as a teacher. I can't comment on the realism of it, because I'm sure that there are places (in the US and abroad) where that level of abuse is allowed to exist.
For sure, though, the kind of social structural failure is a thing. Chen Nian doesn't seem to have enemies outside of that mean clique, but neither does she have close friends. When it comes to what is happening to her, most of her peers choose to look the other way. The teachers say that they want to help, but their version of help doesn't take into account the life that she has to live outside of the school grounds.
There's a book about different education systems called
The Smartest Kids in the World that examines the educational systems and classroom cultures in some of the highest ranking countries in international assessments, focused on South Korea, Finland, and Poland. The South Korean system is closest to what we see here: students face tremendous pressure to be successful on national exams. Many students begin their day early in the morning, then go to tutoring sessions after school, sometimes only getting home at 11pm. Careers and futures hinge on test results, and while many students are successful under this system, it also leads to some students breaking under the pressure and turning to self-harm or suicide.
In terms of the more specific plot of the film, I think it's interesting to see a film where, in a positive way, a male character sees a female character as a potential breadwinner. I think that Xiao Bei does have genuine feelings for Chen Nian, but part of her appeal is that if she makes it through her exams and university career, she has the potential to earn a lot of money. I think that it adds an interesting element to his protection of her, coming from both an emotional and a pragmatic place. Between his toughness and street smarts and her book smarts, they could make a go of things together.
I also want to mention a scene that I really liked, which is the scene where Xiao Bei and his friends are brought into the police station for a lineup. Fed up with having been brought in, they boisterously deliver their assigned line in silly voices and with distorted facial expressions. And then . . . we pan to behind the glass, where a woman who has been raped is watching this whole performance in shock while a woman (her mother, her lawyer, a police officer) quietly comforts her. Someone who seems to have a heart of gold in one moment has the potential to do a lot of harm in another. The whole film is marked by the danger of lacking empathy, and this little sequence really stood out to me. I think that it also goes a ways to preventing Xiao Bei from being too unrealistically nice. He's young, and he doesn't always think about the harm that his actions (even those done in jest and maybe without specific malice) could do.
I was very torn on the last act, in which the drama and suspense of the bullying subplot takes a sharp turn into a police investigation that threatens to ensnare both Chen Nian and Xiao Bei. For a while, the film turns more into a question of logistics rather than emotion, and during some prolonged sequences in a police station the movie loses a bit of its steam.
But in the end I was okay with how it all turned out, because I thought that the film managed to steer itself out of crime/thriller territory and back to the question of who deserves to have a future and why. In particular, I thought that the question of how someone can be put back on the path to a productive and happy future--even after a serious misstep--was a good one. How can the structures (and the adults) around children and young people keep them on that path and redirect them when needed? I found myself a bit surprised even at how positively I responded to the dialogue that begins and ends the film: "This was our playground. This used to be our playground. This is our playground."
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