Film Name: 少年的你 / Better Days
A few months ago, I had little interest in Better Days – because of the lead actor, because of the subject matter, I had subconsciously labeled the film in some way that it wouldn’t be in my viewing sequence, and there’s such a thing as “bias,” and everyone has it. Everyone has them.
However, with the many positive reviews that flowed in prior to its release (at the end of June), and its eventual fate of being temporarily withdrawn from theaters, I wanted to see it instead. ……
This weekend, the temporarily-scheduled Better Days “dropped” into theaters, and received good box office results and good word-of-mouth, and after seeing it, I can finally breathe a sigh of relief and say “it lived up to its expectations”.
As a “pan-youth” movie, the movie I would like to compare this movie with is last year’s “Einstein & Einstein”, but in the current public opinion environment, I agree that “Better Days” is the equivalent of last year’s “Dying to Survive”: while the movie itself is well made, the movie’s victory at the box office and word-of-mouth is ultimately due to the victory of “realistic themes”. While the movie itself is a solid piece of filmmaking, the movie’s triumph at the box office and in word-of-mouth is ultimately due to the triumph of its “realistic subject matter”.
The current market is so lacking in popular movies that show “pain” that they are spoiled by audiences every time they appear.
[Spoilers ahead].
It’s a waste of good ingredients if the chef at the helm can’t cook them – and thankfully, Better Days has a pretty good team of people working together from the front of the house to the back of the house to make this “brutal youth” story work.
The most intuitive thing that has been trending the most is the “acting” of the lead actors and actresses.
I don’t like to pay much attention to actors, and I don’t have a systematic understanding of someone’s growth trajectory, but as far as the performance in this movie is concerned, Zhou Dongyu is just too capable of “crying”.
If we say it is a thousand different kinds of crying, we may still be able to boo “with tears to cheat sympathy”, but Chen Nian in the film really contributes to a variety of fancy crying method.
There is a desire to speak and then stop sympathy, there is panic and anxiety of the panic, there is depression and indignation of humiliation, there is a weak and powerless shame, there is a pity for the same disease, there is a blood surge of indignation, there is a dying blank …… can play the crying scene does not mean that everything, but has long been over the age of Zhou Dongyu, can combine their own characteristics and advantages of the Chen Nian deduction to the This part, really worth praising.
As for YiYeQianXi, put and ZhouDongYu the same level line is still slightly less than, but taking into account his “flow of students” of the origin and the attitude of hard transformation, not yet 20 years old, he is also enough to a “future can be expected”.
Actors do not fall off the chain, the team behind the scenes will still shoot, the foundation of the film, no matter how it will not be bad.
The two things that impressed me most about Better Days are the “restrained pace” and the “close-ups”: the former is manifested in the fact that there is not much violence depicted visually throughout the movie, and that it does not blindly pursue sensory stimulation in line with the theme; the latter is manifested in the fact that the movie is particularly fond of giving close-ups of people in poses, or in bokeh or side shots, etc. to emphasize the characters. The latter is manifested in the fact that the movie is particularly fond of giving people concave shapes to shoot close-ups, or false focus or side shots to emphasize their roles.
The most typical scene to be counted in the last Chen Nian and Liu Xiaobei in the detention center looking through the window, the two people simply have no lines, is to look at each other’s gradual expression to release their emotions, the window (screen) you have me, I have you …… and the whole film many explosive, infectious drama, are in a similar context to complete.
The biggest advantage of Better Days is that it has captured the pain of “school bullying” and the realization of “adolescence and adulthood”, which belongs to another “realistic subject matter” victory. This is another triumph of “realistic themes”, so I still want to talk about my feelings in this regard.
Many people’s understanding of “school bullying” may still be stuck on the level of “physical/verbal abuse and insults” such as slapping, cutting hair, punching, kicking, and greeting people’s whole families, etc. Although the movie adopts and displays this kind of bullying which is the easiest to recognize and disseminate, in fact, there are more and more “hidden” ways of bullying. Although the movie takes and shows the most recognizable and spreadable forms of bullying, in fact, there are more “hidden” forms of bullying everywhere, including socially, online, and so on.
Seeing someone pouring ink on Chen Nian’s chair but remaining silent, posting about Chen Nian’s mother’s dilemma in an online chat group, teasing Chen Nian about how she also wants to buy a face mask, etc., whether they are direct victimizers, indirect facilitators, or out-of-the-loop bystanders, they are all part of the bullying to a greater or lesser extent.
For example, if a classmate gives you a nickname you don’t like, and he yells it out, and you’re upset, and someone next to you laughs, and your friend doesn’t laugh but doesn’t squeak, this constitutes a very mild and typical case of verbal bullying – what’s even more frightening is that this can become a habit, and teenagers, who are generally lacking in empathy, often can’t tell the difference between a “joke” and a “joke”! “joking” and ‘bullying’.
Just as the old police officer Yang told his junior Zheng Yi, “A group of boys killed someone without even realizing that it would kill them”, the public’s blurred perception of the boundaries of bullying is the beginning of a tragedy.
Therefore, some people feel that “the causes and consequences of bullying are not adequately explained” in Better Days, but I think it is not necessary.
“Bullying is not something that can be taken for granted, sometimes it’s easier than “little souls picking on honest people”, maybe it’s just because you don’t fit in well enough to be bullied. The movie …… has already given enough context for this, and even without a formal explanation, the audience can guess the general context.
Moreover, Better Days is not sloppy in the corresponding details, the number one bully Wei Lai scene is not really too much, but through these contents, it is enough to outline the image of a girl with a twisted heart, colorful and weak, she is the aggressor of the bullying incident, but also the victim of her family of origin – after barely reaching a After barely reaching a “reconciliation”, if Wei Lai hadn’t used her own “value system” to make up with Chen Nian and further stimulate the other party, there wouldn’t have been the subsequent accident.
Looking at Wei Lai was dropped dead, I do not have the slightest sense of revenge and hatred, only “tragedy after tragedy” lament.
At the same time, the design of Chen Nian’s relationship with Xiao Bei is very chic, smart and reasonable.
First of all, they are all weak “bullies”. Despite the different living environment, but their situation is similar, the same lack of love, the same humble and powerless, in front of the more powerful “majority”, the same slaughter, their chance encounter, acquaintance, is based on licking each other’s wounds of the same life pity.
Secondly, they can both play the role of each other’s “protector”. Xiao Bei can use his uninhibited punk status to deter the bad students from bullying Chen Nian, while Chen Nian can use her excellent grades to give them a hope of “going out”, hence the phrase “you protect the world, I protect you”, That’s why there are such golden phrases as “You protect the world, I protect you” and “I’m not a loser until you win”.
At the end of the day, they are still the “survivors” who are warming up to each other, and there is no need to explain this point.
That said, a more insidious and poignant issue comes to the fore: the deception, compromise, mistrust and transition between teenagers and adults.
On this point, I think Better Days gives a relatively pessimistic answer.
There is no ideal (let alone exemplary) pair of parents in the movie: both Chen Nian and Xiao Bei’s fathers are completely absent, and the mothers are each flawed in their own way; the strapped Xiao Bei’s mother is willing to buy meat buns for her son, and Chen Nian’s mother, Zhou Lei, always shows her care for her daughter in her own way – of course they love their children, but it’s just that their personal lives have long been fragmented and broken. Of course they love their children, it’s just that their personal lives have long been in tatters and what they give their children is more of a burden and pain.
As for the other parents who appear briefly in the movie, they also have problems with their children, such as spoiling, scolding and neglecting them, which is true to the saying that “unfortunate people have their own misfortunes”.
There is another lie in the movie that almost all of our generation have heard before, that is, “After the college entrance exam, you will be free”.
Before the entrance exam, it was a golden advice to numb you and me to forget our fatigue for a short time; after the entrance exam, especially when we left the campus and started to walk into the society, we realized that it was just a shot of anesthesia with a shelf-life.
Better Days does a good job of treating the “college entrance exam” as a key element of the narrative, without adding drama or overshadowing the main story. According to our “inertia thinking”, the college entrance examination finished the story is almost over, but the movie is the beginning of the climax of the drama of the college entrance examination: accompanied by the opening of the examination paper, is the excavator dug out the Wei Lai’s body, when most of the candidates in the preparation of the next day’s exams, Chen Nian is faced with the “suspicion of murder” investigation. “The investigation of ……
I see this unfolding as a kind of crushing and mockery of the adult world on the world of teenagers, after all, the latter is “too clean and pure” for the former.
Of course, the two are not completely antagonistic in the movie, because of the existence of Zheng Yi’s character.
As a young policeman, Zheng Yi is caught between the underage Chen Nian, Xiao Bei and the early-adult Lao Yang, the former of whom flaunts his teenage defiance, hysteria and desperation in front of him, while the latter of whom teaches him to be calm, prudent and considerate in front of him without revealing his feelings.
Zheng Yi can be regarded as the third teenage protagonist in the movie, who pursues the truth and is impulsive and reckless. In order to prevent Chen Nian and Xiao Bei from making a black-or-white “addition or subtraction”, he has repeatedly violated the rules and challenged the alliance that the two teenagers have already agreed upon.
The same know the truth of the old Yang, after the dust settled praised Zheng Yi, and meaningful to say half a sentence: “a punk, a good student ……” He did not finish the sentence, but we have understood his choice, will be wrong, let Chen Nian have a brighter and broader future. a brighter and broader future.
In the world of adults, there are more periods, not like teenagers as full of exclamation points and question marks – Zheng Yi’s “undefined”, more or less for the audience to leave some room for reconciliation.
When Chen Nian and Xiao Bei appear again at the end of the movie, they are already adults. We have no way of knowing what kind of “adults” they will eventually become, but when we see Chen Nian accompanying a girl who has something on her mind to go home with her, and when we see Xiao Bei still following Chen Nian silently, we will have more hope for the world after all.
Just like the sentence that flashed in the textbook: we live in the gutter, but some people still look up to the stars.
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