Director Derek Tsang, who nominated the international film, had extensive involvement with Chinese regulators, and was rejected only by filmgoers in his hometown of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong director Derek Tsang’s disturbing youth drama Better days is the rare Oscar-best international film nominee who has both been highly acclaimed and a massive commercial hit. The film, which was released in mainland China in October 2019, grossed $ 223 million, which is more than 40 times the total earnings of the other four international nominations combined. Better days At home, they also garnered numerous artistic accolades by achieving various honors during the Hong Kong Film Awards and China’s Best Film Awards, the Golden Rooster Awards and the Hundred Flower Awards.
But despite his achievements, Better days has become a bizarre kind of success that no one wants to fully claim – not the director of the film, his hometown Hong Kong or mainland China. The main cause of the dichotomy in the film, as is the case in China’s oppressive creative sector these days, is the country’s increasingly fragile and nationalist political environment.
Based on the Chinese internet novel In his youth, In her beauty by author Jiu Yuexi, Better Days tells the story of a high school girl (Zhou Dongyu) who is struggling with severe bullying and the increasing pressure of China’s main college entrance exam. Through a chance encounter, her life becomes intertwined with that of Xiao Bei, a young street thug (played by Jackson Yee, a pop star who became an actor). But as the duo form a surprising bond born out of necessity, a series of tragic circumstances plunge them in the direction of an accidental murder and a moral reckoning.
Better days was selected to receive its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019 after producing strong excitement in the Chinese film industry during production. But the film was placed a few days before the screening of the festival, with the words that it did not get the necessary approval from the Chinese film administration.
Although Better days Eventually, it was classified as a Hong Kong film – where content regulation usually followed an MPAA rating system with limited political interference – the film was designed for the Chinese mainland market, meaning approval was crucial for its commercial future. wash. The film was also co-produced by Hong Kong’s Golden Village Pictures and a bunch of Chinese studio partners and financiers on the mainland. So, Tsang and she Better days a post-production team embarked on a difficult, months-long process of adapting the film to meet Beijing’s demands.
According to sources close to the production who spoke anonymously due to the sensitivity surrounding the film, Tsang received direct instructions from the Chinese investors of the film as well as from government sensations on how to reform certain scenes. It was a long process of trial and error – familiar to many in Chinese industry – which forced filmmakers to repeatedly test the boundaries by offering a new, refined version for approval, but to reject it and return to editing. bay again from scratch. “It was kind of a tug of war,” says a source close to the film. During the process, China’s long-planned release date was scrapped in June 2019, with the production companies referring to the film’s “level of completion” and “pre-marketing reviews” as their public reasons for the postponement.
“The director was determined to maintain what he thought the story required and maintain its integrity, all for the benefit of the film,” says the source close to the project. “He wanted to maintain his vision as much as possible. That’s why he tried his best to stand in his place for some time.”
Better days sources took from the sensors, mainly because it got too close to home, sources say. In mid-2019, the People’s Republic of China was celebrating its 70th anniversary. The competition came with instructions to content creators, implicitly and explicitly, to sing the country’s praise – and certainly not to shine a harsh light on the reality of urgent social ills, Better days do.
Classroom bullying is a universal struggle everywhere in school systems, but in Better days‘The case found the film its theme in a real crisis that emerged in China in the mid-2010s, when a series of deaths in which bullying children threw themselves from the top floor of school buildings became a topic of public shouting. . Better days, which began to develop in 2017, drew various details directly from reality. Schools in the film, set in Chongqing, install mesh panels around their corridor on the top floor, inside and out, to even prevent the possibility of jumping. This is exactly what some schools in the region of China have done.
The original version of Better days submitted to Berlin lasted 138 minutes, while the version released in China lasted 135 minutes. The various changes that were made were apparently intended to numb the most frightening aspects of Tsang’s social critique, and at the same time to communicate that the wisdom of the leaders of China corrected many of the ills that the film presents. Some of the changes do not seem so significant – cuts in scenes of the male lead, Bei, and a fellow criminal slapping each other’s faces, for example, a little too aggressively, or another sequence in which Bei’s hand strikes up the thigh hangs. of the young female main character, Chen.
But one of the clearest sets of amendments removed all references to an entire real-life scandal that took place in China in the mid-2010s. In the unpolished version, Bei works as an illicit debt collector who was engaged in the practice at the time known as a ‘naked loan service’, which rose to the brink of the peer-lending tree that took short and disastrous post. in China for people with lower incomes who could not get loans from established banks. The practice has led risky lenders to provide unlicensed creditors with naked selfies in which they clearly keep their government ID cards – with the material used as collateral to ensure that the debt, plus large interest, is repaid. The Chinese government then shut down the practice after numerous identifiable nude photos of unhappy souls who could not repay their loans flooded the internet. In the original track of Better days, Bei is employed by one of these naked selfie loan sharks, with Chen’s mother owing the criminal money. In the amended version, references to the whole scandal – which was a nationwide plague – are completely erased. Chen’s mother is still said to have owed a loan shark, but only standard notices with her headshot are spread by the bullies at Chen’s school, rather than embarrassing nude photos of her mother. Bei’s entire involvement in the loan-shark trade was also removed.
Among the various cuts of his film, big and small, it seems that the change Tsang made the worst was the overhaul of the ending. “The official ending was the one I liked the most,” he said during an online seminar hosted by the Hong Kong Screenwriters’ Guild in 2020, “I thought it was OTT [over the top] and like a teen TV drama series. “He said a few ends were shot to give his team more options, and the one he and the production team preferred and originally used was on a much darker note for the two young protagonists; he admitted that it was ” a bit gloomy ”. The ending that was released involves an epilogue showing that Chen, the main character of the woman, played by Zhou, learned from her mistakes and now made a positive impact in the world has a montage with a list of all the policies the Chinese government has put in place in recent years to tackle and eliminate the problem of school bullying – a postscript that is hard to imagine as Tsang’s idea.
Better days finally opened in mainland China in October 2019, but regulators gave the film official permission to release just three days in advance, leaving little time for Tsang and his distributors to conduct a marketing campaign. Nevertheless, the film became a mouth-to-mouth phenomenon starting at $ 85.1 million. Many reviewers emphasized the emotional intensity of the story and the reality of its subject matter – a relative rarity on Chinese screens. Like the reworked ending of the film, the after-screenplay is on Better daysrelease saga has it all about political attitude.
Initially, the version of the film that was released seemed to have official support in China. In February 2020, Better days received 14 nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards, which asked Global Times, China’s nationalist, state-affiliated tabloid newspaper, which suggests that it could ‘make history like Parasite“on behalf of the Chinese theater. The awards drumming continued throughout the year, making Tsang a rising star on the continent. In December, he achieved a lucrative and very visible performance as a judge and celebrity mentor, along with Zhang Ziyi and Yu Zheng, in the hugely popular reality show I’m an actor. But shortly after his tenure in the program, nationalist Chinese social media users began spreading old reports allegedly written by Tsang’s wife, Hong Kong actress Venus Wong, who expressed support for Hong Kong’s 2014 democracy Umbrella Movement. Allegedly, photos multiplied by seeing Tsang and Wong gatherings in Hong Kong. Not long after, Tsang left the show without ceremony.
Better days is the first Chinese language to be nominated for an Oscar since Zhang Yimou Hero in 2003. But the official reception of Tsang’s honor by the Chinese state press was certainly icy, and the nomination received only passing mentions. Chinese director Chloé Zhao nominated for best director Nomadland, has received a similarly repressed – even censored – treatment online in China since nationalists made two brief interview remarks she made in the past criticizing China (one publication admits she misquoted her). The nomination of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protest documentary Do not split in the short documentary category, Beijing’s official animus only deepened for the Oscars. In March, authorities ordered local media not to broadcast this year’s Oscars live, leaving the question of whether a delayed – and censored – broadcast would be carried out in China.
In Tsang’s native Hong Kong, the local audience has grown just as skeptical about Better days, albeit for different reasons. Online consensus in Hong Kong is that the film hardly represents Hong Kong and its unique culture, thanks to a story that takes place only on the mainland of China, a cast entirely from the mainland, mostly financial supporters in Beijing and Mandarin rather than Cantonese. Since its inception, the project has been considered a Chinese film on the continent, and the announcement of the Hong Kong election as the official presentation of the Oscars has been received with public outcry. Indeed, filmgoers in Hong Kong actually rejected the film twice when it was released. During its two releases in Hong Kong, the first in December 2019 and the second in May 2020, for a total of 76 days, the film earned a combined HK $ 1.19 million (153,000) – a sad performance for any significant film in the city. For many in Hong Kong, their first Oscar nominee in decades is nothing more than an important opportunity to fight to preserve their identity and culture – and to reject the encroachment on China’s draconian leadership and giant market influence.
A version of this story first appeared in the April 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to sign up.