Tomorrow Will Be Fine

明天会好的

China, 2021, colour, 2.35:1, 100 mins.

Director: Yuan Yuan 袁媛.

Rating: 6/10.

Unremarkable story centred on two drifting souls in Beijing is stronger on acting chemistry than narrative.

STORY

Beijing, late 2019. Nine years ago Xiao Yu (Jiang Yilei), dissatisfied with her life, left her hometown near Hangzhou, southern China, and arrived in the capital; now aged 27, she’s an anonymous hack scriptwriter, her current goal being to save enough money to visit the history-rich state of Guanajuato, in central Mexico, with her best friend and roommate Xu Baolan (Xu Ge). Socially awkward, Xiao Yu has few friends in the city. Currently she’s working on a TV drama series but then is suddenly sacked when an office junior (Shi Qian) schemes against her. When Xu Baolan moves in with her boyfriend Pangzi (Shi Laoban), who’s just bought a flat, Xiao Yu moves – for the ninth time – to a west-facing room in an old neighbourhood on the edge of the city around the Fifth Ring Road. She decides to give herself one more year in Beijing to see if she can still make a success of her career. In November she gets a job as continuity girl on a film, Sanyi, directed by Yuan Yuan. She keeps turning down approaches by the on-set Romeo, Xiaowu (Sang Kezhou), and then has a mild attack of shingles. She’s prescribed a vaccine but ends up being sacked as the producer (Zhang Ailin) is afraid she’s suffering from fatigue. Returning to her flat, she’s forgotten she temporarily sublet it to a young man, Ji Ye (Zhang Chao), while she was away working on the film; she ends up sleeping on the sofa. She returns to writing an autobiographical online novel, West-Facing Youth 西晒青年, that she hopes will get her known; Ji Ye sings with his guitar in bars. The two of them get along well sharing the room, though one night he asks her to go out for a while as he’s brought a woman back. While walking the streets, she slips and sprains her ankle. When his sub-let expires, they’re getting on so well together that she lets him stay on for a month if he sleeps on the sofa. He decides, however, to move on; but after a month he suddenly turns up unannounced. During the winter of 2019-20 they finally become a couple and she recommends him for the scoring of an online film that pays RMB40,000. Neither of them has had so much money; but Ji Ye then spends it all on a piano. However, an online director (She Congge) says he wants to adapt Xiao Yu’s novel into a film. That evening, Xu Baolan and Xiao Yu celebrate, full of hope.

REVIEW

Mainland scriptwriter Yuan Yuan 袁媛, 40, who co-wrote the offbeat rom-com Go Away Mr. Tumor! 滚蛋吧！肿瘤君 (2015) and romantic drama Us and Them 后来的我们 (2018), makes her debut as a director with the okay but under-charged Tomorrow Will Be Fine 明天会好的, which relies more on the actors’ chemistry than any strong narrative development. Despite starring hot internet comedienne Jiang Yilei 姜逸磊, 34, in her first “serious” role as a woman who’s been 10 years in Beijing without achieving anything but still delays throwing in the towel, it failed to make a mark at the spring box office, taking a meh RMB30 million.

Shanghai-born Jiang – better known under her online moniker Papi Jiang papi酱 (literally, “Papi Sauce” or “Papi Jam”) – studied direction at Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama but rocketed to fame and fortune in 2015 after she started posting brief comic sketches on the internet, satirising Mainland manners and character types in often fruity language. Her film debut was in comedy-horror Goldbuster 妖铃铃 (2017), the solid directing debut of Hong Kong comedienne Wu Junru 吴君如 [Sandra Ng], in which she played a crazed, bespectacled inventor, one of several colourful supports. In Tomorrow, she’s on screen virtually the whole time and not only has to carry the whole film but also create a character that will interest the viewer for 100 minutes – a very different challenge compared with her online sketches that last just a couple of minutes.

The opening plays to the audience’s expectations with a lot of droll humour that’s similar to some of Jiang’s online and TV work, as, in voiceover, she describes arriving from the provinces (only later identified as Zhejiang, near Shanghai) and becoming one of the city’s 8 million migrants/wannabes, the so-called běipiāo 北漂 (“Beijing drifters”). In her case, though, “I don’t know what I want, but I do know what I don’t want.” Right. After a decade of unprecedented growth and changes in the city, Xiao Yu is still a self-described “anonymous hack scriptwriter”, cranking out TV dramas, changing digs every year, with a tiny circle of friends and no real money. But she still dreams of writing a script or novel that will bring her fame and fortune, and still gives herself one more year to make it in Beijing.

It’s hardly an original premise but the early scenes, as she jokes with her flatmate, makes social gaffes at a party, and then gets sacked from her current job thanks to office politics, make Xiao Yu an interesting enough quotidian character, played by Jiang with a kind of restrained spaciness. Forced to move yet again, Xiao Yu finds a flat way out in the city’s suburbs; but the room is west-facing (a running theme of hope in the film) and cheap. And then she meets Ji Ye, a happy-go-lucky drifter who sings in bars and to whom she sub-lets the room while she’s away.

The script, co-written by Yuan with Lin Li 林励, contains no great surprises and is basically an offbeat rom-com between two dream-centred, self-obsessed singletons. Nudging the film along, and disguising the fact that Xiao Yu and her personal situation don’t evolve in any way, is plenty of window-dressing: inserts of stand-up comics performing in a small club, a party at home where a group of friends share thoughts on life, a celebration one evening by Xiao Yu and her former roommate, a trip by Xiao Yu to her hometown, and another trip with Ji Ye to Inner Mongolia. None of these add anything to the characters’ evolution or the film’s architecture – which hardly exist anyway – though they do provide enjoyable diversions. Like the title of the film itself (which is the same in Chinese and English), Tomorrow starts and ends with a shrug. It’s all pleasant and watchable, but that’s about it.

Looking a little like a younger Xu Jinglei 徐静蕾, and convincing as a young, unglamorous everywoman, Jiang needs stronger material than this to sustain an interesting performance across a feature-length film. Actor-singer Zhang Chao 张超, 33, who played the con artist in Mr. No Problem 不成问题的问题 (2016) and the light-hearted violinist friend in Somewhere Only We Know 有一个地方只有我们知道 (2015), also dials down his looks and is equally convincing as a terminally unreliable drifter who, like Xiao Yu, is not really looking for any ties. Other roles aren’t major, though TV actress Xu Ge 许歌, 33, is okay as Xiao Yu’s BFF/roommate.

Widescreen photography of Beijing and Anji county, Zhejiang province, by Chinese American d.p./director Guan Xi 管曦 (Tibet-set TV movie Meiduo 梅朵与月光, 2020) is notable for the way in which she catches the capital’s late autumn/winter light. Scoring by Thailand’s Pantawit Kiangsiri (Blood 13 血十三, 2018; The Secret of Immortal Code 伊阿索密码, 2018) is conventionally romantic. Credited as creative producer 监制 is Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯, though the mainstream-ish Tomorrow shows no signs of his own stylistic quirks.

CREDITS

Presented by Shanghai Henglu Pictures (CN), Beijing Enlight Media (CN), Horgos Happy Pictures (CN), Beijing Unitalent Pictures (CN), Shanghai Fabula Entertainment (CN). Produced by Shanghai Henglu Pictures (CN).

Script: Lin Li, Yuan Yuan. Photography: Guan Xi. Editing: Liao Qingsong, Qiao Aiyu. Music: Pantawit Kiangsiri. Music supervision: Zhao Zizhu. Theme song music: Zhang Chao, Pantawit Kiangsiri. Lyrics: Lin Li. Vocal: Zhang Chao. Lyrics: Art direction: Ge Le. Styling: Gao Bo. Sound design: Zhao Ying. Visual effects: Zheng Wenzheng (FX Free Productions). Executive direction: Xu Chengwei.

Cast: Jiang Yilei [Papi Jiang] (Xiao Yu), Zhang Chao (Ji Ye), Xu Ge (Xu Baolan), Wu Yufang (Xiao Yu’s mother), Lu Zhong (Xiao Yu’s father), Bai Ke (Xiao Yu’s ex-boyfriend), Shi Laoban (Pangzi/Fattie), Bai Jianyong (man in leather jacket at party), Wang Limin (mixed-race man at party), Deng Jia (fat man at party), Shi Qian (office junior), Ding Xiaoyang (senior writer), She Congge (online film director), Sang Kezhou (Xiaowu), Liu Xin’gang (doctor), Zhang Ailin (film producer), Chang Yukun (modern-dance teacher), Dong Lei (film director), Ge Jiajia (Shanshan, Xiao Yu’s best friend from school).

Release: China, 2 Apr 2021.