My Best Summer

最好的我们

China, 2019, colour, 2.35:1, 109 mins.

Director: Zhang Disha 张笛沙.

Rating: 7/10.

Film version of a well-liked book and TVD is strongly cast and packaged, tweaking the high-school cliches.

STORY

Wuhan city, central China, Sep 2008. After applying for Zhenhua High School, the top one in the city, average student Geng Geng (He Landou) is surprised to get into its senior high. Also there is her childhood friend Jian Dan (Wang Chuyi), who introduces her new friend Jiang Niannian (Zhou Chuchu); together the three girls form a self-styled “dunces’ group” in Class Five. Geng Geng ends up being a deskmate to Yu Huai (Chen Feiyu), a brilliant but arrogant pupil whom she thinks is completely out of her league. (In 2018, seven years after graduating from Zhenhua and leaving the city, Geng Geng finds herself back in Wuhan for work reasons. Jian Dan tells her she can attend the annual class reunion party, which is to be held soon, and that Yu Huai is also back from the US.) Despite their intellectual differences, Geng Geng and Yu Huai are drawn to each other, and he promises to “protect” her. She likes him but keeps bungling attempts to show it. The pair finally bond when Yu Huai’s widowed mother (Hui Yinghong) tries to get Geng Geng moved to a different desk in class, as she perceives the girl as a bad influence on her son’s future, but Yu Huai stands up for Geng Geng. Her respect for him also grows after he saves the school’s top student, geeky Sheng Huainan (Dong Li) from humiluating himself in front of the whole school when he declares his love for the school’s beauty, Ye Zhanyan. (At the reunion dinner Yu Huai turns up late and sits next to Geng Geng.) As the class nears the end of its third year and the university entrance exam looms, Geng Geng worries about being separated from Yu Huai if they end up at different universities. Against her parents’ wishes, she chooses to specialise in Science to be with Yu Huai, and he helps her with her studies. But after the exam finishes, he fails to turn up at an agreed meeting spot, and she finds he’s left the city, supposedly for the US.

REVIEW

Coming only three years after iQiyi’s highly regarded online TV drama version, My Best Summer 最好的我们 (literally “The Best of Us”) has had a lot to prove as a film adaptation of the same novel. But looked at objectively – either with prior knowledge of the TVD or not – this first feature by scriptwriter Zhang Disha 张笛沙 is way more than just a decent job, perpetually tweaking the high-school/retro formula in interesting ways and served by a terrific cast of youngsters (for once playing roles near their own ages) as well as by very smooth scoring and editing. The new cast is very different from the TVD’s but makes sense both in its own terms and as a movie, as well as boasting an especially fine performance by petite He Landou 何蓝逗, 19, in her big-screen starring debut after some lively lead roles in online movies (Gone for Nothing 青春喂了狗, 2016; Monkey King Reincarnation 盖世英雄, 2018). Mainland box office has been very warm, raking in almost RMB400 million in three weeks and with some puff still left. [Final tally was RMB418 million.]

Jiangxi-born Zhang, 38, worked on the scripts of military drama A Mysterious Bullet 近距离击杀 (2014), road movie Breakup Buddies 心花路放 (2014) and “age travel” comedy-romance Once Again 二次初恋 (2017), as well as on the production of offbeat rom-com Go Away Mr. Tumor! 滚蛋吧！肿瘤君 (2015) and buddy comedy Crazy Alien 疯狂的外星人 (2019), so the China Academy of Art and Beijing Film Academy graduate already has a background in some genre-bending. Add to the mix management/film-making guru Huang Bin 黄斌 as producer and co-writer, and you have an alternative take on the novel that’s smartly condensed and sticks to the same plot and central idea while never pretending to have the same detail or character breadth as the 24-episode drama series (see poster, left).

The film opens in high spirits in Wuhan, central China, in autumn 2008 – a pivotal year for the country, with the Beijing Olympics, Shenzhou VII space launch and (more important for the teeny heroine) the seventh album by Taiwan boyband Mayday 五月天. The bubbly, totally generic tone is continued as she teams up with two other duncy girl-pals and ends up sharing a desk with a brilliant but arrogant male student for whom, after the usual spatting, she develops a serious but clumsy shine. Equally diminutive as the TVD’s lead actress Tan Songyun 谭松韵, but not as conventionally cute, He has her own subtle style that’s more attuned to the demands of the big screen, registering her character’s mood swings from embarrassment to anger, and also convincingly playing the same character in 2018. She’s pretty well matched by Chen Feiyu 陈飞宇 (son of director Chen Kaige 陈凯歌 and actress Chen Hong 陈红, prominently thanked in the end titles), who also plays a character around his real age and isn’t just a pretty poster-boy for the heroine’s fantasies.

Unfortunately, in a story that’s meant to be a twosome about temporal mismatching – “then you were at your best, now I’m at my best: the times when we were at our best were separated by a whole youth” – the roles aren’t equally dramatised, with He’s emotions minutely detailed but Chen’s more enigmatic character never given a convincing reason for behaving the way he does, especially at the end. It’s the major weakness in an otherwise slickly packaged and well-balanced movie. Some supporting characters get shortish shriff – the heroine’s parents, the hero’s mother (tartly played by Hong Kong veteran Hui Yinghong 惠英红 [Kara Hui] in just a couple of scenes) and one of the BFFs who has a crush on the class teacher – but that’s par for the course in a feature-film version that has to be driven by its main leads.

Though the situations and whole setting are totally manufactured according to genre conventions, Zhang & Co.’s tweaks pay off time and again: a National Day school singing competition packs a genuinely inspirational punch as it’s used to cement the leads’ relationship as well as to solve a more immediate problem, and the leads’ temporary farewell on the eve of their exams is equally moving for its simplicity. The grand finale doesn’t quite live up to expectations after such earlier sequences, knocking a point off the movie’s final score, but Summer is still streets ahead of the average high-school rom-com. Among the supports, Zhou Chuchu 周楚濋 stands out as the more extrovert of the heroine’s two BFFs and Fang Wenqiang 方文强 (who played the same role in the TVD) is again fine as the class teacher, handling his farewell speech with a quiet dignity.

The original novel by Bayue Chang’an 八月长安 – literally “Chang’an [ancient Xi’an] in August”, pen name of Harbin-born writer Liu Wanhui 刘婉荟, 31 – was her final one in a high-school trilogy, and was published in book form in 2013 (see cover, left). The TVD, directed by Liu Chang 刘畅 and, like the novel, known in English as With You, was released online by iQiyi from 8 Apr 2016. The plot’s running joke about how the lead characters were made for each other is based on the fact that their two names, Geng Geng and Yu Huai, when put together can be translated as “Losing Sleep over Yu Huai”, as well as sounding exactly like a four-character phrase that means “nursing a grudge”.

CREDITS

Presented by China Film (CN), Beijing Hero Film (CN), WeFun (Shanghai) Entertainment (CN).

Script: Zhang Disha, Huang Bin, Huang Moqi. Script co-ordination: Xu Qinghua, Cheng Yuhai. Novel: Bayue Chang’an [Liu Wanhui]. Photography: Deng Xu. Editing: Li Jiahua. Music direction: Chen Jianqi. Art direction: Xi Zhongwen [Yee Chung-man]. Styling: Wei Xiangrong. Sound: Wang Danrong.

Cast: Chen Feiyu (Yu Huai), He Landou (Geng Geng), Hui Yinghong [Kara Hui] (Yu Huai’s mother), Wang Sulong (student), Dong Li (Sheng Huainan/Guaitai/The Freak), Zhou Chuchu (Jiang Niannian/Beita/Beta/β), Fang Wenqiang (Jiang Ping, class teacher), Wang Chuyi (Jian Dan/Simple), Gao Wenfeng (Zhang Feng), Chen Shuai (Xu Yanliang), Jiang Ziyan (Wen Xiaoxiao), Xia Jing (literature teacher).

Release: China, 6 Jun 2019.