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Better Luck Tomorrow
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Justin Lin's well-received 2002 independent feature, Better Luck Tomorrow, is a strangely appealing story of the mysterious, somehow inexorable drift of an ultra-conscientious, Southern California high school senior, Ben (Parry Shen), toward a fateful interlude with crime. Though highly focused on impressing colleges with his thoughtful balance of excellent grades, energized volunteer work (as a translator), and varsity sports (warming the bench during basketball games), something about Ben appears to be unraveling. Perhaps it is an attraction to his out-of-reach lab partner (Karin Anna Cheung), or his growing attachment to hard cash, or simply the malaise that coats his every act of self-denial. In any case, he and a brood of fellow Asian American overachievers metamorphose into the local go-to gang of black-market thievery--all while keeping up their classes. Lin brings a fresh angle to the exhausted youth-crime genre, and clarifies, with no small wisdom, the distinction between building a future and living one's destiny. --Tom Keogh
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While Better Luck Tomorrow's main characters are Asian-Americans, the film is only tangentially about the Asian-American experience. Lin's focus is set squarely on the life of the contemporary suburban teenager, and the lives he chooses to explore in this film aren't necessarily pretty ones. Lin will never be confused with John Hughes, although the characters in Better Luck Tomorrow confront many of the same coming-of-age dilemmas that stared the angst-ridden high school students of The Breakfast Club in the face so many years ago. But Lin uses the "teen movie" genre as a launching pad and lands in a territory somewhere between early Scorsese and Larry Clark. These characters ostensibly never had any innocence to strip away.
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Entirely financed by private investments with a budget well under a million, "Better Luck Tomorrow" has 212 scenes, over 100 locations, including actual Las Vegas casino locations, and 7 crowd intensive scenes. It's a five-week shoot spread over Los Angeles and Orange County with a couple of days in Las Vegas.
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Better Luck Tomorrow has received much ink and controversy for a small independent feature. After a screening at Sundance this year a heated discussion ensued between the filmmakers and audience regarding race and representation of Asian-Americans. The film traces the double lives of over-achieving teenagers whose ambitions to receive straight A's ... spills over to extra-curricular activities such as dealing drugs, selling cheat sheets and more extreme criminal behavior. Lin plays with the stereotype of Asian-Americans as smart well-behaved citizens; the brighter their futures appear to be the darker the film becomes. With Enron execs and white collar criminals getting off scot-free, Better Luck Tomorrow is a telling satire of an amoral world where the pursuit of money at all costs is the ultimate goal. (98m)
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Now more than 20 years after Chan’s release, Better Luck Tomorrow will pick up where Joy Luck left off, but sans the optimism for a mass Asian American cinematic movement. It offers only what the filmmakers believe is an unabashed look at the Asian American identity as a portrayal of the present, unfettered in its fiction by the history of Asians in America. The film, like its characters, lives in the moment, unaware of or ambivalent about the consequences of its actions. Director Lin seems to know that Better Luck will be left to the fickle scrutiny of the mainstream and he struggles to adjust to mainstream sensibilities. What he seems to want is what the film’s characters’ ultimately want: the unconditional acceptance of their American dream as they dream it. But here the dream overshadows the experience.
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Better Luck Tomorrow is smart, a product of close observation of adolescents, and like most intelligent films, it raises questions without feeding you answers. The main characters, mostly males, live in generic, affluent suburbia and attend a generic vast warehouse of a high school. They lead the lives of the stereotypical Asian or Asian-American student—high GPAs, lots of clubs and extracurricular activities, part-time jobs, SAT drills—all focusing on the deadly earnest competition for admissions to prestigious colleges. The story kick-starts when over-achiever Ben Manibag (Shen) lets a fellow student copy his answers during a test. Later Daric (Fan) approaches Ben about supplying cheat sheets for profit. Ben knows it’s wrong, not to mention the fact that the payoff—a mere $50 per sheet—is hardly compensation for the possible consequences of getting caught.
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Better Luck Tomorrow