This is an odd mixture of romance and family drama that didn't quite fit well together. She is a poor girl from a small town who values education as her ticket out of her toxic household, while he is a popular rich boy who's always out cutting classes and causing trouble. They fall in and out of friendship (though Li Ran pretty much falls straight into love XD), ultimately losing contact when she moves to a different country, only reuniting when she flies back for a family emergency. The movie alternates between present and past.
It felt like they shot so many scenes (and they were shot very well too!) from the novel but couldn't figure out how to put them all together into a cohesive story—to the point that it didn't really feel like the story had any themes at all. Subplots that I thought would be called back to or addressed later on were simply dropped. The characters didn't really get a chance to be characters or have personalities, they were just ingredients for conflict—conflicts that weren't actually resolved, just pushed out of the way.
Pacing and flow were really weird. There was poor judgement in what parts to include and how much of them was needed; some scenes felt either completely extraneous or overly long, while the ones that I felt were important only lasted five seconds, or were omitted altogether, and nothing really made emotional sense to me. It's such a shame because there were some really cinematic moments that ended up feeling wholly unearned. Similarly, the "memorable" lines also ended up falling flat because they simply didn't get the space to gather weight.
It's so weird because I spent two hours following Chen Jianxia's journey from insecure teenager to assertive adult, and at the end of everything I still had no idea who she was. But I think what this movie lacks the most is joy, something that Chen Jianxia was clearly capable of but was shunted off as a background detail (apparently she's good friends with Zhang Ruonan's character at the end, but all of this happens offscreen, while significant time is spent on multiple bullying scenes with varying levels of plot relevance). I think if the happy moments had been given a chance to be in the foreground, the resolutions would have felt meaningful enough to give me some satisfaction.
On a more positive note, the songs were nice, the cinematography was actually pretty great, and my favorite part was the middle bit where Chen Jianxia realizes that she's more capable than she thought and learns to assert herself.
*
That said, here is the ~*lyric video*~ I made of ZXC's song, whose title (Shattered Time) I now think is fitting given the movie's very fragmentary and jagged pacing. XD
Other MVs for this movie (note that I feel that the ZXC song is the weakest among these, since it's more of a character song):
晚星 / Evening Star:
空空的/ Empty-Handed (my personal favorite; it's the most thematic one):
And here's my playlist of trailers, BTS, and promotional materials that I personally subbed:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3oeFgk5YVn8t8w9qydoRpHRo55JiCaGB
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