General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Best of Times (美丽时光)

The Best of Times (美麗時光) is a 2002 Taiwanese crime drama directed and written by Chang Tso-chi (張作驥), about two 19-year-old cousins in the Taipei suburbs who become debt collectors for a local gang and turn into fugitives after a shooting. It was the only Chinese-language film in competition for the Golden Lion at the 59th Venice Film Festival and won Best Feature Film at the 39th Golden Horse Awards.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Chang Tso-chi (張作驥), his third feature¹^•³
Production	Chang Tso-chi Film Studio with Japanese NHK investment; producer Lu Shih-yuan¹^•⁴
Format	35mm color; languages Mandarin and Taiwanese; restoration record lists 112 min, festival listings 109–111 min¹^•⁴^•⁵
Leads	Fan Zhi-wei (范植偉) as Wei (小偉) and Gao Meng-jie (高盟傑) as Jie (阿傑)¹
Venice 2002	Competed for the Golden Lion, the only Chinese-language film in the running²
Golden Horse 2002	Best Feature Film, Best Taiwan Film of the Year (shared with Menghuan Buluo), and Audience Choice Best Film¹^•⁶
Singapore 2003	Silver Screen Awards for Best Asian Feature Film and Best Actor (Wing Fan)⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Wei and Jie are cousins who grew up together in a large extended household of mixed Taiwanese and mainland Chinese origin, in a multilingual family compound.¹^•⁸ Wei is placid; Jie is volatile. Wei's twin sister Min (吳雨致) has terminal cancer and, near the end of her life, breaks with her boyfriend A-Zhe (曾一哲) and returns to the home she once wanted to escape.¹ Jie is distant from his devout Christian father, a retired soldier from mainland China, and from his intellectually disabled older brother.⁴

Pushed by Jie, Wei asks his boss Gu, owner of the nightclub where he works as a parking valet, to give them gang work, and the two are sent out as debt collectors.⁴ As a reward for a job done well they are given a gun with a single bullet; the impulsive Jie uses it to shoot a rival gang's boss, and the two become fugitives.⁵ Cornered with nowhere to flee, they jump into a murky drainage ditch beside the family home; underwater the water turns clear, and they swim toward the deep sea as if beginning another splendid adventure.⁶

Magic realism and style

The film is shot in a realist style but dabbles in fantasy, a combination that marks Chang's work generally.⁸ Pigeons appear over the rundown rooftops of the veterans' village, ducks swim in the drainage ditch, and a stray white pig wanders by; a horse in the alley outside the dying sister's window is mistaken for a unicorn, and in one scene Jie's magic trick seems to conjure a unicorn in the family courtyard.¹^•⁸ The critic Tony Rayns, writing for the International Film Festival Rotterdam, described the film as rhyming the boys' longing for status and power with a journey into their inner lives, its surface naturalism underpinned by the suggestion that dreams can be more real than anything else.⁴

Craft on a small budget. The production involved only about 30 people, yet its dialogue spans Hakka, Mandarin, Taiwanese, the Shandong dialect, and English, and the National Cultural Memory Bank account credits the film's bright, luminous photography on minimal funding as a main reason for its Golden Horse win.⁶ Time Out praised the cinematography by Chang Yi-min in a palette of blues, greens, and reds, and called the ending one of the most original in recent memory.⁹ Chang has acknowledged the influence of Hou Hsiao-hsien's long-take style, while noting that he learned from many directors, having worked under filmmakers including Yu Kan-ping, Tsui Hark, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Yim Ho after graduating in 1987.¹⁰^•¹¹

Festival run and awards

At the 59th Venice Film Festival in 2002, The Best of Times was the only Chinese-language film competing for the Golden Lion.² Chinese press reports from the festival described it as warmly received by distributors, with sales inquiries about global release following a press and industry screening, while a Hong Kong competitor, Fruit Chan's Public Toilet, was booed.¹² A Taipei Times report after the festival, however, wrote that the film failed to make a good impression at Venice.⁸ It was nominated for the Golden Lion but did not win it.⁷

The film's major honors came at the 39th Golden Horse Awards, where it took Best Feature Film, Audience Choice Best Film, and, shared with Menghuan Buluo, Best Taiwan Film of the Year, three awards without any individual acting or directing prize.¹^•⁶^•¹³ Chang was nominated for Best Director but lost to Fruit Chan for Hollywood Hong Kong.¹³^•⁷ At the 2003 Singapore International Film Festival it won the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Feature Film, and Wing Fan won Best Actor.⁷ It also screened at Rotterdam, Toronto, and Busan.⁴^•¹⁴

Place in Chang Tso-chi's career

Chang's earlier films Ah Chung (忠仔, 1996) and Darkness and Light (黑暗之光, 1999) had already established his themes of youth, Taiwan's lower strata, and dysfunctional families, and Darkness and Light won prizes at festivals in Tokyo, Singapore, and Cannes.⁸^•³ In interviews around the Venice premiere, Chang said he wanted the film to explore the ambiguity between youth and death through the eyes of the two young men, a theme running through all his features.¹⁵ The Busan festival program described the film as a coming-of-age story combining the depressive sensibility of film noir with the conventions of Taiwanese family melodrama, presenting a portrait of contemporary Taiwan through 19-year-olds who fall from grace.⁵ Reviewers have generally treated it as a high point of his career: David Stratton's Variety review called it essential viewing for Asian cinema audiences, and a 2002 Chinese review ranked it the writer's favorite Chinese-language film of that year.¹⁶^•¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026