'The Best Is Yet to Come' Is A Messy, But Affecting Look At Post-Pandemic Journalism [Venice Review]

Mining the well-worn tropes of the crusading journalist, Jing Wang’s “The Best is Yet to Come” is an investigatory look at Beijing in the aftermath of the SARS epidemic. Taking place in 2003, the film follows aspiring journalist Han Dong (Bai-Ke), as he hustles his way into an internship at the prestigious Jingcheng Daily and eventually lands on a possible front-page story, before being torn between his loyalty between journalistic ethics and a friend whose future might be jeopardized by Dong’s reporting.

While scattershot in its narrative approach (it takes over an hour before the actual plot clarifies), Jing’s feature debut is an affecting dive into the post-pandemic anxiety that swelled through Beijing, as Dong stumbles upon a bombshell story of Hepatitis B patients paying for forged medical records in order to land jobs in a society that fears any type of illness and requires complete medical disclosure for job applications.

Yet before getting to this point, Jing lingers on Dong’s rise from high school dropout to an up-and-coming journalist, initially catching the attention of Jingcheng through his online blogging, writing under the on-the-nose moniker of “Virtuous Gentleman.” Quickly, he is hired as an intern (the only one to not be from a prestigious university) and helps veteran reporter Huang Jiang (Zhang Songwen) break a front-page story about a mining disaster.

Essentially, all this serves as a preamble for Dong’s descent into the shady world of forged medical records, in which he goes undercover to expose the healthcare’s black market, all the while never questioning the discriminatory practices that led to this underground need for records. Only when Dong’s childhood friend, Zhang Bo (Song Yang) becomes caught up in the scheme, in a bid to get into grad school, does Dong realize that his reporting opens up a dilemma between journalistic and humanitarian ethics.

Jing, a former assistant director of filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke (a producer on this film), has crafted a film that harkens back to the paranoid journalistic thrillers of the ’70s, but one that is often too scattershot in its narrative approach. The film is populated with a number of periphery characters to Dong, including his supportive girlfriend Xiao Zhu (Miao Miao), who are forgotten about for large stretches of time. “The Best is Yet to Come” quickly spins out in multiple directions, never finding a coherent line through the material, bifurcating Dong’s story in a way that makes the film feel like two incongruent stories pushed together.

Despite Dong’s initial entry into the journalistic workforce as a blogger, “The Best is Yet to Come” anachronistically fetishizes print journalism, realistically bringing to life the ins and outs of a newsroom, but nevertheless reinforcing the gatekeeper mentality of editorial control. Even as Dong continues his investigation, outside of the purview of Jingcheng and Jiang, he nevertheless continues to push for front-page publication. “The Best is Yet to Come” argues both the importance of front-page journalism and for the democratization of news media, never landing one side or the other.

Despite these half-baked arguments and awkward structure, Jing, inadvertently or not, has crafted a prescient film that explores the impacts of a defining pandemic on society, honing in on how governments react to control the flow of medical information, and how people latch onto information, true or not, that reinforces stigmas about medical conditions. “The Best is Yet to Come” may take a while to get to its point, but it is nevertheless made with a sincere conviction about the ways in which journalism can give voice to the humanity underneath these restrictive laws. [B-]

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