Certainly better late than never.
Certainly better late than never. Chinese filmmaker Edward Yang’s often-cited A Brighter Summer Day is to many the holy grail of Eastern films that tragically haven’t seen the light of day in America outside of film festivals or piracy.
Leaving a large footprint as part of the New Taiwan Cinema movement during the 1980s and 1990s, Yang’s work has been highly praised despite limited actual overseas releases (2000’s Yi Yi is fortunately available).
While subverting any kind of nostalgia for its period, A Brighter Summer Day ends with the culmination of a loose recreation of a notoriously true event of a young girl’s horrific public murder. Told through a sprawling community of over a hundred speaking parts (mostly by young first and only time actors), the engrossing 218 minute saga is set during the national identity crises and globalization of early 1960s Taiwan.
The central plot revolves around Si’r (Chen Chan), a young introverted teenage boy who befriends a young girl Ming (Lisa Yang) who is seemingly sought after by every man she encounters. The would-be budding romance between the two is often set aside by the outside forces and the inherit complications within their social groups.
Ming, poised to be a film actress, mysteriously remains adamantly loyal to her often-absent gang leader boyfriend (who is often referred to but rarely seen and recommends that his peers read War & Peace) who has little to no interest in actually being a boyfriend.
The deadpan tension, shot effectively naturalistic by Yang, is extended throughout the rival gangs that hang around a less-than-reputable night school full of poor students, hooligans, and beige uniforms. These competing boy gangs, known as “The Little Park Boys” and “The 217s”, are tough, violently sadistic, and quick to dish out revenge toward one another.
While the central storyline takes place in and around the school and various children’s homes, it’s the young street clans clashing for turf and supremacy that permeate within A Brighter Summer Day.
A film with plenty of adults (with their own problems with their government and each other) astoundingly retains a strong lack of parental supervision when it comes to these kids’ after school lives and the pressures they face to align with others for safety. The film’s illusion of a controlled establishment and ever-changing dynamic are subtle while utterly mesmerizing.
Yang’s long coveted A Brighter Summer Day finally gets its first North American commercial release via The Criterion Collection.
Despite its notorious reputation, for many this will be the first time they’ve watched the film outside of secondhand laserdisc quality bootlegs with iffy subtitles. With a new 4k digital transfer restoration with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack, the beautiful and moving film gets the treatment it so deserves. Unfortunately, Yang himself is no longer living and isn’t available to shed more light onto his film or give his blessing, but we are greeted with an extra disc of special features.
Perhaps the most insightful supplement is critic Tony Rayns who contextualizes the film’s complex cultural history and multifaceted plot and structure. Star Chen Chang also gives an interview about his approach to his first acting gig and what acting on set was like. Also Included is a videotaped recording of Yang’s 1992 play Likely Consequence along with a 113-minute documentary about the New Taiwan Cinema movement called Our Time, Our Story.
The included play and documentary do not seem super necessary, but offer a lot of chance to explore Chang’s art further. An essay by critic Godfrey Cheshire accompanies a statement by Yang himself who tributes the film to his father and what his transitional generation went through.
Rarely do films have the depth or patience to truly create and enact an actual organic community within them.
Yang literally sketched out every character and came up with elaborate backstories for everyone. Characters who may have had a single line or just were placed in the background were given parents, hobbies, eccentricities, and specific styles to color A Brighter Summer Day.
While the film inhabits a somewhat typical coming-of-age drama, the thematic layers surrounding the film are richly explored, three-dimensional, and fleshed out. The loss of identity, lack of individualism, young masculinity, gang culture, obsession with outsider western culture (from Greasers to Elvis Presley himself), and ultimately the conflicting Taiwanese nationalism is what creates such a compelling listlessness found in the film. There’s a tragic despondence that lingers throughout, one that not only breathes tension but also the feeling that of powerlessness. The film is clear to point out that our protagonist is a product of his often unfair environment.
Our “hero,” Si’r, is smart, sensitive and brave, but eventually evolves from a petty, quiet hooligan into a disillusioned criminal by the film’s conclusion. Teenage disaffection, a thoroughly modern theme, didn’t really exist 100 years ago and while the film speaks to those looking for answers, it never makes it simplistic. The film’s runtime requires a certain amount of discipline from its non-native speaking viewers, despite never feeling its length or like a pessimistic slog, which it could have been.
It’s restrained and methodical with its filmic time and thus hard to commit entirely in one viewing. The feeling that something big is about to happen permeate throughout the story as such the pacing of such events sporadically and jarringly enough, it becomes hard to abandon.
Somewhere lost in time (figurative and literally) and seemingly moving at its own logic, its own pace, capturing that spirit, that soul, and that sadness in such a self-critical way that makes A Brighter Summer Day a Taiwanese masterpiece and a small “epic” in its own right.
A Brighter Summer Day
Taiwan (1991)
Edward Yang
Spine # 804
Available on DVD & Blu-ray
