Critics have long recognized the late Taiwanese director Edward Yang as a master, but American audiences have never had the chance to see one of his most major films, 1991’s A Brighter Summer Day. Luckily, the four-hour epic is about to receive a four-day run at BAM followed by a DVD and Blu-ray release of a new 4K restoration from the Criterion Collection. Here are five reasons not to miss the chance to rediscover A Brighter Summer Day.
5) The Complexity of Coming of Age – The coming of age film is hardly unexplored, yet most examples, due to length restrictions and simplistic imaginations, posit the formation of identity as a relatively straight line, pushing an overly deterministic view suggesting that a teenager’s personality is the direct result of one or two seminal experiences. Yang, on the other hand, delivers a richly textured look at teen years that shows the myriad influences that push and pull protagonist Xiao Si’r in different directions – from the different spheres of home/family and school/youth gangs, to the political pressures that have forced his family into exile and continue to erode their status, to the American pop culture emerging into their consciousness. Even this list doesn’t do justice to the film’s scope – there are over 100 speaking parts and each interaction is important in some small way.
4) The Music – Speaking of American pop culture, the music in A Brighter Summer Day is strangely entrancing. I’m not even talking about the soundtrack, but about versions of American rock songs that the kids perform to Taiwanese audiences. The film’s title comes from an Elvis’ “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and hearing the songs of the King among others transposed phonetically into the mouth of singer Cat and belted to appreciative audiences is both outrageously fun and hard to describe. The songs become something totally other than their originals while still channeling the same potent sense of rebellion.
3) The Light – Light is the basis of all cinema, but few films make it practically a character in the same manner as A Brighter Summer Day. One of the film’s first scenes involves the theft of a large flashlight, which reoccurs crucially throughout the film, its light being used both to transgress and shine light on transgressions. Yang incorporates his own strong childhood memories of rolling blackouts into the drama, making for scenes that use light both beautifully and symbolically.
2) The Complexity of (National) Coming of Age – Though this aspect is wonderfully understated and never didactic, A Brighter Summer Day is also a key document for understanding the emergence of Taiwanese statehood. The very first scene shows the disconnect between the Taiwanese youths and the traditional Confucian social bonds of their Chinese forbears, a vacuum that will be filled by gang culture and foreign influences. The political interrogation that Xiao Si’r’s mild mannered father suffers shows the instability of the past, how past associations may take on different meanings as politics change. A sense of dislocation affects every character and collectively they learn the difficulty of preserving national identity in exile, while Japanese and American cultures proliferate.
1) The Tragedy – Without spoiling too much, the various forces I’ve described build inexorably to a painful tragedy. While it is an act carried out by one character, Yang seemingly indicts a wide range of factors stemming from the erosion of institutions and social bonds that fail not only the victim, but also the perpetrator. Society fails to provide Xiao Si’r and his friends with a compelling past, present, or future and their efforts to cobble together lives and identities from the materials they find ends in bitter irony and heartbreak.
A Brighter Summer Day will have a limited theatrical run at BAM. For tickets and more click here.
