A Brighter Summer Day

Rating: out of
Released: 1991
Directed by: Edward Yang
Cast: Zhang Zhen as Xiao Si'R; Lisa Yang as Ming; over 100 speaking roles

I watched this near the end of the 2007 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. In an earlier showing, cast members of the film paid their respects to the late Edward Yang.


"A Brighter Summer Day" is one of the finest films ever made. It is a four hour riff on the 1950s American juvenile delinquent film (in this context, the children of mainlanders often formed gangs and warred with the children of the native Taiwanese), but in total it is a reflection on modern Taiwanese history and nothing less than a consideration of the nature of humanity and adolescence.

The film will be hard to get into, for some of the singing scenes are silly, some of the violence is poorly done, and much of the narrative is understated and demanding of total immersion in the film's world (which might be impossible in less than three viewings).

Yang's medium and long-distance shots give the audience a way of seeing the film's world, a world that can never be viewed up close. It's always the landscape and the oft-ignored military exercises in the background (the film takes place in the early 1960s during Taiwan's military dictatorship) that contexualizes the main stories and tells the whole story.

There are two major stories. Xiao Si'R (Zhang Zhen, at the time a gawky teen; now, a star actor in Asia) isn't much of a student despite his father's claims to the contrary to an exasperated school bureaucracy. Si'R falls for Ming (Lisa Yang), the town flirt and the girl that a gang leader named Honey killed for. Si'R's relationship with Ming is the main story.

In the other major story, Honey comes back, but he is a much older soul now, matured by close readings of martial arts novels, his favorite of which ends up being Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Honey essentially allows himself to be killed by a rival gang leader, a brute of a man who didn't even pass muster when he tried to join Honey's gang years before. There's a brutal mass murder as a means to avenge Honey's death, a fine reflection on the island's Japanese influence and its children's relationship to violence.

After Honey's death and its consequences, we return to Si'R's relationship with Ming and his relationship with Ma (Tan Zhigang), a bored child of privilege. Things end badly, and while the end of the film elicits emotion in a very traditional (and nearly cliche) way, it is one of the most effective and devastating endings imaginable.

In a secondary story line, Si'R's father, who tries to do business the old Shanghaiese way, is in part because of his business ventures visited by the secret police. It's the subtlety of teh police's psychological torture that makes the scenes so harrowing.

The movie deserves several book-length studies, so I will not do it justice. There's a world here of humor, violence, love, loss, hope, and confusion. Yang perfected the film through years of preparation. It doesn't have the polish of "Yi Yi," but if one can forgive the poor quality of the video (see below) and pay full witness to Yang's ambition, the greatness of the film will be readily apparent.

The Hong Kong VCD or the Laserdisc edition (from which the VCD copy is derived) are the only ways to see it now. It's servicable--not ideal, but the only way to see an important film. Rumor has it Criterion would like to put out a copy, but the legal issues create another "Killer of Sheep"-type situation.

Reviewed by: Sean Allan

Dec 23,2007