A Brighter Summer Day Review
[Another review here culled from the pages of our forum, this one from regular reader Eight Rooks.]
Millions of mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan in 1949 with the Nationalist government after its civil war defeat by the Chinese Communists. Their children were brought up in an uneasy atmosphere created by their parents' own uncertainty about the future. Many formed street gangs to search for an identity and to strengthen their sense of security.
Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day chronicles the fortunes of one such Taiwanese family at the start of the 1960s - the way in which they each chase after an identity, the emotional and cultural baggage which influences those pursuits and what happens as a result. The father struggles with the guiding principles he's lived his life by up until now; he's never known anything other than being a civil servant, properly mindful of authority, yet he wants to do right by his children and clumsily tries to further his relationship with the old college friend he used to know who's now a successful entrepreneur. His two sons struggle to decide what they want to do with their lives - they and their circle of friends spend their time trying to better their own fledgling gang's standing, cutting classes, playing, fighting, trying to impress those they see as bigger and stronger than they are, devouring Western pop culture in lieu of any established heritage of their own. When one of the brothers falls for a girl who goes to the same night school they attend, the rivalries and jealousy sparked off by their fumbling relationship loosely serves as the central plot strand of the film and touches on all the others to some degree.
Four years in the making, just short of four hours long, A Brighter Summer Day is not to be taken lightly. There are easily enough different characters and subplots to flesh out two or three films rather than just the one (the father, the one son and the girl he falls for probably get the most attention, but not by that much). Yang employs an odd sort of directorial aesthetic, casual - almost ephemeral - and carefully considered at the same time - the film grabs your attention visually then lets it go, over and over again. Parts of it feel very verite and then out of nowhere an image hits you that's almost painterly, colours and framing just so. It's a dark film - a huge amount of shots show characters in darkness, illuminated only in part, say by torch or candlelight, and the brothers and their circle of friends attend night school. He likes fairly long takes - unsurprisingly, given the running time - but the film still moves faster than you might expect. The overall effect is not unlike reading a giant novel, perhaps like James Clavell's Asian Saga books without so much hysterical melodrama; there's little or no over-acting and the only music is strictly diagetic.
It's also startlingly gripping, given how defiantly arthouse it is. The plot, such as it is, is not rammed front and centre but there is an overarching sequence of events, pitched just at the right level to have us as enthralled as with any soap opera, yet dialled back so we can appreciate the human drama in every moment taken by itself. Also, it could be argued nothing much happens for great stretches of the film, but when the confrontations come you realise much of that seeming inaction was careful buildup, long crescendos that make the tense parts that much more effective. There are several memorable set pieces, most notably a desperate, pitched battle between two of the teenaged street gangs in almost pitch black night and torrential rain, and the moment where the father comes to the attention of the secret police - for what, we're never really sure, but the sheer inhuman beauraucratic malevolence ("You didn't write down you knew this person! Do you have something to hide?" etc., etc.) and the brief glimpse of someone who's made them a lot angrier already is every bit as nerve-shredding as hysterical young people carving each other to pieces in near total darkness.
The film is also replete with subtext and commentary, from the aforementioned shots in darkness, characters moving into or out of the light (mirroring everyone's search for purpose and affirmation of themselves) to the way the film touches on Taiwan's lack of any identity as a whole (the young cast idolising Elvis - the title actually comes from Are You Lonesome Tonight? - or the houses their families live in having once belonged to the occupying Japanese). None of it is pushed any more forcefully than it needs to be.
The acting is mostly excellent - as might be expected given Yang apparently spent most of the time preparing for filming training his cast. Some of the younger boys come across as perhaps a little flat, but this is nitpicking, more or less. Again, there is virtually no overacting - the naturalistic approach draws you in so much that when the characters are pushed over the edge (and oh, they are) their pain and vulnerability hits home to a frightening degree. The climax, when Yang finally gets around to it, is flat, and weary, yet it feels right - as if grief piled on grief has just left these characters weeping at the sheer hopelessness of it all. Nonetheless, it's not a depressing film, by any means - playing it as a period piece sidesteps that more or less completely. It invites contemplation rather than despair, asking the country "Were we really doing that well back then? Are we doing any better now?"
A Brighter Summer Day can be a struggle - its sheer length, its subject matter and its arthouse qualities mean it's definitely not for everyone. At the same time it's easy to see - perhaps not even a quarter of the way in - why it's widely acknowledged as the pinnacle of Yang's career thus far. For all it's a difficult film to get to grips with it's no less a masterpiece - intelligent, multi-layered, gripping, compelling, thought-provoking and so visually striking as to seem effortless. If you've got the patience, recommended without question - this goes up with Jiang Wen's brilliant In The Heat Of The Sun as one of the best Asian films I've ever seen.
