A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991) (Patreon)

Considered by many to be Yang's masterpiece, A Brighter Summer Day certainly earns its four-hour runtime. For one thing, the film's episodic organization keeps things moving at a brisk, varied pace, often turning away from its putative center, Si'r (Chang Chen) and observing some of the action swirling around him, particularly the plight of his parents. But also, this is a fairly panoramic film, effectively capturing a very specific time and place: Taipei, thirteen years after the communist revolution on the mainland, as people begin to suspect that this temporary relocation may in fact be permanent.

On Twitter I joked that this film is essentially The Warriors as conceived by Yasujiro Ozu. While that's clearly simplistic -- you really only have two rival gangs, with somewhat permeable boundaries -- there is an occasionally bothersome focus on the internecine fighting and posturing of the Little Park gang vs. the 217's. With a solid core of young boys, always surrounded by secondary characters and hangers-on, these gang scenes can be hard to parse. It helps that the two groups usually wear different shirts, but then when they're at school, they are all in uniform, which effectively differentiates their two primary identities. Officially, they are all the same; privately, they are a little less so, but too unformed to really stake out individual lives.

The main exception to this is of course Si'r, but also a couple of somewhat unusual figures who stand apart. The prime example is Cat (Wang Chi-tsan), a much smaller kid who is a bit like a mascot for the Little Park gang, and who is actually finding himself through rock and roll. In addition to singing with a band, with his stark, heavenly falsetto, he is also the one who collects records, procures translations of lyrics, and in one of the the film's most poignant moments, receives what may in fact be a personal letter from Elvis. Yang subtly suggests that despite appearances, Cat is what the future of Taiwan looks like, and not Si'r.

Poor benighted Si'r. He makes the mistake on hinging is sense of self on his desire for Ming (Lisa Yang), the girlfriend of a gang leader who is off in the military. Although Yang does not really make Ming's subject position clear (this is a film about boys and men, almost exclusively), she appears to be adapting to life in Taipei by exploring sexual freedom. As we see, Si'r's possessiveness becomes his downfall, to say nothing of Ming's. If there is one notable flaw in A Brighter Summer Day, it's that the film does not effectively depict Si'r's simmering resentment. Yes, he devolves from "bookworm" to street thug, but it's fairly late in the film when it's clear that he's actually unbalanced, not just rebelling.

It's possible that Yang's lack of development where Ming is concerned is meant to mirror Si'r's distorted perspective. We learn that she not only has been with a couple of the other guys, notably gang rival Sly (Hung-Yu Chen), but has been ... I hate to say "groomed," because of the current politics around that word, but Ming has indeed been manipulated into a "relationship" with the adult doctor (Shih Ming-Yang), so it's unlikely that Ming might have a healthy outlook on sexuality, and Si'r's idealization can only represent more pressure on her to conform to the desires of men.

A Brighter Summer Day is a truly novelistic film. I haven't even discussed how Si'r's honorable father (Chang Kuo-Chu) is demoted and harassed by the Taiwanese police for his ties to a mainland professor; the way that two adults, Shandong (Alex Yang) and Threads (Hang Shen) manipulate the teen gangs behind the scenes; the movie studio next door to the high school; or the mid-film introduction of Ma (Tan Chih-Kang), a delinquent from another part of town who enters the scene as a free radical and temporarily becomes a friend to Si'r. With admirable restraint, Yang balances all of this material, while continually returning to the film's core, the teen gang drama.

So yes, yes, yes, A Brighter Summer Day is a remarkable achievement. That's news to no one. So let me conclude with my two somewhat heretical opinions about the film. First, Yang may be a bit clouded by his own nostalgia.The gang plot appears to be the most autobiographical part of Summer Day, and this permits him to narrate the film from his own perspective while attending to the other sorts of business happening around him as a young man in Taipei. But this doesn't change the fact that the kids' story is the least compelling element of the film. (However that could be a result of encountering Summer Day in 2023, when young adult fiction has co-opted so much of the world's storytelling.

Second, I think I find A Brighter Summer Day to be a film-text that falls a bit between chairs. Over the course of four hours, there is only so much detail Yang can provide. So the broader context of people like smooth criminal Wang (Hsu Ming), the relationship between Si'r's father and mother (Elaine Jin), or what all of Si'r's sisters -- in fact, all the girls -- were up to when the boys were out running the streets. So I actually think A Brighter Summer Day feels less like a work of expansive cinema, and more like a truncated limited-run TV series. Which is to say, I would have gladly watched eight more hours of this film.