A Brighter Summer Day
At a glance...
- Directed by Edward Yang
- Released in 1991
- Runtime 237 minutes
- Watched at The Siff Egyptian
- Final feelings: dense with life, expansive in image, worth every second of its runtime.
A movie that left me breathless and stunned. I am a believer in the power of the longer runtime movie because of Edward Yang. He is able to work with so many threads and so many characters because he is allowed to spend all the necessary time it takes to do these stories justice. Everything is densely arranged, so much so that I worried through the first hour that I wouldn't be able to keep up with such a large cast of children. By the end, I truly felt intimately connected to their stories and their environment, which made this movie's astonishing conclusion all the more heart breaking and jarring.
I keep thinking about how this movie feels intricately tied to empire and militarism. Yang sets the movie in an environment where the adults all feel a deep sense of insecurity and anxiety about their future and their safety. By arranging their communities according to their fears, these anxieties and pressures are foisted upon the children, who then replicate that violence and repression in their own ways. Throughout this movie, tanks roll through like taxi cabs might in other films. Children play with enough guns to make an American feel at home, they talk about atomic bombs and Disneyland, the boys' school uniforms look like military fatigues. The main character learns to imitate the cowboy heroes of American western movies and pretends to quick draw his pistol to shoot his teachers. Children are listening to Elvis and rock-and-roll music and are going crazy for these cultural signifiers of a growing relationship with the West. The eldest daughter becomes a target for jealousy in the neighborhood because she is accepted into a top-tier college that will allow her to go to America for work and study. For 4 hours, I was immersed in a community that was deeply in conflict with itself and also so tied to the American empire in which I live. It's one thing to know this relationship between America and Taiwan historically, it's another to see it so honestly depicted on-screen.
The tension that builds inside of such a setting comes at you so fast it feels, at times, like a nightmare. But something that I also felt in Yi Yi is that Edward Yang refuses to escape to the fantastical, he insists on contextualizing drama, violence, and conflict into the mundane everydayness of being. There is a massacre that happens in this movie and how do the characters involved deal with that trauma afterwards? By going to school the next day. It seemed so surprising and tonally abrupt in the moment, but aren't we all everyday existing in the mundane violence that is happening all around us? It is upsetting in A Brighter Summer Day because it calls our entire way of relating to our communities into question.
A movie about child gangs and youth delinquency is not normally in my wheelhouse. I had doubts about my interest as it dawned on me that I was watching a 4 hour long drama about boys in high school. After finishing this film, it became abundantly clear that this movie was about so much more. An excellent piece of cinema, of history, and of art. I will be thinking about this movie for a long time.
More specific thoughts that are probably going to spoil more details:
There is a shot in this movie that I am still thinking about, when the main character Si'r (si er, literally 4th child) is walking to the school infirmary because he knows Ming, the girl he has been crushing on, will be there. As the two children approach, the camera pans over to a close up of the door in the doorframe instead of at the children. For the entire conversation these two children have in this tender moment, you only see 2 faint shadows in the texture and reflection of the glossy paint on the door. You see so much so clearly in this movie, so the fact that these kids get privacy from us, the viewer, in this moment, feels haunting.
As a prison abolitionist, a movie like this makes me feel so much grief and also thankful in a way that it takes so much time to fully establish how a violent and repressive environment guides its children to violence. You see so clearly how Si'r is trying to find his place in the world. The movie tells you right at the beginning that children organize themselves into gangs to provide a sense of stability and security in such an uncertain atmosphere. Si'r is learning through the whole movie about what it means to be a man, to take responsibility, to be empowered to make decisions about his own life. He is learning through his teachers the power of violent authority over others. He is learning through his friends the social power one can gain from mischief and aggression. He watches his father fail to argue on his behalf and violently erupt at his teachers which leads to his first demerit from school. He is learning from his peers about the desirability of girls and how a strong man ought to relate to them.
And let's talk about the women and girls in this movie! Both girls that Si'r tries to talk into going out with him tell him off for his selfish and arrogant idea that he is noble enough to change them! Young girls in this movie are shown having their own sexuality, their own desires, their own autonomy, and also their own insecurities and fears that make them selfish and capricious. If the boys in this movie are surrounded by a kind of toxic and violent masculinity, the girls do not idly accept that reality but move through it, testing its boundaries and trying to get what they want out of it.
There is much less focus on the adult relationships in this movie than compared to Yi Yi, but even still, there is time given to Si'r's parents as they try to reconcile their different opinions about work and receiving favors from others around them. Si'r's mother, in particular, expresses her desire to have a kickback for her benefit instead of it always being about her husband. She left a teaching certificate behind in the mainland when fleeing to Taiwan, and is resentful that her husband won't include her work in the negotiations with a corrupt family friend who is also a political higher up.
There's so much going on in this movie, all these threads of people with their own desires and wants and resentments and regrets. Edward Yang is not content to make an extra of a single person in his films, it seems. I haven't even talked about Cat, the young singer boy with musical ambition and deep loyalty to his friends, or Little Ma, the son of a general who's family is so wealthy and powerful he just brings a sword to school sometimes because he knows he can't really be punished. There are no throwaway characters here, just human beings colliding into each other, often violently, every single day. How they reconcile and come back together when tragedy and loss strikes is what makes A Brighter Summer Day so incredible. While I do still like Yi Yi more (mostly for personal reasons), this movie is brilliant and epic and awe inspiring. I am so deeply thankful for a chance to see it.