A Brighter Summer Day, directed by prolific Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang, is a piece of art that deserves the loving restoration that it was given. Yang presents Taipei in the early 1960’s as a moderately civilized city on the brink of chaos. After their flee of Mainland China, caused by the defeat of the National Government, the millions of families nestled in their new homes. Within those new homes were restless kids that needed to find their purpose and reason in a new land populated by people as lost as they were. Yang’s film, which borrows its title from the lyrics of Elvis Presley’s Are You Lonesome Tonight, is about those children, their parents, and their discoveries within themselves.
Starring Chang Chen, among hundreds of other non-professional actors cast in roles both major and not, stars in the haunting and blunt portrayal of the life and times of these people. It’s difficult to not become emotionally invested with these characters and their plight. Chen plays Xiao Si’r, a young teenager in the midst of the war between rival gangs, the political unease of the land, raging hormones, and on and on. Chen’s performance, as well as many others throughout the film (including his father, Chang Kuo-chu, actually playing Chen’s father in the film) are spectacular. Learning of the fact that nearly all the actors were non-professional, I was completely surprised by the notion of amateurity within the ranks of the film. Nearly every actor nails their role and feels nothing short of realistic.
The cinematography is equally astonishing among the beauties of ABSD. Shot by Hui-kung Chang and Long-yu Zhang, the frame is always well used and never short of beautiful. The streets of Taipei are littered with teenagers and roadside shops in scenes that are lensed with a sense of confidence that is hardly seen in a film mostly filled with dialogue. The smallest of moments are taken just as seriously as the big ones in every technical aspect, and it shows. ABSD is nothing short of epic and admirable. But Yang’s reach often exceeds its grasp over the four hour runtime, and despite the excellence of major portions of the film, it can’t recover from a lot of things that are just plain unnecessary.
Despite ABSD’s name drop of War and Peace a few times, it’s less novelistic and more meandering. With what must be over 100 characters (and I’m not being hyperbolic here), Yang has a difficult time balancing them all and finding a proper place within the narrative. The movie tries to have its main focus point in Si’r, but you meet with several other gang members and friends along the way. These gang members are sometimes funny, other times interesting, most times pointless. The length adds to the feeling of time passing and it definitely felt like it. With the exquisite visuals and development of certain characters, a major portion of the film is gorgeous and intelligent enough to keep my interest and I admired the film throughout, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t entertaining or having certain storylines add to the importance of the narrative.
The importance of the Gang storyline in the film is excellent and interesting within the context of these characters, so when the film ends that storyline at the 2 hour and 30 minute mark, the rest feels like a 90 minute epilogue to the novel. ABSD tries a lot for the rest of the stories to be interesting enough within the remaining time, and it even attempts at another climax within the last 20 minutes, but it’s hard to not feel the strain the rest of the movie goes under. Ending after ending, Yang struggles to stick the landing.
For a film that has no problems with exploring every facet of the issues faced in that era, it became more apparent on how little the movie cared about the women in that era. Played as shrill, annoying matriarchs or teenagers without the same depth that the boys have, Yang has no idea where to place them except in the background. There’s even an attempt to try and explain away all the issues the women have faced within that time and it almost succeeds, until you realize it’s just too late to explain away the misuse of those characters over the last 210 minutes. The women are stuck in the background to worry and be complacent to every major event around them. The adolescent girls are just there for boys to chase around. I can see the argument that the movie is through a boys viewpoint, so it’ll have a simplistic look at that side of things, but the excuse goes out the window with every instance of familial issues and cultural differences between certain families and their values.
Despite all the issues, ABSD is a film I am very happy to have finally seen. 25 years after its initial release in China, North American audiences can finally see Yang’s film (for the first time on any form of home video here) and it’s arguably one that needs to be watched to witness another seminal experience and viewpoint that is rarely seen. Seeing the Criterion restoration on the big screen, I can confirm the amount of work that has been put into this and how clean it looks. I’m hard pressed to see how much better this movie can ever look. Whatever issues I may have with the film, I can’t deny the power it holds when it really works, and it works more often than not.