Nathan (JJ) Shankar

Notes on A Brighter Summer Day

There are three types of movies that tend to really resonate with me.

The first type consists of the one-off wonders. Lacking a traditional narrative, they propel themselves on a streak of magic tricks. They leave me breathless at every moment, fearful that the magic will run out. The movies that can sustain such an otherworldly run of brilliance are very rare indeed. That's what makes them great in my book. I put movies like Daisies, The Act of Killing, and Last Year at Marienbad in this category.

The second category is characterized by ruthlessly efficient exercises in stylistic and narrative craft. The envelopment of the viewer is gradual, seemingly effortless on the filmmaker's part. Only a significant portion of the way in, if at all, do I realize that I've succumbed to the movie's spell. Bunuel's Viridiana, Kaurismaki's Match Factory Girl, and Hong's Right Now, Wrong Then, among others, exemplify this experience for me.

Then there are the movies that proceed on an epic scale. By epic, I don't necessarily mean sprawling in length or cast size, but uniquely impressive in emotional grandeur. These movies don't have a story; they have an arc. I come away from them feeling that I've changed as a person over the course of my viewing. I feel tangibly older and more wise. Some movies that have had this type of effect on me are To Live, The Godfather Part II, and Tarkovsky's Mirror. And Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day, which is what I hope to briefly write about here.

The protagonist of the movie is Xiao Si'r, a middle school boy in 1960's Taipei. He lives in a quiet residential neighborhood with his mother, father, older brother, younger sister, and two older sisters. He possesses a natural gift for studies; in the film's first scene, however, due to a poor test score in literature, he is assigned to night school. There, he and his friends Cat and Airplane begin to associate with a gang called the Little Park Boys. Si'r also strikes up a friendship with a beautiful girl named Ming, as well as a new classmate named Ma, a general's son with a reputation for violence. Si'r runs into trouble with his teachers a number of times too.

The Little Park Boys and another rival gang, the 217s, have been feuding with each other, resulting in some violent confrontations. Furthermore, Honey, the leader of the Little Park Boys, who is also Ming's boyfriend, is on the run after murdering the former leader of the other gang; two other boys are competing to fill his place. One, named Deuce, is the leader's brother, and the other, named Sly, is a bully. Eventually Sly, whose father owns a large auditorium, gets together with Shandong, the leader of the 217s. After some blackmailing from Shandong, they agree to host a rock-and-roll concert together, and split the sales. At this time, however, Honey returns. During his time in hiding, he read War and Peace, feels out of place back in Taipei, and takes Si'r under his wing. Also, he's none too happy about the arrangement that Sly has made with the other gang. On the night of the concert, he confronts Shandong, who pushes him in front of an oncoming car. To retaliate, Deuce reaches out to some of the Honey's seasoned gangster contacts. On a rainy night, they storm the poolroom hangout of the 217s; an awesome bloodbath ensures, resulting a large trail of bodies, among them Shandong's.

With Honey now deceased, Si'r becomes quite attached to Ming. In what may be the film's most powerful scene, he vows to protect her as the school band loudly rehearses around them. However, Si'r continues to get into trouble at school, and is eventually expelled. He promises to his father to study hard to get readmitted into day school. Soon after, his father is taken away for a night by the secret police. Si'r himself, guided by his virtuous older sisters, seems to be on an upward path. But after finding out that Ming has been fooling around with several other boys the entire time, among them Sly, Ma, and a young volunteer doctor at the school clinic, he becomes enraged, and stabs her in the middle of the street. Such is the story, the film tells us, of the "first juvenile homicide case in Taiwan".

Part family drama, part gangster saga, part coming-of-age tale, A Brighter Summer Day is almost four hours long, and immensely dense too. The above summary barely scratches the surface. Yang's film boasts a wide cast of characters; it took me a couple viewings to get all of them straight. The four hour runtime provides space for the film to develop many of the characters beyond Xiao Si'r, and give us a very well-rounded sense of them. There's Si'r's older brother, a pool junkie who's protective of Si'r in an endearing way. There's the middle sister, probably in early high school, greatly involved in her church and something of a quiet mediator within the family. There's Cat, a short, high-pitched rock-and-roll crooner, always the peacekeeper and a often source of comedic relief.

There's the school nurse who gives Si'r shots for his eye problem. The stern school principle who goes around confiscating bats. The drunkard Uncle Fat from the convenience store around the corner, who warms up to the family after Si'r rescues him from a ditch. And many, many more. The length and density of A Brighter Summer Day are also matched by its economy. There are always about half a dozen story threads unfolding at once, which also made it difficult for me to soak everything in on first viewing. But watching it again and again and again, I had a hard time pinpointing a single scene that went on too long. Even seemingly marginal episodes, such as the young doctor's assembly speech during the first few minutes, or the rift between the movie studio director and the lead actress, serve to advance the plot in meaningful ways. Combining a novelistic richness with taut storytelling, A Brighter Summer Day proves that lengthy stories need not be bloated.

Yang also proves to be at the peak of his directorial powers. He was known to be a great perfectionist, and it shows here in every frame. As in the other works of his that I've seen, the mean shot length is quite lengthy, leaving the viewer ample time to take in the settings that he and his team have carefully planned out. In several instances, the camera is remains still; when there is camera movement, it consists of simple pans and tilts, sometimes composed in dazzling sequences that unfold like the precise shifts of an afternoon breeze. Even when the camera is stationary, however, his shots are consistently full of layered motion, with characters shuffling in and out of the frame, along with passing pedestrians, bicycles, and carts. A rich color palette -- the deep red of the opening shot, the pastel pink-green walls of the school, the bright greens of summer gardens and meadows, warm yellow light streaming out windows at night -- endues the film with a sense of youthful nostalgia and an undercurrent of unease, and provides a steady stream of eye candy too.

Yang seems to opt mostly for longer distance shots, oftentimes at angles that approximate the point of view of his characters, particularly Xiao Si'r. Some types of shots, such as that of the entrance to the family house, or Si'r's conversations with his father, reappear several times, but by-and-large, the camera is constantly revealing new aspects of the film's various spaces, digging deep into every room of the family house, for instance, not to mention the chambers of the 217s pool hall, the nearby film studio, or even the simple two-room school clinic.

The camera also takes time to focus on a small and diverse stable of objects, to the point where they take on an elevated significance. The way Yang weaves a tapestry of shots surrounding the flashlight or Ma's dagger or the confiscated baseball bat and returns to them at critical points in his story almost renders them as characters of their own. Surely extended analyses could be written on any number of these. As in Taipei Story, Yang plays around with symmetry in the imagery of A Brighter Summer Day. For instance, the parallels between the assembly shot early on and shot of the Si'r's sister's church choir at the end, as well as those between the radio broadcasts that bookend the story, are unmistakable. Such symmetry, to borrow from the Elvis track that lends the film its English name, prompts the viewer's memory to "stray to a brighter summer day", before the onset of the much more somber "act two"; the loss of innocence Si'r experiences over the course of the story is devastatingly amplified.

Another striking feature of the film is the sound. Yang makes prolific use of offstage sound; in many scenes, a good portion of the dialogue will come from offscreen, building the effect of the viewer being there, eavesdropping the conversation. Also, as far as I can tell, until Cat's recording of Elvis is played at the end, there is no non-diegetic sound: rather, the viewer is directly exposed to noises like the quiet bustle of the neighborhood streets, the irresistible riffs of rock and roll bands, and the latest news broadcasts over the radio. Something feels deeply comforting, innocently childlike about the way in which Yang chooses to position his viewers within the story.

So what is the ultimate effect of such a dense and sprawling story, and naturalistic yet meticulously-detailed style of direction? Nothing less than a complete and convincing immersion into Xiao S'ir's world. At large, A Brighter Summer Day is a living, breathing snapshot of a country at a particular moment in time. Cold-War era militarism and a dictatorial regime cast a large shadow over the society's everyday affairs. This is not only reflected through plot points of the film, such as the father's interrogation by the secret police, or Ming's mother being brought over the straight with a military officer, but by smaller details like the contents of radio broadcasts, the weapons in Ma's house, and columns of tanks rolling down streets. We see how Xiao S'ir's parents, who came over from Shanghai at the end of the civil war, are struggling to establish a life in this new land. In turn, we also see how this society, with so many different diverse outside influences, is struggling to establish an identity of its own. The existential threat of the PRC aside, S'ir's mother remarks early on that little over a decade removed from the horrors of the Pacific War, they "live in a Japanese house and listen to Japanese music". Western culture permeates the lives of the youth, in the forms of rock and roll music and cowboy movies.

Against this tense and confused backdrop, then, our main character seeks to make his own way. The directorial style gives the viewer a deeply intimate identification with his struggles. He seeks to obtain control over certain elements of the world around him; this however, proves to be too much to expect. Starting from a place of innocence and promise, he becomes corrupted by the larger forces of society, and learns how to lash out at what he cannot control. The redeemable becomes unredeemable. This, in my estimation, is the arc of A Brighter Summer Day. Even with dozens of characters and dozens more subplots, this arc unmistakably shines through, a great stamp impressed upon every frame.

It's been a little under two years since I first watched A Brighter Summer Day. The moment I finished, I was filled with a strong conviction that it was the greatest film ever made. While I loathe distinctions like "greatest film", this conviction has never wavered, even after watching the film 3,4,5 times. I don't quite understand why the film compels me so much, but I've attempted to write some thoughts here. I do believe that the attention to detail and narrative arc in Yang's film are truly unparalleled. The four hours never fail to mesmerize my senses; they leave me feeling emotionally drained, but above all, thankful. Thankful that Yang created a work of such astounding insight and beauty for moviegoers like myself to learn from and enjoy.