The title of A Brighter Summer Day is paraphrased from a lyric in Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight," a pivotal song representing the generational shift in Taiwan in the early 1960s where teenagers are far more enraptured with Western popular culture than the propaganda media being generated from China. The story here is set in the period when the Nationalist Chinese government has completed its settlement of Taiwan, and adolescent Xiao Si'r is one of the new wave of exiles with no memory connection to mainland life. The strict morals imposed by his parents contrast with the gang lives of Xiao Si'r's friends in the Little Park gang, who regularly clash with the rival Village 217 gang.
A sprawling work in every respect, this film was initially released with a running time of just over three hours and then reissued as a director's cut clocking in at over four hours. In total it features over 100 speaking parts, though the star is undoubtedly the actor playing Xiao Si'r, Zhang Zhen, who would go on to be credited as Chang Chen in a string of acclaimed films including Happy Together (1997), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and the John Woo Red Cliff saga from 2008). In addition to the multitude of actors, the film is also loaded with pop culture references from both the East and West including many cinematic nods to Hollywood staples like Citizen Kane, Rebel without a Cause, and Rio Lobo.
When the film was shown on the international festival circuit in 1991, Yang issued a statement about the film's view of cultural suppression: "It is horrifying to think that Man might have deprived its own species of the truth for hundreds of years. Luckily, there are enough clues left... to reconstruct the truth and restore our faith in humanity." He also acknowledged the heavily autobiographical nature of the work, recalling that "we kids had a lot of time on our hands. You got tired of listening to propaganda music, so rock 'n' roll stations were the ones you'd tune into. There was very little locally produced popular culture because everyone was too worried about finding the next meal. We were brought up in a Confucian atmosphere. We'd see Elvis movies and think, they that's cool, that's the sort of thing we don't speak to our parents about. My mum saw the film last year in Tokyo and she said, 'Jeez, I never knew about that.' My parents had the right to know what really happened. I had to bridge the gap between generations."
The film was highly praised by both viewers and critics at the time, with Hollywood Reporter dubbing it "remarkable" as "the movie achieves an empathetic and poignant depiction of troubled youth that evokes justifiable comparisons with similarly themed work by Nicholas Ray and François Truffaut." However, it received little play in the United States outside of a handful of repertory screenings, most likely due to the daunting running time. Today it still remains a relevant and gripping portrait of a society in transition, speaking with a voice as urgent today as when it was made.
By Nathaniel Thompson
