This review contains various thematic spoilers but only vague allusions to plot spoilers. Read at your discretion.

A Brighter Summer Day is a truth epic, a four hour journey into the abyss of teenage disillusionment. It's about the reality of growing up and the consequences of an aimless life. It's a quiet movie, of people kissing in the dark, with conversations happening between people offscreen, of themes muted in favour of shapeless ideas. It's paced like life itself, with threads weaving gradually into the story, some exit before the end, others remain forever. This is a tale of music, love, injustice. A brick to the face, a desk in an empty room, a beating watched through a window. The cinematography…

"If a person apologizes for wrongs they didn't commit, then they are capable of anything terrible."

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"Natural? You can't even tell real from fake."

If it's slowly becoming a cliche to call this film 'novelistic,' it is simply because it is true, as much as I would like to perversely dis-spell that notion (a truly self-destructive act!). Over 100 characters with speaking roles, this creates a density of details and interrelationships which serve as both a portrait of a culture (and/or diminishing culture with the beginnings of a new one) as well as a process of depersonalization borne from the desire for cultural identity. Xiao S'ir is at once a fully realized, developing character himself and a walking metaphor…

It's truly a shame that A Brighter Summer isn't better known because it's truly one of the greatest landmarks in modern cinema. It's about a lot of things at once, but Yang beautifully balances everything out. It's as intimate as a love story, but at the same time also as expansive as a historical film. Set in 1960s Taipei, the film is said to be based on a real incident that the director remembers from his school days when he was 13. It's a violent incident, which the film places in the context of the political environment in Taiwan at that time.

A Brighter Summer Day is nearly four hours long but it doesn't take it's lengthy running time for…

49/100

Second viewing, last seen 30 January 2000. (According to my log, I also saw High School that day. It's one of the shortest Wiseman films, but still, that's a whole lotta adolescent rebellion.) Wish I had a stronger case to make for my contrarian opinion, but the film's ostensible greatness is simply lost on me—what I saw, again, was four solid hours of maddeningly shapeless quasi-memoir, centered around a protagonist who never quite comes into focus and a mundane turf war between rival youth gangs. Chang Chen's appeal has always escaped me, even in movies I otherwise quite like (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Red Cliff); here, in his screen debut, he's such an empty vessel that Si'r's final act…

The western title for Yang’s most universally and all-embracing giant mammoth of a film is inspired by western culture: A Brighter Summer Day is taken from the lyrics of Elvis Presley's Are You Lonesome Tonight?. The original title is literally translated as Youngster Homicide Incident at Guling Street. Naturally, I would opt for referring to this film with its original language title, but the universal thematic content of this colossus ironically leads us to conclude that both titles/sides are irreparably coexistent. Both titles are relevant, one from the angle of the loss of cultural identity and the latter from the social perspective.

Youngster Homicide Incident at Guling Street justifies its length for its enormous array of socially concerning topics, and…

“Are you sorry we drifted apart? Does your memory stray… to a brighter summer day?”

The perilous search for identity in an ever-changing world seems to define the adolescent experience. Yet coupled with this ephemeral sense of youth is indescribable moments that linger in one’s mind for years. For me this was the rusted goal post, missing its net, quietly wobbling in the wind as I played soccer with friends.  The impressions on my forehead I’d get from constantly falling asleep on the 6 am bus ride to school. My dad’s headlights piercing through my blinds at 7 pm, signaling his late arrival from work. These brief, seemingly non-essential moments are what make us human, and form our memories not around…

“Are you lonesome tonight?”

Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is a film where everything and nothing happens all at once. An unrivalled artistic achievement in its magnitude and scope, the film encompasses adolescence, ideals, love, and anguish in a tender portrait of Taiwan's search for a collective identity. The film chronicles the exploits of the young and disillusioned Si’r, who is forced to attend night school after failing one of his classes; his family grows worried he will be influenced by the delinquents who also attend the school.

But the world of A Brighter Summer Day extends far beyond this almost superfluous plot description. Yang's 1960s Taiwan is vibrant and textured while losing none of its authenticity and realism.…