A Brighter Summer Day
Gǔlǐng jiē shàonián shārén shìjiàn
Edward Yang (1991)
This marathon, critically revered crime drama – 237 minutes long, 78th in Sight and Sound‘s latest 100-greatest films poll – is set in Taipei at the start of the 1960s. The main narrative is introduced by text on screen:
‘Millions of mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan with the National Government after its civil war defeat by the Chinese Communists in 1949. Their children were brought up in an uneasy atmosphere created by the parents’ own uncertainty about the future. Many formed street gangs to search for identity and to strengthen their sense of security.’
One of those children was Edward Yang, born in Shanghai in 1947 and who grew up in Taipei. The climactic killing in A Brighter Summer Day derives from a real crime, committed in 1960 by a teenage boy roughly the same age as Yang. In an interview for S&S in 1993, Yang explained to Tony Rayns that ‘the incident stayed with me and when I began researching it found that most of my contemporaries remembered it clearly too, whereas older people had forgotten it. And I began to realise that all of us had sympathy with the kids involved. It could have happened to any one of us’.
Yang’s fourteen-year-old protagonist, Xiao S’ir (Zhang Zhen), is the second-youngest of five children in a middle-class family that came to Taiwan as part of the exodus from mainland China. His father, Zhang Ju (Zhang Guozhu), is a civil servant. In a brief prologue to the main action, we learn that Xiao S’ir has failed a junior high-school examination and will need to attend night school to prepare for a retake; we watch the displeased father and his chastened son listening to a radio broadcast that confirms the names of high-school students recently admitted to university. Zhang Ju is worried by the bad reputation of Taipei night schools as breeding grounds for juvenile delinquency; his worries are soon vindicated when the narrative moves forward from 1959 to 1960. Yang describes the events whereby Xiao S’ir is caught up in the world of two Taipei youth gangs, the Little Park Boys and the 217s. Honey, leader of the Little Park Boys, is hiding out in Tainan after killing one of the 217s in an argument over Honey’s girlfriend, Ming (Lisa Yang). It’s Ming who subsequently becomes Xiao S’ir’s girlfriend and whom he will eventually stab and kill, close to the end of the film. In the meantime, Honey (Lin Hongming) returns to Taipei, only to die at the hands of the 217s leader, Shandong (Yang Shunqing); the Little Park Boys murder Shandong and other 217s in revenge; Zhang Ju is interrogated by secret police about his past associations with the Chinese Communist Party and, after being released, is demoted in his government job. The film’s epilogue is preceded by more legends, which explain that Xiao S’ir was sentenced to death for Ming’s killing, the sentence was subsequently commuted to fifteen years’ imprisonment and Xiao S’ir was released from jail in 1976. In the closing scene, his mother (Elaine Jin), sorting through things in the now-deserted family home, weeps as she comes across Xiao S’ir’s school uniform and listens to another radio roll-call of successful students’ names.
This is cutting what’s obviously a very long story short – and I’ll have to admit defeat in writing as much as I hoped to about this film. Watching Yi Yi (2000) two years ago left me eager to see more of Edward Yang’s work but I really struggled with A Brighter Summer Day. It was clear enough that Yang intended Xiao S’ir’s story to be a microcosm of contemporary Taiwan and the challenges it faced, but I found it very hard to follow the details of the conflicts between and within the two youth gangs; and although the summary above might suggest that Yang develops his portrait of Taiwanese society as a whole by concentrating on a single family within it, that’s far from the case. The cast is enormous. At the end of four hours, I still wasn’t sure who some of the characters were; to be honest, it’s only through looking at the details on the BFI handout that I realise even that Xiao S’ir has four siblings. There are occasional powerful moments: the romantic-minded young gang leader Honey’s monologue, on his return to Taipei, in which he describes reading countless routine war stories along with War and Peace; the breakdown of the usually very together Mrs Zhang into uncontrollable sobs after her husband’s arrest and demotion. Yet these moments stand out because they’re conspicuous acting highlights – and, as such, departures from Yang’s predominantly naturalistic style. At other important stages of the story, I couldn’t make sense of why characters reacted as they did (or didn’t: Xiao S’ir doesn’t appear to react at all to his father’s prolonged interrogation, for example). When Xiao S’ir confronts Ming outside their high school, she sees the gun and knife he’s carrying and quietly takes them from him; I didn’t get why Ming, apparently unworried, then handed the weapons back to Xiao S’ir. Moments later, she’s dead.
I began to wonder if I couldn’t ‘read’ A Brighter Summer Day because of its cultural setting. I can’t think why that might have been the case – there was no such difficulty with Yi Yi – but the nagging suspicion was reinforced by the Western pop music that plays a significant part in the story, and which I found easily its most engaging element. When the teenagers gather at a youth club, Xiao S’ir’s friend Cat (Wang Qizan), although he’s tiny and his voice hasn’t yet broken, is the star vocal turn, performing Frankie Avalon’s ‘Why’[1], Ricky Nelson’s ‘There’ll Never Be Anyone Else’ and Elvis Presley’s ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ in a vigorous falsetto. These songs symbolise the unsure cultural identity of this particular generation of Taiwanese[2]. In the early post-war years, as Yang told Tony Rayns, ‘The image of America as a model modern country drew strong. And America was always fresh. If you tuned into a rock ‘n’ roll show on US Forces Radio, there’d be a new Number One every week. Whereas if you tuned into a Chinese music station, you’d hear the same thing over and over again’.
As the film’s intriguing English title makes clear, Elvis numbers are especially important. A couple of the older kids carefully listen to songs they’ve recorded from the radio in order to transcribe the English lyrics for Cat to learn. They debate whether the words in ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ are ‘a bright summer day’ or ‘a brighter summer day’. You understand why: Elvis enunciates the ‘t’ in ‘bright’ so definitely that it’s almost an extra syllable. Cat makes a recording of his own version of the song: as he proudly reveals to unseen officials when he later visits the jail where Xiao S’ir is being held, Cat has sent a copy of his recording to the King himself, and received an appreciative letter and a ring in reply. Perhaps the renaming of Yang’s film for its international release – the original Chinese title translates literally as ‘Youth Homicide Incident on Guling Street’ – implies that I wasn’t alone in having to latch on to the pop songs aspect of the story; or perhaps I’m just trying to console myself for failing with A Brighter Summer Day. I came out of it feeling disappointed but grateful that I’d already seen Yi Yi. If my first exposure to his work had been through A Brighter Summer Day, I might not have wanted to go back for more Edward Yang.
8 March 2025
[1] Or, as I think of it, Anthony Newley’s ‘Why’: Frankie Avalon first recorded the song, written by his manager and producer, in late 1959; the Newley cover topped the British charts in February 1960.
[2] By the way, in one musical sequence a group is playing at the youth club. It puzzled me that ‘Telstar’ was emblazoned on their drums: the satellite wasn’t launched until July 1962; the Joe Meek/Tornados single – which really was a British original! – was released a few weeks later.