The Transitory Spaces of “A Brighter Summer Day”
Criterion
When I think of the impression that A Brighter Summer Day leaves, I think of the pacing, the quiet, and the muted pastel colors. Sometimes they all work in concert with one another, like a shot that lingers on a group of preteen boys standing in a beige, spacious ice cream parlor, empty but for them, surrounded by pink and blue gingham-checked tables and streamers strung up above them. It’s an environment of stillness and remove, the visions of violence from the teen gangs at the film’s center punctuating long takes and stretches of placidity. That violence, a symptom of the dislocation felt by these kids in the first decades of Taiwan’s nationhood, is shocking in its frequency, severity, and the sheer youth of those involved. The film remains caught between those two poles, quietness and chaos, sweetness and cruelty, sliding back and forth before it finally tips in favor of one over the other. There is nostalgia, to be sure, and it’s ultimately a very tender look at the period, but it’s not blind nostalgia. It exists in a transitory space, not quite one thing not quite the other, chiaroscuro nights nestled between soft pastel days, and that mood echoes throughout all facets of A Brighter Summer Day. Taking its English title from a line in Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (“Does your memory stray/To a brighter summer day?”), it recalls that song’s wistfulness and nostalgia, its romantic longing, and that in-between space of a breakup, one foot in one frame of mind, one in the other, looking back into the past as you cross reluctantly into the future.
It is in all senses a film of transition, from its framing to its characters, as it follows Xiao Si’r, a rebellious junior high student, and his friends as they navigate the gang-ridden landscape of early 1960s Taiwanese youth culture. Apparent within the first few scenes is the way that doorways recur, at home, at school, in communal spaces, as the camera peers into these selectively framed moments, segmented movements. Especially in Xiao Si’r’s house, an old Japanese-style house common to the formerly Japanese-occupied Taiwan, doorways feel omnipresent, with director Edward Yang splitting the camera’s perspective between spaces within the house. The home is already a disconnected space in terms of the way the family interacts with it, a structure not belonging to their ethnic Han Chinese culture (at one point the older son remarks on the lasting Japanese domination of Taiwanese life), and that feeling is amplified through the transient motif of doorframes, multiple rooms seen at once in a disjointed physical space.
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Beyond that are the many static shots of Yang’s camera positioned in one room looking into another through the doorway, often seen in moments of intense conversation. In one instance, there’s a fight between Xiao Si’r and his friend Ma, a military commander’s son. It’s a breaking point for their relationship because they're both in love with Ming, a girl at school. You watch Xiao Si’r as he yells at Ma through an entryway into Ma’s family’s stately compound, watching them transition out of friendship and, in Xiao Si’r’s mind, into sworn enemies, the sort of exaggerated archrival dynamic that only angsty preteens can conjure up, where a middle school love triangle should become a life and death situation. Doorways impart a sense of an unfixed environment, in perhaps a departure from the more typical way of doing so, of using a constantly moving camera. In a doorway you're inherently moving from one space to another, whether that’s in a house viewing multiple rooms at once, trapped in an in-between area, or using a single entryway as a portal into a pivotal moment in the story.
The lighting serves a similar purpose, switching between bright sun-washed days of classic childhood scenes—of going to school and riding bikes and hanging out on the tennis court and listening to records—to night scenes that are incredibly dark. They take place in quiet suburbs, lit by only occasional streetlamps, with houses and public buildings oases of light studding total blackness. In those shadowy spaces the kids are always getting up to something that they shouldn't be, or having social engagements that feel beyond where they are as kids. There’s a scene where Xiao Si’r and Ma have a double date on the tennis court and flip what was this sunny place for sports to something that's a little more sinister, where they're there in the dark trying to get these girls to do something with them. The film continues this cycle where neither thing reigns supreme, the light nor the dark, always vacillating between the two.
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In the daytime are these soft, hazy colors, pastels and light tans, even the tropical foliage isn’t too loudly green. It's all a little Norman Rockwell, despite that being, of course, an American reference. There’s some commonality in the 50s and 60s of Taiwan and of the US, as American culture filters through in phenomena like all of the kids’ idolization of Elvis. The light touches of barely-there color feel so innocent, nothing lurid about them, and then are totally obscured by shadows at night. Lighting and color both alternate between the sunny and the shadowy, in the same way this is fundamentally a story about the way that these boys are trading light for dark, going between two worlds, and wondering which one they are going to end up in.
Yang visualizes this idea at one point as Xiao Si’r bikes down a street at night and sees the older man who runs the corner store. He drunkenly stumbles down the street singing, ranting about his wife, and as a viewer you wonder if that’s what these boys are going to grow up into. There’s a feeling of watching a slow-motion car wreck with them. It’s not an unusual feeling, when watching any film about childhood, not necessarily a strong sense that the kids are heading for disaster, but from the vantage point of adulthood you see the traumas they’re going to take with them, or the behaviors that will become habits, or the hints of personalities will become more deeply rooted. A Brighter Summer Day is a movie primarily about late childhood and early adolescence, transitioning from one to the other. Yang so excellently creates a space where kids’ problems are taken seriously, reminiscent of The 400 Blows in how they aren't incidental to the story, they are the story.
Childhood is a transitional period that doesn't always feel like it; as a kid time passes by glacially, it feels like this is going to be your life forever. Heading toward teenager-hood that sense is exaggerated: everything feels so, so serious. That state of being, that moodiness, is readily apparent in A Brighter Summer Day, with the devastating self-seriousness of these boys, who consider the gangs they’re in to be the be-all end-all. They're not thinking about the future, they're thinking about where they are right now. All of the adults around them, parents and teachers and even older siblings, can see how damaging the boys’ behavior is, which ranges from recurring dishonesty up to real violence, but the kids themselves don’t see it that way. They live in this world that mimics the patterns of the color and lighting, toggling between innocent and ominous, with Elvis love songs and bicycles and first crushes but also fierce loyalty and brutal fights and embittered attitudes about the other kids in town. The film isn’t indebted to the American teen gang genre, as it’s very much its own story, but there are certainly echoes of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders or West Side Story.
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Despite that connection, A Brighter Summer Day has a more bleakly tragic tone to it, in its unsentimentality, its starkness. Where in West Side Story you’re swept up by the music, the dancing, the Romeo and Juliet of it all, Yang’s restrained filmmaking doesn’t allow for that. There’s no romance in his still camera, taking it all in. There is nostalgia to be found, some fondness in this presentation of the period that Yang grew up in, but it’s knowing nostalgia. Incidents like the one that marks the end of the film could happen; this was an actual case in Taiwan, a 12-year-old boy murdering a girl. Yang might personally remember the time sunnily, but he knows that the story that he's telling comes from a real place and from real problems in Taiwanese society at the time. The way that it plays out with its epic runtime, there isn’t the same narrativization of these kids’ lives that there is in West Side Story or The Outsiders with a three-act structure, a fairly traditional narrative forming the foundation of the story. There's more of a cyclical sense to A Brighter Summer Day, where these same settings of school and home and ice cream parlor are constantly returned to, and so too is the boys’ infighting, where they patch it up and then it happens again and again. Watching the film feels like being in a stationary boat, waves lapping at the side but not going anywhere, static and watching events repeat themselves.
Of course, when referencing these American films and books, you can’t lose sight of the fact that this is a specifically Taiwanese story. The subplot about Xiao Si’r’s father’s interrogation by the secret police, which for a while becomes the main plot, is a little unexpected at first in how it fits into the story as it’s been told up to that point. The sequence, as the father is taken away to be questioned and an uneasy feeling descends upon the house, is another iteration of the transitional motif, with a transitory Taiwan moving from pre-1945 Japanese occupation and the victory of the Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 toward the decades of martial law that would define its first period of nationhood. Xiao Si’r’s father’s interrogation, for his connection to suspected traitors to the Taiwanese Kuomintang regime, betrays the instability of the young nation. It’s paranoid, uncomfortable, a little bit at war with itself.
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Taiwan would eventually become a democratic, prosperous state, even if not entirely leaving behind the turmoil that shaped its immediate postwar existence. Transitional stages have beginnings and endings, as fuzzy as they may be. But when, at the very end of the film, Xiao Si’r stabs Ming in the middle of the street outside the school at night, there’s nothing ambiguous about it. It’s shocking, it’s final. It almost feels as it doesn’t fit, a sharp pivot back to the violence that defined the first half of the film after having drifted away from that and into a focus on the family. This indefinite space he’s been existing in, between light and dark, between childhood and adulthood, is over. That’s it, it’s something he can’t come back from. When the story has up to that point unfurled gradually, caught between the sweet and the cruel, the innocent and the corrupted, it's this kind of irrevocable change. Even in the first half of the film dominated by gang fights, Xiao Si’r was a bit removed from them, a participant but not an instigator of violence. It’s easier to stomach when your protagonist isn’t the one making those decisions but just going along with his friends. Here, he's making the decision, stabbing this girl that he loves. The whole film, we're on the cusp of something for Xiao Si’r, waiting for when his behavior might tip over into the irredeemable. And then it finally does. A transitory space is an untenable one, it's not going to last. It still smarts when it finally does tip, though, you still feel like this kid has just fallen from your grasp. That’s it for him, this period, his adolescence is over. It’s a gutting ending, rendered even more so by how silently, stoically, it's portrayed, as Yang’s camera immediately pulls back into a wide shot. The incident isn’t sensationalized by the filmmaking; everything that's sensational about it is there in the story, like how reporters flood into the office of the middle school doctor, who Ming had had a crush on, asking if he had an affair with her, the situation spiraling into the tawdry and sickening.
That’s the note it ends on. There’s a sort of sweet coda where Xiao Si’r’s friend Cat comes by the juvenile detention center to drop off his recording of “Are you Lonesome Tonight?,” singing of the ‘brighter summer day’ of the film’s English title. But any childish innocence from that scene is undercut by the last shot, of Xiao Si’r’s mother finding his school uniform and weeping into it, her son no longer there with her, being a kid, going to school. He’s moved on to a different stage, a harsher conception of the world, abruptly ending the carefree moment of childhood through what he’s done, the possibility of the transitional space now limited.