Cinema
A Brighter Summer Day
牯嶺街少年殺人事件
Edward Yang · 1991
Synopsis
Taipei, 1959. Xiao Si'r, fourteen, son of a civil servant who came from Shanghai, is sent to evening classes after a failed exam. Around the school, two gangs fight over the neighbourhood: the children of families who arrived from the mainland and those of families settled before 1949. Si'r becomes attached to Ming, the girlfriend of the leader of one of the gangs, who is in hiding in Tainan, while his father is suspected by the political police.
Context
The film starts from a news item that occurred in Yang's school, when he was thirteen; the Chinese title carries its name. The English title comes from a 1960 Elvis Presley song. More than a hundred characters speak Mandarin, Shanghainese or Taiwanese; the actor Chang Kuo-chu plays the father of his own son, Chang Chen, who was making his debut. Cut in three versions, from 237 to 127 minutes, it was restored in 2009 and again in 2016. Released in France in 1992 under the title Une belle journée d'été, it was re-released there in 2018.
Who it is for
A film of nearly four hours in Mandarin and Taiwanese with subtitles; it requires accepting its length.
Prizes and reception
Awarded at Tokyo and at the Golden Horse Awards, it entered the 2022 ranking of the greatest films by the magazine Sight and Sound.
Sources for this page 3
The pages consulted to check this page.