Critics reviews

The film is a landmark of the Taiwanese New Cinema... So far this year Criterion, has released two Taiwanese films: A Brighter Summer Day, and King Hu's A Touch of Zen (with his Dragon Gate Inn presumably coming soon as well). This has doubled their number of Chinese-language films, joining Yi yi and In the Mood for Love (John Woo's The Killer and Hard-Boiled and Wong's Chungking Express are technically in the Collection but are all out of print).

Although it was shot as a theatrical feature, it fits surprisingly well into today's taste for long-form TV narratives. With over eighty speaking parts, it's a very thick slice of life from 1960 Taipei. Indeed, Tony Rayns' commentary reports that Yang said he had developed enough story material for three hundred TV episodes. If you like soaking in a richly realized world, here's a movie made for you.

Along with Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A CITY OF SADNESS and Tsai Ming-liang's THE RIVER, this is one of the supreme masterpieces of the Taiwanese New Wave.

Seeing "A Brighter Summer Day" in the early 1990s as part of a touring package of Taiwanese films, I was impressed by Mr. Yang's synthesis of detached European art cinema and florid Hollywood youth films... To revisit the movie is to appreciate the precision of Mr. Yang's period details and novelistic touches.

The opening shows that Yang knows his Citizen Kane and Peeping Tom, while some of the finely calibrated visual gags and use of offscreen space and sound cues suggest an acquaintance with Tati. All of this is filtered through a style very much Yang's own, which combines compositional rigour with a seemingly offhand storytelling style, casually swapping the focus of the narrative between one character and another.

One of the flat-out best films from anywhere that decade, this Taiwanese bruiser (minutes shy of four hours) may be the least-seen of major masterpieces, a generational saga, set in the 1960s, of gang warfare and cultural upheaval in which every shot is a drill-lesson in eloquence and mystery. It has no detractors, only devotees, and since it needs to be seen more than once to grasp its fabric, it needs to be owned.

Though now decades old, Yang's fourth feature retains an inexhaustible freshness that speaks to viewers the world over. Like a Taiwanese Rebel Without a Cause made with the gravity and epic sweep of The Godfather, the film, which has more than a hundred speaking parts, is above all a vision, in terms of both place and time.

The film is a succession of atmospheric reveries (Proustian sense memories of school uniform fabrics, clunky radio units) punctuated by spasmodic violence, boredom and confusion breeding obscure hatreds. The cast of characters is enormous, and Yang is able to build a real sense of a community, conveying the ragged dignity of alcoholic shop owners, philosophical gang leaders, and the apathetic teen who throws his life away with a few thrusts of the knife. It is a towering achievement.

Held up for years, Criterion's home-video release of Edward Yang's four-hour masterpiece makes up for the wait with a superlative A/V transfer and one of the best packages of extras the label has fielded in years.

After years, decades of wait, it has arrived. Finally, what many critics hail as *the* masterpiece of 90s Taiwanese cinema is here to stay, thanks to a new restoration from Janus Films. A void has been filled. And it's with voids, and small illuminations, that Edward Yang tells the expansive coming-of-age story of a young man's descent into delinquency.

Yang reproduces the dense, minutely-variegated world of early-'60s Taipei, delineating the personal, cultural and political battles that defined his own generation while portraying scores of men and women of various ages from a range of classes, each with rich and specific detail. The most fully realized achievement in Yang's consistently rewarding filmography, A Brighter Summer Day elucidates Yang's commitment to unraveling the knotted strands that compose the experience of history.

In the nearly four-hour span of this vast Proustian memory piece, from 1991, Edward Yang meticulously delineates the anguish of young people in Taipei in 1959 and the gang violence that pervades their lives... Yang's methods bring a melancholy tenderness to his recollections. He films intricately staged action in long takes of a rueful, contemplative reserve. As in Proust, the closely observed objects bring the past back to life.