A Brighter Summer Day

The death of ideals — when the weak draw a blade, they can only strike at those even weaker

Edward Yang’s films have long been described as a “scalpel” dissecting Taiwanese society, and his masterful grasp of detail — geographical, historical, cultural — more than justifies that reputation. Across his “Taipei Trilogy” and “New Taipei Trilogy,” Yang anatomized Taiwan from multiple angles, yet it is A Brighter Summer Day, which stands apart from those two cycles, that remains his sharpest scalpel of all.

After spending nearly ten hours with this film — the original cut, analyses, background research, and studies of the director — I have at last arrived at a preliminary assessment. The four-plus hours of the original cut made me realize, for the first time, how perfectly Ann Hui’s words apply: “Some things, when they cannot be written down, must be made into a film.” If this story were rendered in prose alone, it might truly have lost all flavor.

Though limited by my own ability, I hesitate to delve too deeply into history, yet out of respect for the film I offer this brief background: the story unfolds in the 48th year of the Republic of China — that is, 1959 — a decade after the Nationalist government fled to Taiwan, during the period of martial law. Over two million people had retreated to the island, and their children were coming of age, a new generation living under an extraordinary convergence of history and geography. Those two million came from every corner of China, speaking a bewildering mosaic of dialects, caught in immense cultural collisions that left them utterly adrift (partially adapted from the film’s opening narration).

A Brighter Summer Day is a grand epic, only it bears too modest a name. Though the title sets the narrative through-line, the film’s scope is vastly broader, focused on an entire era — it is an interweaving and collision of multiple groups and classes. Chai Jing’s interview exposed the story behind Yao Jiaxin; that was enough to stir our empathy and prompt self-reflection. But what Edward Yang exposed was the pathology of an entire era behind people like Yao Jiaxin — the shared helplessness of small individuals crushed beneath an immense social machine, under a dark political repression, behind impenetrable class barriers. If you are a nobody, no matter how you resist or struggle, you cannot make the slightest dent in this rigidly stratified social structure. The resistance of the weak can only wound those even weaker, and in the end, destroy themselves along with them. That is why Xiao Si’r’s knife thrust at the film’s end has been incisively summarized by a Douban reviewer as “a knife from the weak to the weak.” That blade was Xiao Si’r’s despair at his goddess’s betrayal and the utter death of their love, but it was also a self-immolating blow of rage from the weak, crushed by an oppressive society. That one knife destroyed two young people and the families behind them — a crime of passion born from love turned to hatred, yes, but also a muffled, anguished cry of the weak in the depths of despair.

Through the content, I saw a central theme: the death of youthful ideals.

The reason I love A Brighter Summer Day and consider In the Heat of the Sun its lesser is precisely that Edward Yang, with cool precision and meticulous care, lays bare the entire process of a young man’s ideals crumbling to dust.

A man’s first idol is always his “father.” For Xiao Si’r, his father was a towering figure of integrity and fire. The first time Father is summoned to the school office to meet the teacher, he argues passionately, insisting the examination system is flawed. Xiao Si’r stands behind his father, silent, but his heart brims with admiration. On the way home, Father tells him to have backbone. Then martial law tightens its grip on Taiwan. Father is called in to write confession materials, day after day. A month passes, and Father has aged immeasurably — the old heroic spirit gone, reduced to a timid, taciturn shell. The image of the father collapses.

A man’s second idol is his “brother” — the code of fraternal loyalty, through fire and flood. This is why Xiao Si’r, though enamored with Ming, also reveres Honey. Honey is a true brother who lives by the code. But Honey’s old-school code of the streets has already become obsolete, and he dies in the schemes of the military-village gang. This lamp of righteousness is extinguished.

“Losing the whole world means nothing, as long as I can be with you” — that is the anthem of every naive love. A man’s third comfort is love, the source of his courage and strength, the courage with which he stands against the entire world. So when Ming finally speaks the words, “I am just like this world — I cannot be changed,” the last lamp in Xiao Si’r’s heart goes out. He can find no more exits, no more supports, and begins to drift.

He chooses violence, murder, and then spends half his life in prison.

In our youth, driven by instinct, we hate evil with fierce conviction, draw sharp lines between love and hate, cannot tolerate a single grain of sand in our eye, and even believe that whatever exists is unreasonable and must be overthrown and destroyed. Yet sooner or later, we must step into society. Reality is always crueler than what the mind imagines; the world is never as perfect as we dreamed. Gradually, we come to accept that “whatever exists is reasonable,” and then we feel the helplessness — and more importantly, we discover that, beyond shattering a wine bottle, there is truly nothing we can change.

I might console myself with the thought: I am only seventeen; I still have time to use a vibrant life to refute this pessimism of yours. But Yang-Yang’s line in Yi Yi — “I’ve grown old too” — struck me down completely. It turns out I can no longer escape. The same is true of A Brighter Summer Day. The ages and thoughts I have lived through, the ugliness and helplessness I have witnessed — all of it tells me that I was entangled in these weighty questions long ago. Since there is no avoiding them, can one ever break free? Perhaps the choice made after that long silence is the choice of a lifetime, and the true meaning of “coming of age.”