A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
2xDVD5 (LD-to-DVD) | ISO | NTSC 4:3 | 227 mins | 3,88 Gb + 3,60 Gb
Audio: Mandarin AC3 2.0 @ 256 Kbps | Subs: English and Chinese both hardcoded
Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance
2xDVD5 (LD-to-DVD) | ISO | NTSC 4:3 | 227 mins | 3,88 Gb + 3,60 Gb
Audio: Mandarin AC3 2.0 @ 256 Kbps | Subs: English and Chinese both hardcoded
Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance
Director: Edward Yang
Slow, elliptical, and for the most part understated, Yang's masterly account of growing up in Taiwan at the start of the '60s is as visually elegant as his own Taipei Story and The Terroriser, and as epic in scope as Hou Hsiao Hsien's City of Sadness (which Yang produced). On the surface, it's about one boy's involvement in gang rivalry and violence (on which level, it's often a little obscure, so numerous are the characters) and his experience of young love. On a deeper level, however, it's about a society in transition and in search of an identity, forever aware of its isolation from mainland China, and increasingly prey to Americanisation. The measured pace may be off-putting, but stay with it - the accumulated wealth of detail invests the unexpected final scenes with enormous, shocking power.
IMDB
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
Edward Yang's four-hour A Brighter Summer Day (1991) is even more complex and intriguing than Yi Yi. Set over the course of most of a year in 1961, the film deals with a subculture of Mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan after the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949. A printed introduction explains that their children are now living in a state of uncertainty and have taken to forming street gangs for a sense of safety and control.
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
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From there, Yang's narrative jumps back and forth between many subplots. It's difficult to track them all, especially given his taste for medium and long shots, as opposed to close-ups. Even so, Yang's masterly storytelling skills usually find recognizable cues for each sequence, and the world he creates here is so vivid and complete that we're never lost for very long. Perhaps the main thrust of the story, or at least the one that's the most emotionally engaging, has to do with a gangster's school-age girlfriend. He has gone into hiding and a younger, inexperienced gang member becomes smitten with her. They cut class together and wind up next door, at a movie studio, where she wins an audition based only on her looks. They form an endearing bond, but his friends warn him never to let a girl become the cause of any bad blood.
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
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Other characters flirt with singing careers, putting on little shows that become both a source of income and frustration for the various gangs. Our two singers, one pre-pubescent (with a high, Frankie Lymon-type voice) and one post-pubescent, have American songs translated phonetically; the Elvis song, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" is the source of the movie's title. That song is just one coveted artifact that re-appears throughout the movie and doesn't specifically originate in Taiwan. A samurai sword, a flashlight, a radio, and a tape recorder also become important, almost characters by themselves. The arc of the movie as a whole suggests dislocation, people adrift between patriotism and something grayer and more elusive. The older characters, when they appear, either stubbornly adhere to Taiwanese traditions or have grabbed onto something else, such as Christianity. Other adults are weak and powerless. The children seem to understand all this, but can't comprehend how to crawl out from under it. And despite a murder – inspired by a real-life incident – the film still has a few glimmers of hope.
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
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Yang's film doesn't waste a single second of its four hours, and taken as a whole, reveals a beautiful, intricate, masterful tapestry that is as accomplished in its grand, quiet way as is The Godfather trilogy.
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
It's only natural that Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day begins with a shot of a barely lit light bulb. On the set of a movie, a director reprimands an actress for harping on the color of her dress. "This is a black-and-white film," he says, one of many references to the symbolic darkness that overshadows the film's milieu. A Brighter Summer Day is itself in color, but it may as well be monochrome as much of its action takes place at night or inside dimly lit interiors, and it's not unusual for the characters to be confronted by light and its almost political implications. Some of the film's finest images (young boys staring at a rehearsal from a theater's rooftop, a basketball bouncing out of a darkened alleyway) pit light against dark—a fascinating dialectic meant to symbolize a distinctly Taiwanese struggle between past and present. From weapons to watches, objects similarly speak to the present, and like the light, these objects are constant reminders that the past can't be ignored and must be used to negotiate the present.
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
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Jonathan Rosenbaum once praised A Brighter Summer Day's novelistic qualities and the way with which Yang realizes a "a physical and social world as dense with family, community, and other personal ties as any John Ford film, and furnished with more sheer physical presence (including characters, settings, and objects) than any other fiction film I know of from the '90s." The film takes its title from a lyric in Elvis Presley's "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" (the singer himself once bemoaned Taiwan's unknown status to the world) and loosely revolves around the death of a young girl by a male classmate. Over the course of the film, Yang evokes the way the military regime in Taiwan has disconnected the island's people—men and women desperately trying to figure out a way to relate to each other and their children despite the constant meddling, whether punishment or validation, of the government.
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
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In what is arguably the film's most memorable scene, a young kid in military school asks his teacher, "What should I do?" The emphasis on the "I" is important and indicative of Yang's concern for the country's oppression of its people and the limits of their personal freedom. Because Yang's compositions are so unadorned, it's easy to dismiss the director as a better storyteller than visualist, but that's to ignore the remarkable way he uses his camera to posit all sorts of emotional and political confrontations. It's in his generous, objective use of long shots and spare but startling close-ups that we see once again the influence of Robert Altman in Yang's aesthetic and the struggle of the Taiwanese people to accept their history. In essence, Yang uses his aesthetic to bring into the light that which is dark.
A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
Special Features: None
Note!
As I said above this is Laserdisc to DVD transfer and it's the best quality available at the moment, since this has never been released on DVD.
Many Thanks to Original uploader.
If you want to download it, but found out that links are dead,
just leave a comment or PM me!
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