IMDB Rating:8.6 IMDB Link:A Brighter Summer Day Released: Sep 9, 1991 Rating: Not Rated Genres:Drama, Romance, Sub Genres: Running Time: 237 minutes AKA: Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian Country: Taiwan Language: Mandarin Official Site: Official Site Views: 2,128
Plot: Those of us who get easily swept up in the tender, boundless empathy of Yi Yi may find it difficult to remember (or, due to the general lack of availability of Edward Yang?s other films, may not even realize) that much of this great Taiwanese director?s career sprang from his bitter sense of irony. While Yang?s final masterpiece suggested an artist beginning to make peace with an unjust world, his other major works were made in a spirit of indignant protest against a culture he felt was actively suppressing its own history and cheating its youth. Now that the World Cinema Foundation?s newly restored print of the 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day is finally making its stateside debut as part of this year?s Film Comment Selects slate, Yang fans will get a stronger dose of the anger that only occasionally disrupted Yi Yi?s chastened world-weariness and Ozu-like tranquility. Where Yi Yi was dominated by brightly lit compositions contrasted with a handful of melancholy nighttime sequences, A Brighter Summer Day traps its audience in a permanently murky atmosphere?one that seems intended to precisely capture the political anxiety of its historical moment, but that also renders our relationship to time and space unstable.
