Romancefest 2021: A Brighter Summer Day

Directed by Edward Yang

Written by Hung Hung, Lai Ming-tang, Edward Yang and Alex Yang

Starring Chang Chen, Lisa Yang, Chang Kuo-Chu, Elaine Jin, Wang Chuan and Chang Han

Taiwan, 1991

The greatest gift Romancefest 2021 has given me, and possibly Romancefest as a whole, has been Edward Yang. Here's a filmmaker I'd never heard of in my entire life until now. He made his best work in the 90s, the decade when I really got into movies seriously, and I still never heard of him. Now that I have, I learn he's already gone, lost to Cancer in the early 2000s.

This is one of the main reasons I do things like this -- to see movies I've never seen before and find filmmakers I've never heard of. I don't know how I missed Yang in his prime, but I did, and I'm glad I've found him now. He's one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

This flick is a sprawling 4 hour epic about some kids coming of age in 1960s Taiwan, complete with rock and roll and gang warfare. They're the kids of Chinese immigrants, fleeing communism, growing up in a chaotic and uncertain time, when their families and parents have been uprooted and had to start over, sometimes under suspicion by the government they've fled to for solace.

Yang said he modeled the movie partly after GOODFELLAS... it reminded me of CITY OF GOD, which came about a decade later. It might be better than both.

There is a central relationship between a boy and a girl, complete with a tragic climax -- an incident based on Yang's childhood memories. I won't give it away here, but it's heart breaking and surprising while also seeming inevitable.

I can't recommend this movie highly enough. You've likely never seen anything as great. For as many movies as I watch, it is rare something strikes me like lightning the way this one has, upending everything and making me feel like I'm seeing something totally unique and exciting for the first time ever. It made me feel the way I felt when I was a kid, and all of film history was new to me. It's beautiful and terrible, simple and complex, intimate and epic. It's a masterpiece.