Edward Yang's four-hour film, entitled in English Brighter Sunnier Day (below those words, the Chinese title appears: characters that mean The Boy-Murder on Gulin Street) is not so much a movie as a vocation. This is because the film is very long and extraordinarily complex, the Middlemarch of narrative films with over a hundred speaking roles and a dozen or so sub-plots. Further, the film, made in Taiwan, is an island-picture, insular in that the movie pre-supposes the knowledge that people in Taipei would possess in the early nineties. As the commentator, Tony Rayns, notes that this knowledge is not readily available to Americans or Europeans and, indeed, as time progresses, becomes increasingly inaccessible to East Asians as well. Although the movie is very lucidly constructed, moving effortlessly between its subplots, we should not deny that it poses a number of challenges -- first, many of the characters will look alike to Western eyes and it is, sometimes, hard to tell who is who. We may account this racism on the part of the viewer or simple inattentiveness, but it remains a fact that I had to consult the brochure accompanying this Criterion release several times in order to keep track of the players. (And I am presently working through the commentary -- a four-hour task.) Second, the milieu is unfamiliar -- the movie involves refugees from Mainland China (Shanghai) who have fled the Communist regime and are living, uneasily, in houses confiscated from the Japanese in Taiwan. These people are middle-class, conservative, and, mostly, hate the Communists. They are also trapped -- they have been on Taiwan 12 years when the film begins around 1961 and have little hope of returning to their homes. Taiwan seems to be a kind of austere military dictatorship and there are many tensions between the native-born Taiwanese and the immigrant Chinese.
The film's plot resembles in some ways an immensely extended, and much more serene, even blissfully indifferent, version of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. Two brothers live with their immigrant parents. The film's protagonist is a kid named S'ir ("Fourth"). Si'r has been in trouble at high school, expelled, and is now attending a less prestigious night-school. The town is divided between two violent youth gangs, the "Little Park Gang" and the lower class "217's." Everyone listens to Elvis Presley and there are nascent rock-and-roll bands with falsetto singers. Military convoys roll down the highways and, it seems, that there are only two options for the young men attending high school -- join a youth gang or the biggest, most aggressive gang of them all, the Taiwanese army. The movie follows Si'r's attempts to navigate this mine-field. But the picture is much larger than Si'r's story with subplots involving the hero's brothers and sisters, their uncles, and his parents -- Si'r's father, for instance, is suspected of disloyalty and mercilessly questioned in some Kafkaesque scenes by government secret police. As with a Scorsese film, there are outbursts of shocking violence. But the movie is astonishingly beautiful -- Yang was one of the greatest masters of the wide-screen format in the history of cinema. His compositions are packed with people arranged with the perfection that you see in Degas' paintings and mezzotints, little floral bunches of people posed against empty space, sometimes with a dog or infant thrown in for a good measure. Yang's interiors are geometric studies of enclosure, paper walls and tight corridors framing his characters in abstract patterns that sometimes look like elegantly colored Diebenkorn canvases. Early in the film, Yang cuts from an interior to a nocturnal landscape, an image of lagoons and flowers and reflected streetlamps as strangely beautiful as a Monet painting. Some kids heading for a rumble dart across the landscape and the image takes your breath away. A few shots later, we see a movie set from overhead -- two boys have climbed up into the rafters to watch a film being made: we look down into a schematic image of technicians, actresses, wardrobe people, all of them flapping their fans against the tropical heat -- the moving fans somehow unify the separate groupings of people and the image is densely detailed, gorgeous, similar to one of Thomas Struth's big photographs. It's evident that Yang had one of cinema's greatest eyes and the movie is placidly gorgeous without being overt or unnecessarily "pretty" about its beauty. (You will see that I have exhausted myself in comparison to great, painterly artists -- and, although those similes are inexact, they are the best that I can do to articulate how this picture looks.) Furthermore, the wide-screen invites the viewer to explore the images, to look past the central action, to study the background and the landscape, to move, in other words, through spaces in the frieze that are animated with activity to other spaces that are empty or still -- some of the most beautiful images contain highly charged action off-center to space that is vacant.
Yang's staging of events is often oblique, even elliptical -- the principal events in the film's first part involve the death of Honey, the leader of the Little Park gang, and the reprisal committed by Honey's friends in league with a Taiwanese gang. Although Honey is an important character -- he is world-weary at 19, has read a novel that he regards as the best of the martial arts books, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and seems inclined toward negotiation instead of fighting. (Honey cites Tolstoy and wishes that someone would write a book about the gangs so that people "in a hundred years could learn from what we happened to us" -- referring, it seems, to the movie that we are watching.) Shandong, the leader of the 217 gang, kills Honey with a gesture, shoving him in front of a moving vehicle -- and this after the two men have engaged in a quiet, even philosophical chat: it's clear that neither of them have any inclination toward violence and their periodic assaults on one another, or opposing gang members, seem purely perfunctory. (The casus belli is a rock-and-roll concert staged by the 217 gang on turf that is nominally controlled by Little Park -- but this is no more than a lame excuse for a fight that is fundamentally unnecessary.) Yang doesn't show us what happens to Honey -- later, we see a corpse, some lights, and a small dog lapping up some blood. But the event is staged in a way as to make it invisible -- because I kept falling asleep in this part of the film, I was confused: the characters all act as if Honey is dead, but I didn't see that episode, was asleep for a while, I guess, when it happened and it took me several viewings of this part of the film to piece together what happened. Honey's girlfriend, Ming, descends into catatonic mourning and has to be sent away. Then, Honey's friends, with a Taiwanese gang, wreak bloody revenge on the 217, attacking their pool hall in the middle of a chaotic typhoon with samurai swords. (This part of the movie seems to come from an entirely different film -- the Taiwanese have found a cache of Japanese weapons, daggers and swords, and, draped in rain-slickers and wearing coolie hats against the storm, they swarm into the pool hall and cut down the hapless 217ers. The sequence is staged as if by the light of lightning flashes -- the power has failed in the neighborhood of 217 clubhouse and we see the violence only as briefly illumined acts offset by turbulent darkness. It's a bravura sequence that looks like something from a Kurosawa movie and, in fact, has an entirely different texture and emotional timbre than the surrounding picture.) On the same night as the 217 massacre, Si'r's father is summoned for interrogation by the Secret Police -- they suspect him of being a crypto-communist. He is taken to deserted army barracks, harangued by debonair and articulate interrogators, made to write out his life-story (also a metaphor for the film) while huge blocks of ice melt in the corridors of the abandoned post -- the picture teeters here on the edge of surrealism but, ultimately, withdraws from that brink. Si'r seems horrified by the carnage -- no one else pays any attention. My summary omits family quarrels, nostalgic discussions of old Shanghai, efforts by finagle a place in day-school for Si'r, and various romantic encounters between the school boys and the girls -- Yang films all of this with equal analytical focus and this creates a center-periphery problem for the viewer: it is hard for us to ascertain what is central to the narrative and what is peripheral. This effect is intentional but a hardship for the audience -- this part of the movie is afflicted by longuers and, in a warm room, it is impossible to stay awake for much of this action.
The last third of the film shows Si'r's deterioration, confusion leading to his murder of Ming. Si'r's mental collapse is paralleled by his father's ruin. Released inexplicably from State custody, Si'r's father loses his job, becomes increasingly paranoid, and succumbs to despair -- Yang handles these calamities with tact: as a character deteriorates, his collapse occurs increasingly off-screen. For the last half-hour of the film, neither Si'r or his father are shown except obliquely -- we see them from odd angles, glimpsing them in the distance, but, primarily, know of their misfortune by the effects that it has on others. Si'r insults a nurse, gets called to account at school where he, apparently, assaults the supercilious and arrogant headmaster with a baseball bat -- rather comically, there is a big barrel full of baseball bats confiscated from gang members in the Principal's office. Expelled, Si'r studies hard to regain admission but becomes confused about his relationship to Ming. (In fact, he really has no relationship at all with her -- they seem to be casual friends.) Si'r tells Ming that he will replace the late lamented Honey and defend her. With realistic and practical acumen, she says that she doesn't need his protection. Enraged, Si'r stabs her to death on Gulin Street. He is sentenced to death, but not executed -- instead, he serves 15 years in prison. We see Si'r's younger sister singing in her church choir. Si'r's friend, the little Elvis fan, has written to Elvis Presley and sent him a cover of "Are you lonesome tonight". Elvis responds with a letter and a gift and the boy makes a tape for Si'r, asking the guards to bring it to him. The guards contemptuously throw the tape away and the movie ends with a list of Si'r's contemporaries who have graduated from High School. The last half of the film can't draw the various threads of narrative into any meaningful pattern and the immense movie raises more questions than it answers. Si'r's murder of Ming is shockingly unmotivated and despicable -- it seems inconsistent with the boy's character as it has been developed in the film. The bravura sequence involving the extermination of the 217 gang leads nowhere -- in fact, the gangs, more or less, vanish from the film during its second half. The pleasures that the movie affords are its precise and lucid presentation of surfaces -- that is, the way a school gymnasium basketball court looked in 1961, the various gardens and landscapes that the film explores, and the luminous interiors with their diaphanous wings of mosquito netting. Yang's tendency is to show you something and, then, provide explanatory information much later in the film and this makes the movie very hard to understand on first viewing. For instance, there is a spectacular scene in which Si'r's father beats Si'r's older brother, the hapless Lao Er. Si'r watches from outside in the garden. Earlier we have seen Lao Er at the abandoned headquarters for the defunct 217 gang playing pool. During the beating, Si'r's sister tells him that Lao Er somehow learned that Si'r had stolen and pawned his mother's watch (an event that reoccurs several times in the movie). To protect his brother from discovery, Lao Er went to the 217 pool hall, placed some bets and won some money, but the cash was discovered before he could redeem the watch. As a loyal brother, Lao Er takes the beating without disclosing that it was Si'r who stole and pawned the watch. When we see Lao Er in the pool hall, we have no idea what he is doing; similarly, during the protracted beating, we don't know why Si'r's father is assaulting his oldest son. The film making is gorgeous but confusing -- presumably Yang wants us to experience the chaos of events just as they are presented to his characters, but this cuts against the analytical, almost geometrical clarity of the film's mise en scene -- spaces and relationship of characters in space are always lucidly presented. And, the story seems fundamentally inconsequential, too slim to support the gargantuan length of the film -- it's hard to make a meaningful and dramatic climax when nothing is at stake: in effect, Si'r kills Ming on a whim and based on a total misunderstanding. He imagines a relationship with her that doesn't exist. In the final shot, we hear a list of students who have successfully graduated from High School -- the students are going to study Chinese literature or foreign languages. Of course, this is the group of successful students that would have included Si'r but for the misadventures shown by the film. But what if Si'r had graduated, how would things have been any better? We don't see that any of the refugees from Shanghai are actually happy or successful. (In fact, as Edward Yang's own career shows, the route to success on Taiwan runs through America, and, in fact, the computer programming capitals on the West Coast -- Yang worked as a computer programmer for eight years in Seattle before returning to Taiwan to work in the film industry.) Would Si'r have been better off with a degree in English literature and working as an ex-pat in San Jose?
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