A Brighter Summer Day (Saturday, November 26, 2011) (118)

Note: The great Taiwanese director Edward Yang made A Brighter Summer Day in 1991 and released it on the festival circuit then. Due to a few complicating factors, such as its unwieldy 4-hour length, it was never released theatrically at that time. It did however gain a tremendous status in the cinema world for being an unknown gem, a magnum opus that was all but unavailable.

This year, just over five years after Yang's death, it was finally released theatrically. Although I could consider the film for my year-end "Best Films of 2011" list, I will not, because I don't feel like that's very fair to the films of 2011. I am thrilled to have been able to watch it (it's a magnificent film), but I do not really consider it a 2011 release.

The title of A Brighter Summer Day comes from a scene when a few of the main kids in the film are sitting around a record player trying to transcribe the lyrics to Elvis Presley's "Are you Lonesome To-Night,"released a few months before the story takes place. The kids are obsessed with rock music and have a not-terrible band that plays in the local diner. The band members are all from the same street gang and they hope their shows won't get broken up by the rival gang.

They are all the children of mainland Chinese people who fled the Communist revolution in the late 1940s. Now, in the early 1960s, they are teenagers, mostly 12 to 15-years-old, trying to make their way in the world and find some grounding. Their parents are all modest people, generally working for the government, and they live in massive public housing compounds that contain apartments, several cafés and their school.

The gangs they create are more like the gangs of West Side Story than of Boyz n the Hood, they get in fist fights and political battles over turf, but generally are not too dangerous. They're much more likely to use a bat than anything more, even a knife.

As we follow the main character, Xiao Si'r, we see him trying to survive the street, needing to show his toughness to his fellow gang members, hoping for a better life than what his parents have given to him, trying to remain a good student and trying to negotiate the trickiness of developing a crush on a girl from the rival gang.

The story is simple, actually, but because it is 4-hours long, it has a lot of detailed information in it. It's a wonderful narrative filled with small ups and downs as the Xiao Si'r and his friends work to survive. There are hundreds are kids in this film, though it's never really hard to figure out who is doing what. Yang is very clear about everyone's intentions and motives as the story moves along.

This is what neorealist cinema is and should always be compared to. This has more of a logical connection to films by de Sica and Rossellini than anything in Hollywood or Asia. I keep thinking about Ozu's Tokyo Story, because it's equally domestic and neorealist, but it's much bigger than that and much less sentimental. The colors of the film are largely gray and green due to the concrete structures the kids exist in and the public street lighting of nighttime Taipei. The interiors are modest, but rich in detail. Xiao Si'r and his brother sleep in two levels of a closet in order to fit all their sisters into the bed rooms.

Yang had an amazing ability to work with kid actors (or non-actors) and get them to come off more naturally than just about any other director I can think of (possibly similar to the boy in Rossellini's Germany Year Zero). In his masterpiece Yi Yi the son takes pictures of the backs of people's heads, saying that that is the most honest way to shoot someone because they don't know they're being shot. It's such a simple and basic idea, a childish idea even, but a true concept.

Here too, Yang works with a passel of kids, most of whom are non-actors, and gets them to be as natural as if they were not acting at all. Their troubles and fights are real and don't feel forced or faked at all. What they do and say comes off as totally honest and significant. This is a great achievement because it's a very fine line between manipulation and profundity. Yang always stays on the good and smart side of that edge.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Fourth Portrait (Thursday, April 21, 2011)

The Fourth Portrait beings with a ten year-old boy, Xiang, walking down a road by himself. He goes to a riverbank and plays at the edge of the water. We soon realize his isolation is not just emotional but real, as he next goes to his father's funeral. Xiang seems to be an orphan.

He does in fact have a mother, she lives in another town where she works as a prostitute. She's living with a new man and has a baby with him. When Xiang is brought to her door she is anything but loving to him. He's a relic from a past life that she's trying to escape. She hates her current life as well, but is out of options about how to survive. Xiang must try to survive in this cold world.

As the story moves along, Xiang, who doodles and draws as a hobby, creates four portraits that show his emotional evolution and also give thematic context to the chapters of the story. This is a beautiful and efficient way of telling the story. This film really is triumph of formalism that is a treat to examine. There is something very literary, almost academic, about the straight-forwardness of this structure, but it is actually very beautiful and easy to understand.

Director Mong-Hong Chung's sympathetic depiction of childhood bewilderment is beautiful. He shoots Xiang at his short level or from his point of view looking up at adults, rather than aiming the camera down toward him. This is a very powerful detail that makes us align immediately.

Xiang doesn't know from minute to minute who to trust, who are his family members and which ones of them are dead or alive. The ghost of Xiang's older brother haunts the family, particularly his cruel step-father who is clearly dealing with some demons of his own. Xiang's mother is unapologetic about her work and unable to connect to her son who is looking for simple signs of love and connections.

Chung has definitely been inspired by other contemporary Taiwanese directors, most notably Edward Yang, and his brilliant film Yi Yi, and Ming-Liang Tsai, and his brilliant film Goodbye Dragon Inn. All three of these directors use amazing saturated colors throughout their works as well as beautiful interplays of light and dark. In this film Chung uses color to thematically move the story forward: the first act is blue and green; the second act is red and yellow; the third act is white.

Clearly Chung has watched movies and quotes many of them very cleverly here. A scene between a bafoonish buddy of Xiang and another doofus speaking about real estate sales is a funny take on Kurasawa's Hidden Fortress (or Lucas' Star Wars, which was taken from that as well); the squalor and pain Xiang lives in is reminiscent in tone and appearance to Igor's life in the Dardennes' La Promesse; moments are reminiscent of the desperation of poor children in So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain. (There are elements of Haruki Murakami here as well.)

It is interesting that as devastating as Xiang's situation is, this is not really a sad movie. There's a matter-of-factness to how this is his life and life will go on that is very powerful. This is a wonderful film and is particularly beautiful from a stylistic, formal and emotional stand point.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

The Fourth Portrait will play at The Film Society of Lincoln Center's Taiwan Stories: Classic and Contemporary Film From Taiwan on May 6 at 6:30pm and May 8 at 3:30pm.