A modern classic made in Taiwan

Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day is an independent film on an epic scale. After eight years, the full-length version is finally going to be screened here

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A One and a Two: review

Edward Yang: interview

The first title confirmed for competition in this year's Cannes Film Festival was the new film by the Taiwan director Edward Yang. A One and a Two... is Yang's best film since A Brighter Summer Day a decade ago, a funny/sad account of what it takes to keep on keeping on when new-tech companies are crashing, relatives are dying, lovers are fickle and brides are nine-months pregnant. It confirms Yang's status as a contemporary master, so it's good news that the best of his earlier films is finally getting another screening in Britain.

Between midnight and 4am on Sunday night, FilmFour is screening the "director's cut" of A Brighter Summer Day, a film now widely recognised as one of the landmarks of 1990s cinema. It's a lovingly crafted independent film on an epic scale, made in Taiwan at a time when the local film industry had effectively collapsed. This full-length version of the film had a few special screenings at London's ICA eight years ago, and hasn't been seen here since. Its only previous appearance on British television was in a version cut by nearly one hour, shown once on BBC2.

Inspired by real events, the film is set in Taipei in 1960-61. Yang himself was in his early teens at that time, and much of the detail and all of the emotion is drawn from his own memories. To Western viewers of the same age, the setting is oddly familiar and at the same time intriguingly alien. The main characters are high-school kids and their lives follow very recognisable patterns, from the problems with dating and the tensions with parents to the hairstyles, the threads and the Elvis 78s. What's less familiar is the political and social background - and the murderous ferocity of the rivalries between teenage gangs.

Xiao Si'r is a 14-year-old boy, the fourth of five children, a loner and a dreamer. More nights than not he sits up late reading and writing his diary by torchlight in bed, the lower bunk in what was once a linen cupboard. His parents (father a minor civil servant, mother a schoolteacher) are decent, hard-working and hard-pressed financially; they were part of the huge wave of immigrants from mainland China who fled to Taiwan when Mao's communists came to power in 1949. Their children were born in Taiwan, and don't share their nostalgia for a "lost" homeland. The film suggests that the main reason that the children of such parents formed gangs was to give themselves an identity they otherwise lacked as first-generation immigrants.

Xiao Si'r is not a member of a gang, although he's friends with Cat and Airplane, two juniors in the Little Park Gang, who cultivate him largely because his elder sister is good enough in English to copy down song lyrics from their new 78s. This makes him a bystander when trouble starts brewing between the Little Park Gang (whose leader Honey is hiding in the south after killing a rival) and the 217 Gang (the sons of military personnel, named after the number of their housing estate). But he's drawn in anyway when he befriends Ming, the girlfriend of the absent Honey and the most chased-after girl in school. It never crosses his mind to get intimate with Ming, but he feels close enough to her to get jealous when her name is linked with other boys. And this, ultimately, plants the seed of his own destruction.

Edward Yang constructs a vast fresco around these characters, crowding the screen with incident and suggesting how individual actions and screw-ups may be inextricably linked with political and social pressures. Xiao Si'r, for example, clearly takes after his father Zhang Ju, a blinkered and upright man who's unlucky enough to work in one of the 20th century's most corrupt bureaucracies. He teaches his son that he can be whatever he chooses to make of himself. But he himself is crushed the night when secret policemen arrive on his doorstep and haul him off for days and nights of nebulous interrogation about his possible connections with underground communists.

By the time he's allowed to go home, he's a broken man, his morale in shreds and his job in abeyance. Yang doesn't pretend to explain exactly what effect all this has on Zhang's family, but he insists, obviously correctly, that it has a direct bearing on his son's sense of right and wrong, not to mention his attitude towards authority figures.

The most amazing thing about the film is that it got made at all. It took Yang just over three years to research and write the script, find and train the cast (three-quarters of the actors were first-timers, as were two-thirds of the crew) and to shoot and post-produce A Brighter Summer Day - all on a budget not much over $1m. The next most amazing thing is that it sustains its inventions across such a broad canvas. There are nearly one hundred speaking roles, none of them stereotyped, underwritten or otherwise lazily conceived. The combination of complex plotting and Yang's preferences for elision and suggestion over bald denotation make it a film that very much rewards repeated viewings. There is, in any case, too much to take in at first glance and Yang's wide-angle compositions allow the eye plenty of room to explore the frame and find telling, hitherto unnoticed details.

At one level, this is a piece of revisionist historiography: a corrective to the bland official versions of Taiwan's modern history, and one which obliquely clarifies the result - the defeat of the ruling KMT - in the island's presidential election last month. At another, it's a prodigious reclamation of a vanished time and culture.

It's no surprise that the film means most to audiences who know something about Taiwan and especially the peculiar and fraught dynamics of the relations between mainland Chinese immigrants and native Taiwanese Chinese. But the film's international success and critical standing suggest that it means plenty even to those who come to it without that background knowledge.

The English title, A Brighter Summer Day, is a possible mistranscription of a phrase in Elvis Presley's cover of the old standard "Are You Lonesome Tonight?". (It does sound as if Elvis sings "brighter" rather than "bright"; the issue is discussed in one scene of the film.) Whatever, it's the optimism the phrase connotes which is operative throughout the film; every character is driven by his or her hopes for a better future.

In the widest possible sense, it's a film about education. Not just schooling and the pressure to achieve academic results, but also the ways parents bring up their children, peer groups influence individuals and circumstances shape character. That's certainly one reason why many already think of it as a modern classic.