Review of A Brighter Summer Day (1991) by Michael H — 16 Apr 2008

Suggestively categorized as a Wim Wenders remake of Rebel Without a Cause by J. Hoberman and the most novelistic film of the last thirty years by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Edward Yang's teen ennui epic seems poised somewhere in between those two tantalizing extremes.

While the angular distance and proscenium formality of the mise-en-scene carries the Wenders/Antonioni chill, the extensive use of off screen sound, an enormous cast of fully realized characters and a baroquely veering plot, give it a hemispherical breadth suggestive more of big novels in the Middle/Augie-March vein then the austere absurdity of fellow Tai autures Tsai Ming Liang or Hanuko Koreada. Which is to say, this impossibly vibrant epic, palpating with human variety and social intrigue is glazed with a distinctley bitter frosting.