Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the film centers on Hsiao Si’r (Chang Chen), a boy from a middle-class home who veers into juvenile delinquency.
[3] Chang Chen (nickname Si'r), a junior high student in 1959 Taipei, is forced to attend night school after failing a test.
This upsets his father, a career government worker, who is aware of and worried about the delinquency rampant among night school students.
The same night, Si'r's father is arrested by the secret police and interrogated about his past connections with the Chinese Communist Party.
[4] The original Chinese title, 牯嶺街少年殺人事件, translates literally as "The Homicide Incident of the Youth on Guling Street", referring to the 14-year-old son of a civil servant who murders his girlfriend, who was also involved with a teenaged gang leader, for unclear reasons.
The site's critics' consensus reads: "A fantastic cinematic and artistic achievement, Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day depicts youth, ideals, violence and politics in a melancholic, tender light, culminating in a complex portrait of Taiwanese identity.
Scott wrote in his 2011 review for The New York Times, "In every aspect of technique —from the smoky colors and the bustling, off-center compositions to the architecture of the story and the emotional precision of the performances — this film is a work of absolute mastery."
[10] He also remarks that the "breadth of action is extraordinary, and a sense of the contradictory pulls of daily life emerges steadily... the result is a dispassionate look at teenaged passions, a deromanticized treatment of young people growing up in a repressive milieu.
"[14] Ari Aster named it one of his favorite films in The Criterion Collection in 2018 and commented that "A Brighter Summer Day is just an amazing gangland epic.
A Brighter Summer Day shifts from a fraught, violent story about teenage gangs to a more introspective and family-oriented movie where the main character passively witnesses how his father is accused of espionage, his brother is in huge debt and his mother suffers in silence.
Cheshire explains this transition of "faces": The “outward” face is a highly critical view of a society in which all proper authority—a very Confucian concern—has been eroded or undermined, so that a young man like Xiao Si’r can be hurled into the spiral of violence indicated by the film’s Chinese title, which translates as “The Youth Killing Incident on Guling Street,” referring to a notorious crime that inspired the film.
The “inward” face, meanwhile, indicated by the lyrics of the 1960 Elvis Presley hit “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” which gives the film its English title, has little to do with Taiwan and much to do with a condition unbound by time or place: the loneliness, melancholy, and longing of adolescence.
Further context is seen in the ethnic and class tensions between Chinese, native Taiwanese, and Japanese residents of the island, as well as the cultural influence of the West, especially the United States.
In 2009, the World Cinema Foundation issued a restoration of A Brighter Summer Day, using the original 35mm camera and sound negatives provided by the Edward Yang Estate.
[18] The Criterion release features the film in a new 4K digital restoration with a monaural soundtrack (on the Blu-ray), and also includes a new audio commentary from critic Tony Rayns; a new interview with star Chang Chen; Our Time, Our Story, a nearly two-hour 2002 documentary covering the Taiwanese New Wave that features interviews with Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming Liang; a video-taped staged performance of Yang's 1992 play Likely Consequence; new English subtitle translations; an essay by film critic Godfrey Cheshire; and a Director's Statement from Yang written in 1991.