A Brighter Summer Day

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been six months since I last wrote a blog post. Somehow, it’s another Edward Yang film that makes me want to open my laptop and write again.

The film ends quietly, much as it begins, with a radio broadcast announcing the students admitted to National Taiwan University’s College of Liberal Arts. I wonder whether any of the names are real. Hearing a string of seemingly random names through the radio static, it’s hard not to ask: what does any of this mean? Just as Elvis thinks of Taiwan as some obscure island, these students, admitted to the country’s most prestigious university and convinced that their lives are about to change, might mean nothing at all to someone else.

The film leaves me with a feeling of something vast and small at once. People from every corner of mainland China pour into postwar Taiwan. A society adrift breeds teenage terrorists armed with guns and clubs, while the White Terror keeps ordinary families on edge. Yet the film is also just about a bunch of kids under sixteen with nowhere to put their restless youth. In the end, Xiao Si is sent to prison like the tape tossed into the trash, abruptly cutting off whatever grief or pity we might feel for him.

Both films use plenty of long takes and static shots, but unlike the gentleness of Yi Yi, the camera in A Brighter Summer Day feels like an indifferent observer. It often watches from behind a door or somewhere far away, as though allowing us to look objectively at all the anger and agitation. Even during the brutal revenge attack at the 217 pool hall, we can only see by the light of Xiao Si’s flashlight, looking straight at one small corner of the violence. There are no close-ups of terrified faces, no fights to set our blood racing. Only quiet death.

Xiao Si’s transformation from a good student into someone consumed by violence is the film’s central thread. In a sense, though, he never changes. From beginning to end, he remains the same stubborn, proud idealist. He simply trades his faith in knowledge for faith in violence, mistaking his own wishful thinking for pure love. It reminded me of Robert De Niro’s Madonna–whore complex in Taxi Driver.

He is pushed around by his times: his father is persecuted, he is bullied at school, and Xiao Ming toys with his feelings. But he hasn’t been abandoned. He has close friends like Cat and Ma, and he is especially loved by his father, his eldest sister, his older brother, and his other older sister. He is trapped in an illusion shaped by both himself and the world around him. He believes violence can solve every problem. He believes that loving Xiao Ming sincerely enough will make her change. But the bubble has to burst eventually. What chilled me most was that, even at the end, he refused to take off his blood-soaked clothes—clothes stained with the blood of the person he loved.

In fact, many of the film’s characters live inside illusions. Xiao Si’s father believes Wang Gou is a friend he can trust. Honey imagines himself as Pierre in War and Peace, facing Napoleon alone. The characters who don’t live inside illusions are Sly and Wang Gou—you can tell how “fond” the director is of them just from their names.

Yang’s tenderness toward idealists comes when the tape Cat sends to Elvis receives a reply. Yet that tenderness lasts less than a minute before it is thrown into the trash. Even at the end, I couldn’t tell how the director felt about people like these, or about the times they lived in. Perhaps, like the names that briefly pass through the radio, they simply disappear: here for a moment, then gone, hardly worth mentioning.

Yi Yi

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It was past ten by the time I finished watching Yi Yi. After walking my friend to the bus stop, I went back to West Hall to grade papers for a while. I kept thinking about an argument I’d had with a student over a grade during office hours that afternoon. I was angry: I hadn’t done anything wrong, yet I couldn’t hold my own. I started wondering why I was so easily pushed around. Then I remembered something similar happening in a student club, and how I’d asked myself the same question back then. Life goes in circles. So many things seem to change, only to repeat themselves in a different form. That was also how I felt after watching Yi Yi.

I’d worried that a three-hour film would feel too long. While watching it, I found myself wishing it would last a little longer. Three hours aren’t enough to capture an entire life, but they are enough to tell the story of a year in one family. Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral, the film follows everything that happens to NJ’s family over that year: a major project at work, Tokyo, A-Di’s marriage and the birth of his child, Ting-Ting’s first love, and Grandma’s death. The camera and the storytelling remain remarkably calm, but that calm can’t conceal the upheaval within the characters.

From the adults to the children, everyone in NJ’s family shares something. After talking it over with my friend, we settled on a description: “They look calm, but they’re all a little unhinged.” NJ is supposed to be the dependable, honest one, yet he refuses to put profit first and often disagrees with the other executives. Ting-Ting, the well-behaved daughter with good grades, blames herself for Grandma’s coma and loses sleep over it for a long time. Yang-Yang says little, but his head is full of strange ideas. The characterization in Yi Yi is extraordinarily delicate. Its dozen or so major characters all feel fully alive. Even when someone who initially seems perfectly ordinary turns out to be a murderer after only a few appearances, it doesn’t feel abrupt.

I love what Fatty says: “Since the invention of movies, human life has become at least three times as long.” Sometimes I feel as though my head is full of all sorts of muddled thoughts that would sound childish if I said them aloud. I’m not even sure whether they count as thoughts, or whether they’re just some unnecessary thing people call “teenage restlessness.” So I keep them to myself. After watching Yi Yi, I felt that perhaps everyone is like this. NJ, A-Di, Lili—all so calm on the surface, all carrying so much inside, sometimes doing things that seem absurd.

A few days earlier, I’d finished Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy. If Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance pushes human anger to its breaking point, then tears everything open to show us what people really are, Yi Yi is a beating heart beneath a calm face. Look: even amid the small, everyday concerns of family life, this is what people are like.

If you asked me which character I liked most, I’d say Yang-Yang without hesitation. It almost seems as though the director couldn’t help loving him either: the film ends with him, and he’s on the poster too. (P.S. Quite a few people seem to see Yang-Yang as a stand-in for Edward Yang himself.) There’s more than innocence and curiosity in his eyes. There’s a kind of resolve, something I don’t see in the softer eyes of the adults who have been worn down by life. Even when the girls pick on him, even when his teacher does, he still stubbornly raises his camera to photograph the backs of people’s heads, showing them a side of themselves they cannot see.

He says, “Grandma, there’s so much I don’t know. So, do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell people things they don’t know and show them things they can’t see. I think that would make every day fun.”

At the wedding, a grandmother who knows everything and has been through everything chooses silence. At the funeral, a child who knows nothing and has been through nothing has so much to say, and so much he wants to know. Life comes around again. If I could, I’d like to always be Yang-Yang.

It’s two in the morning as I finish writing this. I have office hours again tomorrow. I hope they’ll be a little calmer than today. After watching the film, I still couldn’t see the back of my own head. But at least I’d seen the backs of a few other people’s. I seemed to know a little more, and to have a little more I didn’t understand. Perhaps that’s what the title, Yi Yi, means.

Movies | Jiaxun Li's Blog

A Brighter Summer Day

Yi Yi