A Brighter Summer Day (1991)

[DVD Phreak]

Originally Posted by malakaheso

Yes, but I found this completely unconvincing.

It's interesting that its defenders are talking about how subtle and nuanced the film is yet it leads to such an extreme and exaggerated conclusion. To me the tone of the film was completely wrong for this kind of arc. It's something that is best suited for a more polemical film. Each to their own, but for me he picked the wrong approach to the material.

But even the shocking finale is filmed fairly subduely, with long shots galore, dispassionate onlookers, and an overall sense of that the world just doesn't care nor understand.

You need to be more open-minded than this, and accept that any style of filmmaking CAN be used for any subject. What Yang did was just a choice, and we need to evaluate HOW he did it this way instead of whether he should do it this way.

Originally Posted by malakaheso

As for your point about quoting journalists, finding the universal in the specific is a common feature of great stories across the board, regardless of the medium. It's what makes films resonate beyond cultural borders. All I ever hear is 'yeah, it's a film about the growing pains of Taiwan as a nation', but that's the only meaning they find it. The film also expresses a suspicion of authority, but in a way that seems like a hoary cliche from the 60's. The film is set in the 60's, yes, but it was made decades later. It reminded me of The White Ribbon in this respect.

In the rawest sense, ABSD does have a certain universality: troubled youths misunderstood by grown-ups and neglected by a society that is still rigid about old-fashioned traditional values but clueless about the real problems. Anyway, finding universality in specifics is not the only way in which a film can be great. Sometimes, films about another culture need to be understood "from within". It is often the western viewers' conceit that any film made about a supposedly exotic culture *should* be presented in manners "identifiable" to them, but it doesn't have to be that way. We only get that impression because these films are more "marketable" to the West, thus more likely to be seen in the West. But we need to be a bit more altruistic about this: when a foreign film has things we don't understand, it may be because we are *not supposed* to understand, and we need to learn more about that culture first before we can understand the film fully.