Round Four Bonus ReviewA Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)
Won over Be There or Be Square (verdict by worm@work)Won over Passage to Buddha (verdict by Melvil)Lost to Blues Harp (verdict by 1SO)Lost to M/Other (verdict by Teproc)A Brighter Summer Day is likely going to top the resurrection rankings for the second round in a row, but I'm not nearly as disappointed at its ouster from this bracket as I thought I'd be. Instead, I'm just jealous of the experience that worm@work, Melvil, and others had with this film in the early rounds, in the time before this film found its way to Blu-Ray. Yang's film consistently reminded me of Jiang's
In The Heat of the Sun as filtered through the sensibility of Hou's
A City of Sadness but maybe not as good as either of those. My other obvious point of reference is Yang's own
Yi Yi, which sets the bar awfully high as one of my favorite films of all time.
A Brighter Summer Day struck me as less cohesive than that later film, caught in between being a slow-burn, Shakesperean tragedy and a sensory, Proustian evocation of fleeting memories. When the film finds the right balance between those two modes, it's wonderful; but when it doesn't, engagement becomes an issue — especially with a running time of around four hours. It's almost no surprise when the narrative takes a giant detour near the end of the third hour; that choice is symptomatic of the film of a whole, full of sequences that work fine in isolation but don't always play off each other the way they should. There are short-comings in some of the performances that hold the film back at times as well, but any criticism of the cinematography is a bit baffling to me. There is nothing pedestrian about the camerawork (especially the lighting), and the hyperbolic suggestion that it is inferior to that of
Orange Is the New Black makes me wonder about the different way viewers can perceive the exact same things.
Resurrection Standings (the top three films will earn resurrection)Up next:
A Dedicated Life.
pixote