A Brighter Summer Day

Set in Taipei's Little Park neighborhood, circa 1960, Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day is like a Taiwanese version of Rebel Without a Cause. Teenage boys engage in turf wars with other teenage boys while teenage girls drive both sides crazy. Meanwhile, their parents seem helpless to do anything about it. The movie was inspired by the murder of a 14-year-old girl by one of her schoolmates, back in 1961, but Yang is less interested in the murder than in the social world surrounding it. The movie's nearly four hours long, but that's the price you pay for the kind of Balzacian scope Yang brings to this story of juveniles turning into juvenile delinquents. Using mostly medium shots, he documents everything with a rather detached eye, much like the "secretary of society" that Balzac always said he wanted to be.