A Brighter Summer Day (1991), directed by Edward Yang. Sunday, March 5, Trylon Cinema.

My god, A Brighter Summer Day was incredible. This four-hour (!) epic I’ve heard compared to The Godfather, but it’s nothing like that at all, at the very least in being honest, in being critical of masculine violence (rather than celebrating it), in having actually decent roles for women. It’s as if a filmmaker, Edward Yang, somehow captured all of Taiwan in the very early 1960s, captured every emotion of the displaced Chinese fleeing Mao, of the way the teenagers rebelled and devoured American popular music. I can barely wrap my brain around it, I was so stunned and trying to hard to grasp everything. It’s about teenage gangs, there’s a murder, there’s interrogation of innocent people, there’s humor… there’s life, an entire world, in its four hours. I’m going to try to watch it again soon on Criterion in the hopes of digesting more of its utter majesty.