Certain films do not merely tell a story. Certain films behave like defective time machines, capable of transporting us not so much to an era as to the feeling of an era, to its humidity, its smell of dust and cheap cigarettes, the buzz of its neon lights and the silent despair that permeates the walls of houses. Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day is one of these miraculous and terrible devices. A work-world, a novel-river translated onto film which, beneath the surface of a teenage drama, hides the seismograph of the soul of a nation in exile, suspended in historical and geographical limbo.

We are in Taipei in the early 1960s. The island of Taiwan is the precarious refuge of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, defeated on the Chinese mainland by Mao's communists. A generation of children, born on the mainland but raised on the island, live with a split identity, a perpetual state of impermanence. Their fathers, officials and military personnel awaiting an unlikely reconquest, convey a sense of uprootedness and powerlessness that the young people metabolize and transform into nihilistic, tribal violence. The streets are their kingdom, divided between gangs with evocative names—the “Little Park Boys,” the “217”—who fight each other for a territory that is not really theirs, for an honor whose rules are a fragile imitation of ancient codes and poses imported from American cinema. In this twilight universe moves our protagonist, Xiao Si'r, a boy whose innate righteousness, inherited from an upright father but bent by circumstances, is an anomaly destined to be broken.

Yang, with the precision of an architect of despair, does not stage a simple coming-of-age story. On the contrary, he orchestrates the chronicle of a deformation. Xiao Si'r's narrative arc is not an ascent towards maturity, but a slow, inexorable descent into darkness, a loss of innocence that mirrors the loss of innocence of an entire society. In this, A Brighter Summer Day is the anti-Bildungsroman par excellence, a work that dialogues more with the cosmic fatalism of Thomas Hardy or the moral disintegration of a Dostoevsky character than with the sunny rebellions of Rebel Without a Cause. If James Dean screamed at a bourgeois world that did not understand him, Yang's boys whisper and plot in a world that has nothing left to say, a world of defeated fathers and frightened mothers.

Yang's direction is a treatise on visual epistemology. His famous sequence shots and his preference for distant, static shots are not a stylistic quirk, but a precise moral and philosophical choice. The camera observes, often from a distance, through doors or windows, allowing human figures to move in spaces that always seem too large or too cramped. Darkness is not just a lighting condition, but an active dramaturgical space that engulfs the characters, hides crucial details, and amplifies paranoia. Often, the most important actions take place off-screen or at the edge of the frame, forcing the viewer to decipher, to listen carefully to catch muffled dialogue, to peer into the darkness to glimpse a threat. It is a cinema that denies immediate gratification, reflecting the confusion and uncertainty of its protagonists. In this, Yang reveals himself to be a kindred spirit of Michelangelo Antonioni: both use the landscape—urban, desolate, nocturnal—not as a backdrop, but as an outward manifestation of an inner void.

The film is populated by an ensemble cast reminiscent of the vastness of a Tolstoyan epic, but its heart beats around two poles: Xiao Si'r and Ming. If Xiao Si'r is a young Werther with a code of honor that no one respects anymore, Ming is a tragic figure of disconcerting modernity. She is not a femme fatale, but a victim who has learned to use her fragility as a weapon of survival. She moves from one protector to another not out of malice, but because in that world loyalty is a worthless currency and the only thing that matters is having someone to defend you today. Her famous, chilling line – “I am like this world, I will never change” – is not an admission of cynicism, but the most lucid and desperate of observations. It is surrender in the face of chaos that cannot be ordered, the same surrender that Xiao Si'r, in his naive search for moral absolutes, cannot accept. Their relationship is a funeral choreography, an attempt to find a center of gravity in a universe that is falling apart.

Yang's greatness also lies in his ability to weave the historical macrocosm into the individual microcosm through powerful symbolic objects. There is the radio, a source of dreams and connection with the outside world (the America of Elvis Presley, whose “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” gives the ironic original title to the song the boys try to play), but also of static and incomprehensible news. There is the flashlight that Xiao Si'r steals from a film studio set, a beam of artificial light with which he tries to pierce the darkness, to illuminate secrets, a symbol of cinema itself as an instrument of investigation. And then, above all, there is the katana, a Japanese weapon found in an old house, a ghost of a past colonial identity that is reused as a fetish of power in a present without its own symbols. It is a weapon that belongs to no one, just as those boys belong nowhere.

Based on a real news story—the first murder committed by a minor in Taiwan, which shocked public opinion—the film transcends anecdote to become a universal meditation on the failure of utopias. The tragedy is not only that of a boy who kills the girl he loves because he cannot “save” or ‘possess’ her, but that of an entire generation that was promised a “brighter summer day” that will never come. The world of their fathers, with its Confucian rules and bureaucratic rigor, proves to be a house of cards swept away by the winds of history. The scene of Xiao Si'r's father being interrogated by the secret police is a masterpiece of humiliation and paranoia, a vivid representation of how an authoritarian regime can erode the dignity of a righteous man, leaving him empty and terrified. When the father returns home, broken, and beats his son for a minor infraction, we understand that the contagion of violence is systemic, flowing from the top down, from the state to the family, from father to son.

Watching A Brighter Summer Day today, in its monumental restored version of almost four hours, is an immersive and all-encompassing experience. It is a film that requires patience, asking us to inhabit its silences, to lose ourselves in its dark corridors, to familiarize ourselves with dozens of faces and stories. But the reward is a work of a depth and complexity that has few equals in the history of cinema. It is an elegy for lost innocence, a psychological thriller, a social fresco, and a philosophical essay on the nature of violence. Edward Yang has created his own War and Peace, a work that, starting from a specific and forgotten corner of the world, speaks to us about the human condition with a voice so powerful and universal that it remains, even today, absolutely essential. It is the dazzling darkness of an absolute masterpiece.