Student Academy Awards Series Part 6: A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers - Birdy Wei-Ting Hung

A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers, dir. Birdy Wei-Ting Hung

A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers is Birdy Wei-Ting Hung’s brilliant pastiche of the history of Taiwanese cinema. Created for the completion of her M.F.A. at the School of Cinema, San Francisco State University, Hung’s film is informed by her creative work in music videos, narrative fiction, and video essays. A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers is a celluloid dream shot through with Hung’s interests in experimental aesthetics and builds a vivid narrative of sexual awakening, exploring gender and sexuality, historical trauma, affect, the abject, and (perhaps most of all) pleasure.

During Taiwan’s martial law period period, the nationalist government implemented film censorship laws. However, in the five years from 1979 to 1983, more than 100 lowbrow exploitation films lured large Taiwanese audiences to cinemas. Shot through with ruthless violence and seductive female nudity, the disreputable genre films that proliferated in the late 1970s and early 1980s remain a realm of Taiwanese cinema that has been largely overlooked abroad, due in large part to just how down-and-dirty they actually are.

 In an essay with the same title as the film, Hung writes about her first encounter with Yang Chia-Yun’s The Lady Avenger (1982), which came when she was researching Italian giallo film. A vintage newspaper movie poster grabbed her attention; the advert depicted a sensational female vigilante that visually recalled the poster for the giallo film All the Colors of the Dark (1972), only this time it was an Asian woman’s face. The giallo that so affected Hung makes it into her film too; the characters see Dario Argento’s 1976 film The Hatchet Murders (Profondo Rosso) in the “adult” cinema—not to mention the lurid colours and prominent sensuality that A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers is soaked in.

Following the period where genre cinema reigned in Taiwan came a return to the more staid, wholesome national cinema. In 1983 emerged the Taiwan New Cinema, as it came to be called, films which primarily showcased a more realistic style with their depictions of subject matter close to the social reality, offering a retrospective look into the lives of the common people. This includes directors such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang and Edward Yang, with his most popular, most famous film, A Brighter Summer Day.

 Hung rewrites film history by combining these two eras, and their two styles of filmmaking. A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers puts the entire history of Taiwanese film in a Tarantinoesque genre blender to create a thrillingly new kind of mashup. Hung has the protagonist of her film (Wei Huang, dressed just like the heroine of Yang’s film) coming of age on a hot summer day in the 1980s, thinking about her future, considering love. She goes into a movie theatre with a young soldier, and pictures herself as the star of the show. Then, in her vivid daydream, she’s a lady avenger, too, a bad-ass Lady Snowblood unleashing her fury, out for bloody revenge on the men that wronged her, in a reversal of the tragic stories of so many Asian women Hung had seen on screen.

While the context of Taiwan’s national cinema certainly lends a deeper understanding to A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers, it is also a film of immense and immediate pleasures. The gorgeous 16mm film photography by genius cinematographer Ai Chung looks nothing less than incredible; from the ravishing red of the juiciest watermelon you’ve ever seen, to the glimmer of a samurai sword, to the dimly welcoming lights of the local cinema our heroes visit, each dazzling shot could be framed. By forgoing dialogue in favour of close-mic ASMR-type sound, Hung has created a ten-minute physical sensation, a sensory exploration where each moment of the film is calibrated for peak pleasure for the viewers.

A Brighter Summer Day for the Lady Avengers is about a love for the movies, and it is a film that is easy to get lost in, radiating in the colours, the style and the mood. The action scenes are thrilling, and the romance is steamy, even the end credits are a kaleidoscopic, giallo-inspired blast! Hung seems to excel at every genre at which she tries her hand; whichever direction she chooses to go for her next film it is sure to be appointment viewing.

Review by: Joshua Hunt