Chang Kuo-Chu

The father in A Brighter Summer Day (1991) believes in exams and in speaking up to officials. Chang Kuo-Chu makes those beliefs seem like the practical responsibilities of a parent, not an excuse to deliver a lecture. In Edward Yang’s film, a Taipei schoolboy’s life involves his family as well as the gangs around him. The father matters because he has his own understanding of how a person ought to behave. We take him seriously, which makes his difficulties worth attending to.

Chang had worked in Hong Kong productions and joined Shaw Brothers around 1980 before this role brought him prominence in Taiwanese cinema. Island of Fire (1990) gave him a supporting part in an action-drama; A Brighter Summer Day put him at the centre of a family. His subsequent work has continued across film and television, with fathers and authority figures recurring. That history is useful, but it does not explain the performance on its own.

Alongside Chang Chen’s watchful Xiao Si’r and Elaine Jin Yan-Ling’s mother, a teacher whose mainland qualifications are not recognised, Chang gives the household a father who still expects effort to be rewarded. We were moved by his insistence on education, because it makes his hopes for his child so ordinary and so exposed. Yang gives those hopes room within a film running 237 minutes, without asking us to forget the schoolboy or his companions. The performance needs that family around it: his principles mean more when we see whom he is trying to guide. Sternness alone would not carry the part.

Mahjong (1996) reunites him with Yang as Red Fish’s affluent father, while Cold War II (2016) casts him as Peter Choi, a retired police commissioner. The recurring authority figures make sense, though a grand title is not much of a part on its own. We want the writing to give him the sort of stubborn, comprehensible beliefs that Yang supplies in A Brighter Summer Day. Start there, and give the father as much attention as the boys.