De-Chang Yang's film, A Brighter Summer Day (1991), tells the story of the murder of an unfaithful woman. The first part of this paper tries to analyze the theme of the story told by the film, that is, the theme of the problems of power and desire under patriarchy. The second part of the paper focuses on the film's effort at self-scrutiny. It is found that, instead of arriving at any valid self-criticism, the film plunges itself in an unlimited indulgement in, or an unending study of, its own structure. The structuality of the film's structure becomes the theme of the film. Thus, the whole system based on the murder of the unfaithful woman is consolidated once more, this time by way of dismissing her murder as ”something less important than the film's structure.”