The Sun Also Rises (Screen Daily Review)

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The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi)


Dir. Jiang Wen. China , 2007. 116 min .

Five years in preparation and three years in the making, Jiang Wen's explosively energetic third feature film is a feast for the eyes and a delight for the ears. But at the same time this may prove a perplexing, often infuriating experience for Western audiences, faced with a rambling narrative and a dreamlike logic clear only to the director himself.

Taking place in three different locations and over four different time frames (the first three close to each other, the fourth moving the plot back into the past), The Sun Also Rises invites all sorts of metaphoric and political interpretations, all in need of being unscrambled if anyone has the inclination.

Whether or not general Asiatic opinion will follow the first enthusiastic buzz generated by early press screenings in the Far East, Jiang's film is certain to reach much larger audiences on its home turf, owing to the iconic value of the actor/director's name and the splendidly committed acting of all the cast.

The hidden messages freighted throughout the picture's four episodes will be far more far more comprehensible to domestic audiences, but away from home, it still retains a potently exotic value. Its breathtaking visual achievements are impossible to overstate, and it should do extremely well in festivals and arthouse cinema.

The four episodes of what finally turns out to be one story start in the spring of 1976; there is a kind of countryside fairytale mood at work here, wrapped in magical bucolic landscapes. Young mother (Zhou Yun) who loses her mind once her newly acquired slippers disappear and her teenage son (Jaycee Chan) tries to keep an eye on her every time she indulges in another bout of madness, like climbing trees, wildly digging ditches or collecting stones to build a shrine. Finally she disappears without a trace, after carefully arranging her clothes to float in an orderly fashion down the river.

In the second episode, two teachers Liang (Anthony Wang) and Old Tang (Jiang Wen) and one promiscuous lady doctor, Lin (Joan Chen), are involved in a strange bottom pinching episode, taking place on a college campus, in the summer of the same year. This time e background owes more than a little to the traditions of the film musical.

The third episode, the only one actually inspired by Ye Mi's novel Velvet mentioned in the film's credits, follows Old Tang and his wife (Kong Wei) to the village at the beginning. It is now autumn and the Cultural Revolution has erupted; intellectuals are to be re-educated by the working classes. The shy teenager of the first episode has become a brigade leader, which becomes a real problem when Tang spies on the youngster making love to his wife. The final episode goes back to 1958 and into the Gobi desert.

The mad young mother, heavily pregnant, and the treacherous wife are riding side by side on two camels and then separate at a crossroads. One of the two roads leads to a joyous, unbridled wedding celebration, the other reunites the pregnant woman with her late husband's remains, and as the sun comes up next morning (to justify the film's title) she gives birth to her son in a poetically visual apotheosis.

The numerous allusions spread throughout the film, referring to Chinese politics, Chinese bureaucracy, general hypocritical puritanism, the Cultural Revolution, the cultural influence of Russia and so on, will certainly generate much controversy; for example the lush autumnal portrait of deportation for the purposes of 're-education', is a far cry from the grim, horrific tales which abound in Chinese literature and cinema. As for the twisted narrative, elliptically advancing by leaps and bounds, it doesn't help anchor the film much either.

To compensate, however, the luxurious appeal to the senses here is total and on every level. The entire cast seems inspired by the thespian qualities of the director himself, with Zhou Yun, Chan Jr. and an atypically playful Joan Chen distinguishing themselves beyond the line of duty.

The stunningly beautiful photography covers a gamut of poetical images with a precision and a wealth that are rarely encountered; Yang Tao joins Zhao Fei and Mark Ping-Bin Lee, two of China's greatest DOPs, behind the camera.

Wide lenses and brusque cutting of image and sound instil a dynamic nervousness that keeps priming the adrenalin. Joe Hisaishi's musical interventions constantly weave themselves in and out of every sequence, their Russian and Italian references echoing intermittently, and are a rare delight.

Production companies
Beijing Buyilehu Film United
Beijing Taihe Film Investment company
Emperor Motion Pictures

International sales
Emperor Motion Pictures
(852) 2835 6688

Executive producers
Albert Yeung
Wang Wei
Jiang Wen

Producers
Albert Lee
Jiang Wen

Screenplay
Shu Ping
Jiang Wen
Guo Shixing
Adapted from the novel Velvet by Ye Mi

Cinematography
Zhao Fei
Mark Ping-Bin Lee
Yang Tao

Editor
Jiang Wen
Zhang Yefan

Production design
Cao Jiuping
Zhang Jianqun

Music
Joe Hisaishi

Main cast
Jiang Wen
Joan Chen
Zhou Yun
Jaycee Chan
Anthony Wong
Kong Wei

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