Le soleil se lève aussi

Wen Jiang's personality takes center stage in The Sun Also Rises, his first effort since the 2000 Devils on the Doorstep, a film that has yet to be released in China. While The Sun Also Rises captivates with its sumptuous colors, magical realism, high energy, and outstanding performances, its elliptical plot and lack of coherent narrative suggests that Jiang may have purposely clouded the film's meaning in symbols and code to escape the Chinese censors. Loosely based on author Ye Mi's novel Velvet, the film is set in China during the Cultural Revolution. There are four stories and six characters in the film, but they have a tenuous connection to each other.

Three episodes are set in the 1970s and one twenty years earlier, but Jiang provides no intertitles or other indicators to help the viewer recognize changes in theme, time, or place. As the film opens with a tableau of gorgeous colors and people running, a young woman (Zhou Yun) identified as the mother of a teenage boy (Jaycee Chan) buys a pair of embroidered shoes. The colorful shoes are promptly stolen by a mysterious bird, which repeats the mantra "I know, I know, I know," and the woman falls into what seems to be madness—climbing trees, collecting rocks, digging a pit in the middle of the forest, and screaming the name of Alyosha (which we eventually learn was the name of the boy's father). Meanwhile her dutiful son tries to protect her, at the cost of having to constantly leave his job. The segment is playful, magical, and poetic in its songs and poetry, and it suggests that insanity reigned supreme during the Cultural Revolution.

In the second episode, the scene shifts to southern China, where a mob chases Liang (Anthony Wong), a professor at the University of Shanghai, suspecting him of groping women at an outdoor movie, a story that raises issues of rule by mob during the Cultural Revolution. When Liang is beaten, he is comforted in the hospital by Dr. Lin (Joan Chen) who throws herself at him, telling him how much she loves him. For comfort, Liang turns to an old friend Tang, played by the director Wen Jiang. The sequence is raunchy, comic, and absurd, hinting at sexual repression during the 70s.

The scene then moves back to eastern China, where Tang and his wife meet the son of the widow who went mad in the first segment. The son is now a brigade leader and he welcomes the new couple who are following the government's plan for intellectuals to be relocated to perform manual labor in the countryside. Tang adapts to the village, making friends with the local children and going on pheasant hunts while blowing his bugle to provide hunting calls. Meanwhile his lonely wife makes love with the young brigade leader, who is prepared to die as a result. When Tang overhears his wife telling the boy that her husband says her belly is like velvet, he determines to kill the young man but is stopped by the boy's question, "What is velvet?" The last segment shifts to the magnificent Gobi Desert, where two girls cross the desert in search of their lovers. The segment takes us back twenty years to discover how the characters connect, but, as a love child is born amidst the flowers, the film ends on a note as elusive as its beginning.

Jiang Wen's "In the heat of the sun" is a master piece and arguably the best Chinese film ever made. His second work "Gui Zi Lai Le" is controversial in its achievement but certainly fun to watch. The Chinese film industry has so much to expect from him after those crappy 'big productions' such as "Huang jin jia", "Banquet" and alike in recent years. But Jian Wen has failed people's expectation with this one. I don't care how high the technical achievement performed in this film. If a story told can not be comprehended by its dedicated viewers, it's not worthwhile watching. I always have an interest in decoding but do not feel like listening to other people's murmur - Jiang Wen's or anyone else'. Unfortunately, it has thus become a two-hour waste of my life. On the acting part, the talented Anthony Wong wasted his talent entirely in the film. Joan Chen's good performance was ruined by the ridiculous plot. As for the competition with "Lust; Caution" in Venice........ oh, come on!

Jiang Wen is pretty much the most popular mainland Chinese director/actor at present. But whenever I watch any of his movies I can't help feeling that it might be useful being Chinese myself so I could better catch more of the social commentary and humor, which are apparently plentiful in all of his movies. But I am not Chinese, and so Jiang Wen is one of the few directors, whose movies leave me behind feeling stupid and somehow a little guilty for not "getting them", because there is supposedly so much to "get"...

But I also can't help feeling that his movies are pretending to be more than they really are. This is especially true for this movie, which I enjoyed the least of the three Jiang Wen movies I have seen so far (the other two being "Devils on the Doorstep" and "Let the Bullets Fly"). The set-up is really nice, there are interesting characters and stories introduced. First we see one story in one part of the country, then another story in another part of the country, then one character from the second story going to the first setting and encountering characters from there, and then we get to see a flash-back which ties it all together and wraps the whole thing up. And it all works out pretty nicely with very, very beautiful music and sometimes hilarious scenes going on.

BUT there is constantly some surreal sh!t happening that doesn't make any sense at all! We have a goat falling from a tree, a piece of grass and dirt floating on a stream leading to a house built with round rocks, a man committing suicide right after all his problems have been solved and a girl giving birth to a baby on a moving train while she is peeing through a hole on the track, thus dropping the baby on the flower covered train track - just to name a few of those moments. I've read that these events are for the most part supposed to symbolize the crazy futility of the cultural revolution, which is the time-setting of the majority of the film. What?! Really?! Come on! I'm sure there are better ways to depict the futility of the cultural revolution than having something completely (!) random happening in the movie all the time...

Another thing that i found pretty annoying is that Jiang Wen seems to like using unresolved plot lines as a cheap means to have people discuss and think about the movie afterwards. He simply has plot lines ending abruptly or not showing them any more. That doesn't make it deeper, it just makes it a bigger mess.

If you want to watch a movie by Jiang Wen, don't start with this one!

Three unusual stories taking place in 1970s Communist China, linked somewhere in the past, in the 1950s. The second one is a bit out of place. The other two seem to be more or less consecutive and are linked by common characters and locales and a healthy dose of the supernatural. I could never make out what was really going on, why the mother was acting that way, what was behind it. She became infuriating, even for me as a viewer, let alone her poor son. The third story was more straightforward, and the middle one is of a teacher driven to despair by a lady doctor who pursues him like a madwoman, destroying the poor man's reputation just to create a romantic opportunity. Makes absolutely no sense, but she is played by Joan Chen. Actually most of the performances are memorable, even more so as the characters are pretty eccentric to say the least. And apart from the Cultural Revolution setting and uncle Tang being sent to the countryside for reeducation and Aliosha being a soldier but not a martyr, while his dad was. Also, the accused teacher being pressured to acknowledge the crime to save face for everybody else. Not much else and maybe that's by design. It's the narrative and the interconnectedness and the gorgeous imagery that shine here. It's a very beautiful movie, albeit a little testing story-wise. What I am left with from here is the cinematography. Also, I googled Jaycee Chan, Jackie Chan's son, who has a leading role. And I found out about his troubles. And I just read that Tony Leung was supposed to play teacher Tang. Now I'm pissed he didn't, I would've liked this movie a lot more if he had.

The movie basically revolves around two interconnecting stories. In the first story, the mother of an 18 year old boy in the countryside of revolutionary China 1976 begins acting strangely once she falls out of a tree trying to retrieve a pair of her shoes that a mysteriously appearing bird, which was repeating "I know, I know, I know," had stolen. In the second story a teacher at a university in Shanghai (same time, 1976) is falsely accused of groping a female doctor at a film (where he is chased down and beaten by a crowd). The final segment of the movie connects the two tales.

I left the theater with several plot questions unanswered and was glad to find out the Chinese audience I watched it with (in Chengdu, China) were equally as puzzled but just as enraptured with the film. You will definitely leave asking questions that I would assert are not possible to answer from the information provided in the film. But you also soon discover that it is really o.k. and the unanswered questions leave you thinking and talking about the film long after you have seen the movie. The film has a magical quality to it, even though it takes place during that most unmagical of times, the Cultural Revolution, with everything except for one scene at the end being set in 1976. The director, Jiang Wen, has only made three films in 15 years, and this is the only one of his that I have seen. But it definitely makes me want to see his other films.