Días de sol

This is, by all means, one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen.

In spite of the generational gap between us who were born in the 80s and the director who went through their puberty in the 60s, it's a portrait and poem of memory and childhood, regardless of age matters. It is physically impossible to be absolutely honest and draw back memories in the exact realistic way. So we all start telling our own stories mixed with both facts and imaginations.

This film actually reminds me of Giuseppe Tornatore's masterpiece Malèna. The beginning of puberty desire for females, become the fundamental essence of both movies. Both boys had their final releases, with endings filled with both bitterness and sweetness. I believe that every single male audience who watched these two films can recall their dim but lively memory of the curiosity for girls at that age. Amazing...as a Chinese myself, I did find myself more involved with Jiang Wen's piece though.

The cinematography, from Gu Changwei, who's also known for his Berlin Silver Bear winning direction of Peacock, simply stands in the realm of perfection. The yellowish and blurring photographic construction of scenarios generates the nostalgic theme of the movie, and helps the story become more beautiful as it has already been.

The black&white ending, FANTASTIC. A truly imaginative and creative conclusion. Apart from the ironic contrast of the hierarchical statuses among the 'gang' members comparing to their old days, the final line shot by the retarded guy actually made me think. We are becoming materially and intellectually richer and cleverer as we grows, but should those childishness and innocently pure emotions from our childhood be cherished? Days 'in the heat of the sun' has not only symbolize memory, but also speak for the pureness and simple innocence. We are all 'fools', as we enter the kingdom of adulthood, we will inevitably lose our naive characteristics.

Life is always about gaining and losing at the same time, isn't it?

Politically and culturally speaking, Jian Wen did not focus much of his storytelling on the miseries and depressions resulted from Mao's Cultural Revolution. Again, this is not a realistic representation of the concrete historical notion, it's a artistic craft tributing to memories. My parents, who shared the similar historical experience with Jiang Wen, did not acknowledge this film as a proper description of their childhood when they saw it. "It's too romantic to be true." as they said to me. However, they both admitted that the film did reflect their own fantasies of an ideal past. Every time I ask them about what happened with their childhood, they can only give me a vague framework. A lot of the times, the recalling always come with a particular item, like shoes, football, soy sauce, Mao's red book...

"Sometimes, maybe a kind of sound and a stream of smell, can bring you back to the truth." as Jiang Wen said in the voice-over in the film. It's not only for people grew up in the 60s, but also for everybody. Funny as it is, memories can cheat on you and rationalize you in the same filed.

A Time to Live in Dream, this Beach Boy classic accidentally pops into my head. "The child's joyous tear, with innocence he has no fear, now I know what love really is..." Days with brightly shining and heating sun conspire to create a time to live in dream, what a marvel!

Due to lack of adult supervision during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the mischievous boys of military fathers are free to spend their summer left to their own devices. Too young to join other youths working in the countryside, they spend their time riding their bikes, getting into gang fights, picking up girls, and asserting their masculinity. Chosen as one of 100 best Chinese films of the century by Asia Weekly Magazine, Wen Jiang's In the Heat of the Sun is a coming of age story set in Beijing in the 1970s after the Red Guards had been disbanded. The first film by a sixth generation Chinese director, it played to packed audiences of young people when it first opened in Beijing in 1995, but has never been released in North America.

In the Heat of the Sun is based on the novel "Wild Beast" by Wang Shou, a controversial Chinese author who has written many stories about rebellious teenagers. The film is a subjective recollection about a group of friends who meet when their Army dads are shipped out to support Chairman Mao in 1969, recollections embellished by the narrator's fanciful memory. Steeped in eroticism and youth violence, it is a sharp turn from the melodramatic epics of the early 1990s that interpreted China's past as a time of sexual repression. Jiang does not wallow in marketable clichés or make a special appeal to Western audiences but, like the young people in the film, imparts to the work a freshness and authenticity that sets it apart.

The film stars 17-year old Yu Xia as "Monkey" Ma Xiaojun, a rebellious teenager who is a stand-in for the director as a young man. Xia (whose name translates as 'Summer Rain') won the award for best actor at the 1994 Venice Film Festival, the youngest actor ever to win this award. Narrated by the director who is also a popular Chinese actor, the opening narration tells us that "Peking has changed so fast. In 20 years, it's become a modern city. Almost nothing is as I remembered. Change has wiped out my memories. I can't tell what's imagined from what's real." The film's leitmotif is introduced almost immediately and we understand the reason for the title. "My stories always take place in summer", the narrator continues.

"The sunlight was so relentless, so bright, that our eyes were washed in waves of blackness. In the Heat of the Sun. In the raging storms of Revolution. The soldiers' hearts turn towards the sun." During that summer, Monkey acts out fantasies that make him feel like a hero and talks about characters from Russian novels and films dealing with revolutionary heroes searching for glory. He imagines himself standing up to bullies and enemies of the state in an imagined World War III and, in his fantasy, is willing to die for his country and his honor with women. He fights for his group, sending a rival gang member to the hospital for a month, sneaks into people's apartments with a self-made key (though he never steals anything), and watches films banned as inappropriate for children by the authorities.

Monkey's main focus, unsurprisingly, is a girl whose portrait hanging on the wall of an apartment he let himself into is immediately captivating. His pursuit of Mi Lan (Ning Jing), who is a few years older than him, is, however, fraught with rejection, jealousy of group leader Liu Yiku, and passion that veers out of control. Although Jiang problematically redefines the Cultural Revolution as a period of spontaneity and freedom rather than dislocation and chaos, the film is not about politics but about the perilous transition from adolescence to maturity. Unlike other coming of age films, it is not a reflection of sadness and longing but an odyssey filled with the excitement of a new found freedom and revolutionary ardor.

it reminds us of the first love we had long ago, and nothing can restrain the passion of those young with full of confusion and possibilities. We are always amazed by those colorful characters formed under the certain political time. This film has successfully reached to the part that all human beings share with no matter what political conditions. Although the specific time is long gone and would never come back to China, those old, pure and simplified memories would never fate away. It will always be part of the history and part of us. It is not that simple to tag that time as wrong or right, it was just there, always there, with some smell some colours we never want to leave behind.

I'm very down to earth about Chinese films. There's a few good ones like Suzhou River and Zhang Yimou's 'Huozhe' (Life). The rest I find to be overly catered for Western tastes, i.e. plenty of peasants and moralising tales of how bad Communism was for the tiny minority of privileged intellectuals.

This film is definitely an exception. It is about a boy growing up in the Cultural Revolution, but shows the era with a kind of nostalgia that perhaps may be somewhat alien to the Western psyche. If you really want to learn something about how China experienced 'the Sixties,' then watch this if you can get a hold of it.

On the down side, this film appears to be almost completely unavailable. If anyone knows of a DVD or video release anywhere, it would be much appreciated.

The cultural revolution was a tumultuous time in China, to put it lightly. A sort of IRL hunger games that saw famine, deadly skirmishes, and violent unrest throughout the country, especially among the youth. The gratuitous violence was only touched upon in the film. The chaos of the cultural revolution was a distant backdrop for what is essentially a coming-of-age story. After reading the wiki, I found out that it is based on a book (an author's scattered recollections of the time) in which the kids belong to a sort of privileged class that was somewhat insulated from the aforementioned chaos.

So, with that said, it is really a movie about first love, lust, jealousy, trying to belong, discovering one's self, and the adolescent awkwardness that pervades it all. In that respect, the film is a triumph. It is superbly acted (especially from the lead) who's emotive stumbling through puberty is sure to elicit uncomfortable emotions from your own teenage years. Add to that the atmospheric and thoughtful camerawork, and you have a unique and memorable film.