Le soleil se lève aussi

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!

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.

I won't pretend to understand everything or even half of what went on in this film. I gave up pretty quickly into the film, however, I wanted to keep on watching and the film kept me enticed mainly for that reason.

Sometimes it feels good not to understand? Just to watch for the beauty? The Magic? The craziness? The unknowingness of it all.

I really found this film like I was wandering through a modern art gallery but so much better. It was painted beautifully, the setting and the colours; my mouth watered and i felt like i was eating a six course meal.

The words also seemed to be quite poetically abstract to fit in with it all.

A dream like film.

One major thing works against The Sun Also Rises. Its attempt to revisit the surreal mystery genre on a mainland China backdrop faces stiff competition from arguably among the best catalogs in that precise brand of storytelling, as the country witnessed a flood of excellent entries in this form circa the late 90's to early 2000's.

Anyone who's ever seen Lunar Eclipse, Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Chicken Poets, Dazzling, I Love You, Spring Subway and quite a few others, will easily tell you this.

Also, our friend Jiang Wen, although definitely a superb actor and major contributor to the recounting of tales, is probably better when he's poking serious fun at something, to wit In the Heat of the Sun and the unforgettable Devils at the Doorstep.

When it comes to psychedelia he may not be our first choice, as his previous brush with something similar, albeit as an actor in Green Tea, wasn't really all that hot. And in The Sun Also Rises, we have him as a director, which means he's had more to do with the project, yet the result doesn't feel all that strong. It's in many ways akin to The Missing Gun, another one of his projects and also a decent if uninspired venture.

For Sun Also Rises, Jiang enlisted his own wife, Zhou Yun, probably taking a leaf out of Chen Kaige's manuscript in this sense.

She plays a wacky southerner in some unnamed remote village who goes nuts over a pair of fish-ornamented shoes that never seem to stay put yet always come back, or are somehow found. This comes much to the dismay of her son, a young villager especially good with an abacus (Jaycee Chan). He tries to keep her from going crazy, to no avail, until she proceeds to dig strange holes in the ground, go floating on the river and generally get up to all kinds of irrational mayhem. Nothing seems to help, nor ease her anguish as she keeps calling to someone named Alyosha.

In a different story arc, we move to another part of China (each story takes place in a compass bearing, no place names with the exception of a Beijing cameo), where academics find themselves in a bizarre twist of passion. Here, Jiang Wen and Anthony Wong play what are presumably educators in a secluded rural campus, while Joan Chen does a horny doctor who gets everyone worked up. There are accusations of perversion and hints-a-plenty that this is taking place during the Cultural Revolution.

The third segment in this multi-threaded affair brings a few of the characters together as Jiang Wen and his on-screen wife (Kong Wei) are sent off to the southern village to be "re-educated" in the proper ways of hard work, all under the tutelage of Jaycee Chan's character. Here too lust plays a role, but no caution, it's all friendly in the end.

Finally, the fourth part brings clever closure to the stories, featuring pretty much all the main characters and having that "Ah! That's what that was all about!" effect to a large degree, which is nice. However, it also has Zhou Yun deliver among the most screechingly irritating scenes in movie history.

The Sun Also Rises is one of those OK'ish movies that somehow leaves you thinking there's a couple more viewing in it, so go ahead, give it a chance, you may learn something.

It also fields some of Jiang's old gags from previous movies, another boon, but isn't as witty as some of the other works he's been in and basically has no strong message that we could discern. And unlike those other surreal pictures we discussed earlier, this one opts for bombastic presentation that's completely unlike the understated beauty the genre craves. It makes us think the Kunming department of tourism had a hand in this.

But still, give it a shot, you may enjoy what you get.

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.