Le soleil se lève aussi

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.

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!

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.

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.