QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM VENICE
The shiny film title couldn’t be more misleading. Cai Shangjun’s fourth feature film is as dark and bleak as it gets. There’s barely a chance of redemption for its hapless characters. And when a beam of hope materialises, it’s almost immediately obliterated by yet another misfortune.
Meyiun (Xin Zhilei) meets her former lover Baoshu (Zhang Songwen) in a crowded and run-down public hospital in a large Chinese city. She is there for a prenatal ultrasound, while he’s there in order to have a stage 4 tumour removed from his abdomen. She helps him into the toilet, after he collapses onto the floor. They reconnect, but not through love. Meyiun feels guilty for having abandoned her partner years earlier under very difficult circumstances, and owes him gratitude. So she invites the poor man to spend some time in her crammed little flat.
She makes money by selling poor-quality clothes in a small and shabby store. She promotes the items online, but her followers begin to realise that the dresses come easily undone. Meyiun seeks the manufacturer for a refund, but instead of meeting the owner, she encounters his heavily pregnant wife. The woman is both unwilling and unprepared to give Meyiun a refund. This is China’s fast-growing economy with little regard for workers’ and consumer rights at full play. The social commentary, however, remains subtle. The Sun Rises on Us All is a state-sponsored film, and the regime does not tend to welcome criticism of their market practices.
Parallel to this, Meyiun is in a relationship with handsome and successful man, married and with a child. He receives multiple threats from an unidentified source that they will expose their extramarital affair. So he commits to divorcing his wife and marrying Meyiun. Until he visits her apartment and meets her old lover Baoshu. That’s when the surface begins. The reasons why Meyiun abandoned Baoshu are morally reprehensible. The male turns out to be a noble person. He carried out a major sacrifice in the name of the person whom he loved. This is a nice little subversion of the Christian notion of sacrifice to which the West is used, where it is invariably the woman who has to abdicate her rights and privileges, and put herself through the wringer.
It soon becomes clear that good people can do very nasty things. and that very nasty things can happen to good people. It isn’t the people that make The Sun Rises on Us All innately tragic. There are moments of kindness and solidarity. There are no unidimensional personages. Every single character has a heart, but they are also capable of manipulation, psychological and even physical violence. Their ambitions aren’t absurd. These are just human beings desperately trying to hold on to their relative stability.
]Instead, it is the multiple accidents and disasters that keep these people from achieving a quiet and satisfactory life. Cancer, a hit-and-run car crash, manslaughter, a fire, an elevator accident, a suicide attempt and much more help to ensure that The Sun Rises on Us All stays firmly on misery-fest territory.
This 131-minute film can only be described as a drama, however it is the thriller elements that keep the viewers hooked and make the viewing experience worthwhile. Don’t expect to shed a tear for the doomed characters. The developments are just too fast for that, and the ending is extremely exaggerated, Instead, allow the successive developments – including some very strong scenes – to keep your adrenaline flowing. This is a melodrama on psychotropics.
The Sun Rises on Us All just premiered in the Official Competition of the 82nd Venice International Film Festival.
