The weight of the past comes crashing down on a pair of ex-lovers in Chinese director Cai Shangjun’s latest drama, which asks whether it’s possible to forgive and forget — or even to go on living when your bad deeds keep coming back to haunt you.
This superbly acted, impeccably crafted if rather overwrought two-hander is called The Sun Rises on Us All (Ri Gua Zhong Tian), a title that gives us some hope that its doomed couple may eventually find some solace, or maybe a bit of sunshine. But will they?
The Sun Rises On Us All
The Bottom Line
Impressively performed but over-the-top.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Xin Zhilei, Zhang Songwen, Feng Shaofeng
Director: Cai Shangjun
Screenwriters: Cai Shangjun, Han Nianjin
2 hours 11 minutes
Not every star-crossed romance begins with its two protagonists accidentally bumping into each other in a crowded public hospital, which they’re both visiting for not-so-great reasons. And yet that’s how 30-something shopkeeper Meiyun (Xin Zhilei, winner of the fest’s Best Actress prize) winds up seeing Baoshu (Zhang Songwen) for the first time in many years. The sight of him, hunched over and sickly, gives Meiyun the chills. Or maybe she’s freaking out because she’s just had an ultrasound confirming she’s pregnant, although the doctor can’t detect a heartbeat yet.
Cai, who co-wrote the script with Han Nianjin, lays the sauce on thick from the get-go, but also withholds lots of key information about Meiyun and Baoshu’s mysterious connection. The latter then disappears for a while so we can focus more on Meiyun’s dreary life. During the daytime, she livestreams fashion videos at her shopping mall clothing store. At night, she sometimes sleeps with a paranoid married man (Shaofeng Feng), who is being blackmailed about their affair and seems unwilling to commit to something more serious.
In other words, Meiyun doesn’t have much to be happy about, rarely cracking a smile unless she’s posting content for her business. But the woman is also a fighter who wants to keep the baby, even if her current lover seems to have major doubts about their relationship. All of this is happening just as Baoshu suddenly drops back into her life, prompting Meiyun to visit him again at the hospital, where we learn he’s been operated on for Stage IV stomach cancer.
Baoshu thus doesn’t have much to be happy about, either, and he drags himself around in either wincing pain or a deep state of loss. Slowly but surely, Cai unveils the backstory between him and Meiyun, revealing how they were once in love, until a fateful accident tore them apart. It’s not worth spoiling what happened — and the movie takes its sweet time to fully explain all of that — but let’s just say that Meiyun owes her ex quite a lot for what he went through.
Most romantic dramas go from meet-cute to hooking up to some kind of major dilemma, but The Sun Rises on Us All heads more or less in the opposite direction. The dilemma’s already been there for some time, and now Meiyun and Baoshu have to figure out how to move on from it, or not. Cai focuses on their many regrets and misgivings, not to mention all the guilt weighing on Meiyun, who carries that load around like a giant emotional ball and chain.
Can love somehow emerge from such a mess? That’s what we start hoping, and the film’s best sections show how the weary pair tries to kickstart a new life together, both out of necessity and, on Meiyun’s part, a sort of rekindled desire. And yet anyone who’s seen Cai’s incredibly bleak 2011 thriller, People Mountain People Sea, knows that we’re probably not headed toward a big happy wedding at the finale.
Indeed, the director begins to pile on the punishment from one scene to the next, sometimes to an effective degree, sometimes in ways that boil over into pure melodrama. One well-observed sequence has Meiyun chasing down a debt for her clothing business, only to find herself facing a woman in exactly the same sort of predicament. But a scene where she and Baoshu get stuck in an elevator seems overtly symbolic and a tad too much like a deus ex machina, albeit one that doesn’t save either of them from impending doom.
The elevator scene also showcases the impressive range of both lead actors, who aren’t afraid to go overboard in the film’s more fiery moments, of which there are quite a few. Xin is especially a revelation here, portraying a character who shifts from fake-smiling into her phone so she can sell dresses online to begging for the kind of life-changing reprieve she may never be granted.
Even if The Sun Rises on Us All is the story of a couple — or rather, a couple that could have been — the movie really belongs to Meiyun, who suffers not only for the bargain she made years ago, but for committing the sin of being a woman. (Let’s not even discuss what happens with her pregnancy.) Cai deliberately portrays his heroine as an average working-class girl, hinting at what a tough thing that is in a cutthroat country like China, and perhaps justifying Meiyun’s final, desperate act as one of ultimate emancipation.
