Should Jackie Chan fear being eclipsed in the movies by his son Jaycee?

words yvonne teh

Jaycee Chan has been a busy fellow. A young man who has never hidden the fact that music is his first love, he has lately worked on four films in rapid succession. One of those, Benny Chan’s action-packed Invisible Target, was the biggest local movie of the summer. Another, Kenneth Bi’s The Drummer, had its world premiere at Switzerland’s Locarno International Film Festival last month. And in an interview with bc after a press conference for the 2007 Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, the singer-actor talked of yet another – in which he stars alongside Chen Po Lin – scheduled for release before the year’s end.

Before that though, local viewers – along with audiences at the 64th Venice International Film Festival, where the film will be in competition – will get to see the rising star further show off his acting chops in Jiang Wen’s highly anticipated The Sun Also Rises. The first film directed by the renowned Mainland Chinese auteur cum actor since Devils on the Doorstep (never theatrically released in its native land but which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival), it is a work Chan is quick to describe as “really abstract but you’ll get the idea that it’s about life”.

The Sun Also Rises shares its title with two earlier movies: a 1957 Hollywood production which starred Tyron Power, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer and Errol Flynn and a 1984 made-for-TV effort whose cast included Jane Seymour, Robert Carradine, Ian Charleson and Leonard Nimoy. Unlike those two English language efforts however, this Mandarin drama – three parts of which are set in China in the 1970s, and the fourth in 1958 – is not based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel. Instead, as Chan explains, its title reflects “if you die today, the sun still will rise tomorrow. So it’s about life, it’s about now.” And, if anything, the moral of the story appears to be ‘Don’t think too much about the future or the past’.

As far as Chan is concerned, one reason his character, who appears in two of the film’s segments, may not spend too much time thinking about the past or future is because, as he notes, “Mine is the action part. I keep on running through the whole movie!” At the same time it is amusing how, when asked about his future plans, Chan appears to have taken the movie’s focus on the present to heart: “I’ve no idea,” he says!

So there may well be some truth in his description of the character he plays as “a 1970’s Jaycee Chan. Everything I do in the movie is what I would do if I were from the 1970s!” Also, when asked what he thinks he has in common with a character never explicitly named but variously described as the son of a madwoman, a brigade leader and a man who sleeps with a married woman, he immediately responds, “the personality”. Which bears out a previous contention that he has to find something in common with a character before agreeing to play it.

Still, Chan didn’t need much incentive beyond The Sun Also Rises being a Jiang Wen film to want to be involved. As one rapidly emerging from the long shadow cast by his father, Jackie, he laughingly shares, “I didn’t even read the script!” before deciding he wanted to be part of what he is confident people will think is a good, maybe even great, film.

The Sun Also Rises will open in local theatres on September 21.