Starring: Jiang Wen, Joan Chen, Zhou Yun,
Jaycee Chan, Anthony Wong Chau San, Kong Wei
Director: Jiang Wen
Scheduled release: 21 September

It’s hard not to go to a Jiang Wen-helmed film without high expectations. Particularly since the Mainland Chinese megastar’s debut directorial feature, In the Heat of the Sun (1993), earned six Golden Horse awards (including Best Picture and Best Director) and his sophomore effort, Devils on the Doorstep (1998), garnered the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize and won him the France Culture Award for Foreign Cineaste of the Year.

The Sun Also Rises is Jiang’s third directorial effort. Originally scheduled to premiere at Cannes earlier this year, its release was delayed until this autumn but already prestigious film festivals like Venice and Toronto have lined up to include it in their programmes. And when film fans see its star-studded cast (Joan Chen, Anthony Wong Chau San, Jiang himself!…) and crew (cinematographers Zhao Fei and Mark Lee Ping Bin, and composer Joe Hisaishi), they’ll find it really hard to keep from champing at the bit to check out this largely Mandarin-language offering.

But does this adaptation of Ye Mi’s novel Velvet, touted by its publicists as “a poetic rhapsody on memory, madness, serendipity and an ode to pleasure and fantasy” deliver? At the very least, it’s true enough that memory, madness, serendipity, pleasure and fantasy are themes of this film whose four parts the official website entitles Madness, Amour, Rifle and Dream.

However, what may be poetic, lyrical and beautifully thought-provoking to some is likely to strike others as indulgent, frustrating, scattershot and downright incoherent. The website’s titles never formally appear in the film itself; rather, each part is introduced with a mention of place and time.

And so ‘Southern China, Spring 1976’ appears at the beginning of the story of a fatherless young man (Jaycee Chan) whose mother (a not-that-old-looking Zhou Yun) may or may not have been rendered insane after falling from a tree. In much the same way, ‘Eastern China, Summer 1976’ announces the segment featuring a love triangle involving two music-loving friends – teacher Liang (Wong) (whose favourite song appears to be a Chinese language version of the lyrical Indonesian classic Bengawan Solo) and the trumpet-playing Old Tang (Jiang) – and the disarmingly coquettish Dr Lin (Chen).

Next up, in the section ‘Southern China, Autumn 1976’, we see Old Tang being sent to the young man’s home village for labour reform – a sign that the section falls squarely into that time of madness in China known as the Cultural Revolution – and becoming embroiled in another love triangle, this time involving his wife (Kong Wei) and the young man. Lastly, the ‘Western China, 1958’ segment’s amazing visuals and mesmerizing music is so squarely aimed at viewers’ senses and imaginations it might require them to temporarily lose their critical faculties and sense of logic.

“Go on,” Jiang the auteur seems to urge us, “take a leap of faith. What’s there to lose? After all, the sun will rise tomorrow and the day after, regardless of what you choose to do!” But as for what one stands to gain, my own particular feeling is that this is one heck of an original, creative, generally entertaining, at times pretty amusing, thought-provoking (even if also confusing) and sensually enjoyable ride!

Yvonne Teh