“A bundle of hopelessly dull, uninteresting artistic decisions that are as puzzling as they are deeply frustrating.”

The boundary between a mediocre film and a bad one is often so narrow, distinguishing them can be challenging. However, sometimes we’re blessed enough to receive a film that establishes itself as being totally impoverished of any merit from its first scene, saving us the hassle of figuring out exactly where it sits on the spectrum of quality. For some unfathomable reason, Cai Shangjun was given the chance to allow his most recent directorial outing, The Sun Rises on Us All, to see the light of day (no pun intended), despite it being a frankly dismal effort. A director who has made decent work in the past (and his presence at the festival is not difficult to understand, considering the success of his previous work, People Mountain People Sea) – yet we still struggle to understand why this film was able to get through all the necessary industry checkpoints without being flagged for some of its more questionable qualities. Part of it has to do with the story, which does arguably hold some resonance – two former lovers encounter one another by chance. Meiyun yearns to have a child, but her boyfriend is vehemently against the idea, even coercing her into getting an abortion. Baoshu is struggling with a chronic illness that is very likely going to lead to his demise. The pair discover that once the pleasantries have faded, the flame from the past can easily be reignited, but it is a challenging endeavour in its own right when there is so much unresolved trauma. The premise is already skirting around the edges of decency in how it explores certain subjects, and as the film progresses, we realise that our fears are not irrelevant, since nearly every narrative choice in this film is borderline disastrous.

Where does one even start with discussing the themes that inform this film? Cai has always been focused on exploring stories of ordinary people as they navigate challenging scenarios, and that was certainly the impetus for a lot of this film. Unfortunately, this is also where it begins to fall apart right from the start, since he isn’t sure about the kind of film he intends to make. There are points in The Sun Rises on Us All where he is earnestly trying to make a sincere, slice-of-life realist drama about two old lovers rekindling a lost connection after many years of not being present in each other’s lives. Then it suddenly takes a radical left turn and becomes a melodrama, followed by a psychological thriller, before concluding with an ending that perhaps doesn’t even exist as a genre. This lack of clarity regarding the direction the film is intended to go is the foundation of all the ensuing problems, which revolve around the director being so unsure of what he is trying to say, we can only conclude that the film has no real narrative, and is instead entirely focused on being a mood piece. It certainly does not work, especially not when it uses themes such as abortion, sexual abuse, chronic illness and infidelity as trivial additions to a non-existent narrative that proposes itself as some complex character study about wayward lovers fighting personal and societal challenges in order to be together. There’s very little value in what Cai is trying to say, and the lack of narrative coherence is the first of many problems that plague this film.

A film having a weak narrative is not inherently cause for concern, but it does require an awareness of the other aspects that then have to carry the weight. Unfortunately, The Sun Rises on Us All is as creatively bewildering as it is narratively unconvincing, and there is never a moment where it feels like Cai or any of his collaborators are entirely aware of what they want this film to accomplish. Telling a story that tackles difficult themes is understandable if the execution is decent, but beyond overextending itself to be far more serious than it needed to be, this film is also dreadfully heavy-handed in how it examines themes that didn’t warrant such borderline manipulative practices. Putting the audience through what is intended to be a harrowing exploration of the challenges faced by a large portion of society, but instead becomes a truly miserable experience in which we are forced to endure one misfortune after another without anything even vaguely resembling a reprieve from the intensity of the story is not a good way to communicate these messages. It also does not help that the two leads are just as lacklustre as the film that surrounds them – Xin Zhilei and Zhang Songwen do what they can to elevate the material, but they’re ultimately so limited in what they are given to do, it becomes daunting just to see their efforts to create meaningful characters from roles that are merely husks of what we’d expect these characters to be. The visual aesthetic tries to evoke the reality of working-class China, but it comes across as overly dour and dull, never being all that interesting to look at, and ultimately just contributing to the gloomy message that this film is so intent on conveying as some profound, complex set of ideas.   

Finding even the smallest scrap of a redeeming quality in The Sun Rises on Us All is a nearly pointless effort – this film is visually drab, conceptually bland and emotionally corrupted (being borderline manipulative), lacking even the slightest quality that could help us understand its existence. Cai is not a newcomer, so the fact that he wrote and directed something this unconvincing and frankly artistically bankrupt is astonishing. It’s not a film that disqualifies Cai from the artistic roll call, but it does mean that his next film is going to need to be a substantial achievement, since this is not something that can easily be overlooked as just a fluke in an otherwise solid body of work.  It’s a major misfire by any metric, and its refusal to choose either a coherent direction in terms of story, or a consistent tone that doesn’t feel like it is just scrambling for whatever reaction it can garner through layering misfortunes on these characters (including an ending that would be impossible for even the most informed, knowledgeable viewer to understand or justify) is primarily what weighs it down, making The Sun Rises on Us All very close to a complete disaster. All that salvages it is the knowledge that Cai is a solid director, so he’ll likely make improvements for his next film, which should hopefully reflect more of the complex ideas that made his previous work much more engaging, rather than this bundle of hopelessly dull, uninteresting artistic decisions that are as puzzling as they are deeply frustrating.