\n\tThe weight of the past comes crashing down on a pair of ex-lovers in Chinese director Cai Shangjun\u2019s latest drama, which asks whether it\u2019s possible to forgive and forget \u2014 or even to go on living when your bad deeds keep coming back to haunt you.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis 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?<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tThe Sun Rises On Us All\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n
\tImpressively performed but over-the-top.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue:<\/strong> Venice Film Festival (Competition) \n\tNot every star-crossed romance begins with its two protagonists accidentally bumping into each other in a crowded public hospital, which they\u2019re both visiting for not-so-great reasons. And yet that\u2019s how 30-something shopkeeper Meiyun (Xin Zhilei, winner of the fest\u2019s Best Actress prize) winds up seeing Baoshu (Zhang\u00a0Songwen) for the first time in many years. The sight of him, hunched over and sickly, gives Meiyun the chills. Or maybe she\u2019s freaking out because she\u2019s just had an ultrasound confirming she\u2019s pregnant, although the doctor can\u2019t detect a heartbeat yet.<\/p>\n \n\tCai, 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\u2019s mysterious connection. The latter then disappears for a while so we can focus more on Meiyun\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tIn other words, Meiyun doesn\u2019t have much to be happy about, rarely cracking a smile unless she\u2019s 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\u2019s been operated on for Stage IV stomach cancer.<\/p>\n \n\tBaoshu thus doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s not worth spoiling what happened \u2014 and the movie takes its sweet time to fully explain all of that \u2014 but let\u2019s just say that Meiyun owes her ex quite a lot for what he went through.<\/p>\n \n\tMost 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tCan love somehow emerge from such a mess? That\u2019s what we start hoping, and the film\u2019s best sections show how the weary pair tries to kickstart a new life together, both out of necessity and, on Meiyun\u2019s part, a sort of rekindled desire. And yet anyone who\u2019s seen Cai\u2019s incredibly bleak 2011 thriller, People Mountain People Sea, knows that we\u2019re probably not headed toward a big happy wedding at the finale.<\/p>\n \n\tIndeed, 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\u2019t save either of them from impending doom.<\/p>\n \n\tThe elevator scene also showcases the impressive range of both lead actors, who aren\u2019t afraid to go overboard in the film\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tEven if The Sun Rises on Us All is the story of a couple \u2014 or rather, a couple that could have been \u2014 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\u2019s 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\u2019s final, desperate act as one of ultimate emancipation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The weight of the past comes crashing down on a pair of ex-lovers in Chinese director Cai Shangjun\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":206998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,67,132,68,9176,101337,30989,31074],"class_list":{"0":"post-206997","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-venice","14":"tag-venice-2025","15":"tag-venice-film-festival","16":"tag-venice-film-festival-2025"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115161693280518317","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Cast:<\/strong> Xin Zhilei, Zhang Songwen, Feng Shaofeng
Director:<\/strong> Cai Shangjun
Screenwriters:<\/strong> Cai Shangjun, Han Nianjin
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours 11 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n