A Sun
| A Sun | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Traditional | 陽光普照 |
| Simplified | 阳光普照 |
| Mandarin | Yángguāng pǔzhào |
| Literally | Sunshine illuminates everything |
| Directed by | Chung Mong-hong |
| Written by | Chung Mong-hong Chang Yao-sheng |
| Produced by | Yeh Ju-feng Tseng Shao-chien |
| Starring | Chen Yi-wen Samantha Ko Wu Chien-ho Liu Kuan-ting |
| Cinematography | Nagao Nakashima |
| Edited by | Lai Hsiu-hsiung |
| Music by | Lin Sheng-xiang |
Production company | 3 NG Film |
| Distributed by | Applause Entertainment |
Release date | |
Running time | 155 minutes |
| Country | Republic of China (Taiwan) |
| Languages | Taiwanese Mandarin Taiwanese Hokkien |
| Budget | NT$44 million[2] |
| Box office | NT$14 million[3] |
A Sun (Chinese: 陽光普照) is a 2019 Taiwanese drama film directed and co-written by Chung Mong-hong. The film stars Chen Yi-wen, Samantha Ko, Wu Chien-ho, Liu Kuan-ting. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 6, 2019 and was also screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival.[4][5] It received 11 nominations at the 56th Golden Horse Awards, winning Best Feature Film and Best Director for Chung.[6] It was selected as the Taiwanese entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards,[7] making the shortlist of fifteen films.[8]
According to director Chung Mong-hong, the idea from the film arose when a childhood friend told him about how he had cut off someone's hand in his youth; later while eating hot pot, a mental image of a hand boiling in a hot pot struck him and drove him to create the film.[9]
Plot[edit]
Troublesome teenager Chen Jian Ho is arrested after he and his friend Radish assaulted a young man named Oden at a market. During the assault, Radish chops off Oden’s hand with a machete. During the trial, Ho claims he only intended to scare Oden and didn’t know Radish planned to actually use the machete. Ho is sentenced to juvenile detention, while Radish is given a harsher prison sentence. Ho’s father Wen, refuses to acknowledge Ho’s existence after this, though his wife Qin continues to visit their son in custody. Wen instead focuses attention and affection on Ho’s shy older brother Hao, who is studying at a cram school for medical school. Wen is continually pestered at his driving instructor job by Oden’s father for money, but Wen refuses to pay, claiming no responsibility for his son’s actions.
A girl named Yu and her aunt approach the Chen family, as she has become pregnant with Ho’s child. Although Qin supports Yu throughout her pregnancy, she does not inform her son about the child during her weekly visits. Hao and Yu later visit Ho in jail, but Yu is not allowed to enter; Hao tells his brother about the pregnancy, and Ho reacts angrily that the truth was hidden from him for so long.
Wen is awoken in the middle of a night by a neighbor after Hao’s body is found on the ground floor of the apartment complex; he had committed suicide by jumping from the balcony. Zhen, a classmate and romantic interest of Hao's, visits the grieving family and informs Qin that Hao had sent her a text the day prior, explaining that he felt he had nowhere to hide from all the attention on him.
Ho and Yu marry, and when Ho is released after a year and a half in detention, he moves back home, where his father continues to ignore him. Ho takes a job at a car wash to support his family. One night Wen, tormented by visions of his deceased son, leaves in the middle of the night to buy cigarettes. He encounters Ho at the convenience store, unaware that he’d taken a second job there; they speak briefly about Hao and appear to reconcile.
Three years later, while Ho works late at the car wash, he is approached by Radish, who has just been released from prison. Radish asks Ho for money, but Ho claims not to have any. Radish later picks him up after a shift to drive downtown, where he instructs Ho to enter an alleyway and fire a gun at a legislator’s office; Ho reluctantly does so. Wen becomes concerned with Radish’s presence in town and confronts him, offering to pay him to stay away from his son; Radish dismisses him.
Radish again visits Ho late at night at the car wash, coercing him into borrowing a client’s car and going for a late-night drive. They stop near a remote empty property, where Radish instructs Ho to get out and approach a group of men inside to deliver a mysterious package; he is given a large sum of money in exchange. However, when Ho returns in the pouring rain, Radish is nowhere to be seen; Ho quickly returns the car before going home.
Some time later, a group of thugs kidnaps Ho and demand the money, explaining that Radish was found dead in a ditch near the park. After Ho gives them the money, they beat him and drop him off on a busy overpass, leaving him with a substantial “delivery fee” for his trouble. Meanwhile, Wen and Qin go for a hike, where Wen explains that he has been skipping work to tail Ho and Radish. He witnessed them borrow the car and drive to the park; once Ho left to get the money, Wen ran down Radish with his car, dragging his body off the road before driving away. He explains that this was the best way he could think of to help his only remaining son.
Some time later, Ho and his mother bond over a stack of old notebooks that Wen had gifted to Hao at medical school, each titled with Wen's motto “Seize the Day, Decide Your Path.” They then share a tandem bike ride through a park.
Music[edit]
The soundtrack was composed by Lin Sheng-xiang (林生祥), who also composed the soundtrack for The Great Buddha+. 花心 ("Flowery heart"), a song by Wakin Chau, is sung by A-Ho's fellow inmates before he leaves detention.
Cast[edit]
- Chen Yi-wen as Wen (阿文)
- Samantha Ko as Qin (琴姐)
- Wu Chien-ho as A-Ho (or "Ho") (陳建和)
- Greg Hsu as A-Hao (or "Hao") (陳建豪)
- Liu Kuan-ting as Radish (菜頭)
- Apple Wu as Xiao-Yu (or "Yu") (王明玉)
- Wen Chen-ling as Xiao-Zhen (or "Zhen") (郭曉貞)
- Ivy Yin as Miss Yin (尹姐)
Critical response[edit]
On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 94% based on 18 reviews.[10] The film was positively reviewed by Peter Debruge in Variety,[11] as well as Deborah Young in The Hollywood Reporter,[12] David Ehrlich of IndieWire[13] and Anthony Kao in Cinema Escapist.[14] The reviewers praised Chung's restraint as well as the writing and acting of the ensemble of characters.
The film received significant attention from American critics after Peter Debruge of Variety named it the best film of 2020.[15] Prior to this, few American critics were even aware of the film's existence or its Netflix release earlier that year.[16]
The film won the top award in the 2019 Golden Horse Awards.[17]
Awards and nominations
Film Review: ‘A Sun’
An epic look at a family torn apart and forced to rebuild in the face of multiple setbacks, Taiwanese director Chung Mong-Hong's masterful drama is a world-cinema stunner.
As wrenching and resonant a cinematic experience as can be found in any country this year, Taiwanese stunner “A Sun” tells the story of two sons, one a top student poised to attend the med school of his choice, the other a raging delinquent whose latest scuffle lands him in a juvenile detention center. The former, A-Hao (Xu Guang-Han), makes his parents proud, whereas his younger brother, A-Ho (Wu Chien-Ho), is what you’d call a disappointment, if only his slip-ups weren’t so consistent with the rock-bottom expectations everyone has of his potential.
Over the course of two and a half hours, A-Ho and A-Hao will come to trade places in their parents’ minds. It’s not an easy switch, and the incident that compels their father, Mr. Chen (Chen Yi-Wen), and mother, Miss Qin (Samantha Ko), to reconsider their prejudices is a tough shock to swallow, since every one of writer-director Chung Mong-Hong’s key characters is so brilliantly realized, we can hardly bear that something terrible might befall any of them. Still, there’s a deep well of truth in “Parking” helmer Chung’s fifth narrative feature, and this unforgettable family drama promises both to devastate and to uplift audiences in virtually any country where a Mandarin-language masterpiece stands a chance at being released.
Winner of five Golden Horse Awards including best film, “A Sun” works a bit like Trey Edward Shults’ recent “Waves” or 1981 Oscar winner “Ordinary People,” in that all three films concern younger siblings who grew up in the shadow of a golden child — “a sun” of sorts — in whom their parents invested nearly all their attention, only to be thrust in the position of being the family’s new hope after a tragic setback. That description perhaps unfairly focuses on the film’s underlying themes, whereas Chung grabs audiences from the opening scene, as A-Ho and bad-boy best friend Radish (Liu Kuan-Ting) speed through slick city streets on a stolen motorbike, burst through the back entrance of a restaurant (à la “Goodfellas”) and confront an unsuspecting rival in such a violent way, viewers sense that anything could happen going forward.
Both young men are swiftly caught and held accountable for their actions. Instead of defending the boy, Mr. Chen sees this as the last straw, asking the judge for a harsh sentence in order to teach his son a lesson. And so A-Ho is sent to a juvenile detention facility, while the film turns its attention to the rest of the Chen family, and his seemingly perfect older brother in particular. Compared with scrawny, easy-to-anger A-Ho, A-Hao comes across as tall, handsome and well-adjusted, albeit a bit shy for the prom-king type.
There’s more to his character than meets the eye, but then, that’s true of virtually everyone in this ensemble. One of the things that makes “A Sun” so satisfying is how and when Chung chooses to reveal his characters’ secrets. For example, not long after A-Ho is sent away, a woman (Wen Chen-Ling) shows up at his family’s door with her adopted daughter, Xiao Yu (Wu Dai-Ling), who is pregnant with A-Ho’s child. Chung will share the details of Yu’s past in time, but for now, this one revelation is plenty. Miss Qin struggles to do the right thing, and as the more responsible sibling, A-Hao steps up to assist.
And then something irreversible happens that upsets the already fragile balance within the Chen clan. “Seize the day. Decide your path,” Mr. Chen is fond of saying, repeating the phrase not only to his sons — especially A-Hao, in whom he sees the brightest future — but also to the bewildered students at the driving school where he works. Of course, life is too complicated for “carpe diem” to cut it. With A-Ho is in detention, the family is stuck cleaning up the boy’s messes — sometimes quite colorfully, like the time the victim’s father comes to visit Mr. Chen at the workplace, demanding some kind of financial compensation. When Mr. Chen refuses, the man returns with a septic truck, dousing the parking lot in a shower of shit.
In this and so many other ways, “A Sun” surprises, presenting unexpected interactions between an ensemble of memorable, well-acted characters, each of whom has good reason to behave as they do. Only Radish comes off as reductively one-dimensional, but even then, Chung’s script gives him fair motive to feel so vindictive — the reason for which reveals itself after both he and A-Ho have been released from prison. In the film’s tense second half, where it takes an uncomfortable turn into crime-movie territory, Radish pressures his old friend to repay a karmic debt, thereby complicating the young man’s attempts to go straight. A-Ho is now a husband and father, after all, to say nothing of the way his relationship toward his parents has changed.
Ancient Greece’s greatest playwrights recognized the dramatic potential of family dynamics. And whereas contemporary movies so often complicate their plots, “A Sun” understands and explores a universal aspect of any multi-sibling family: Parents tend not to treat their children equally. Quite late in the film, Mr. Chen finally concedes his mistake: “I never acknowledged A-Ho,” he admits, stunning his wife with a story of parental love unparalleled in recent cinema.
In 2008, Chung’s debut narrative feature, “Parking,” premiered at Cannes, though he’s slipped off the international radar a bit since then. Remember, Taiwan is the country that gave us Edward Yang and Ang Lee — the best-known talents of their respective generations to emerge there. With “A Sun,” Chung proves a worthy successor for whatever the third wave of New Taiwanese Cinema might be called. Chung’s command of the medium is astonishing at times, though what’s more impressive is his restraint, including the way he trusts composer Lin Sheng-Xiang’s minimalist score — capped by an end-credits guitar song Lin performs himself — to subtly emphasize the underlying emotions.
In addition to its potent family concerns, “A Sun” questions whether people are capable of change, as well as whether we can change people’s impressions of us. Over the course of the film, Wu undergoes the most remarkable transformation as A-Ho, delivering a performance that’s entirely relatable, and never less than entirely convincing. His last scene is pure poetry, as the movie pays off an earlier story to find two of its characters sharing a moment in the sun.
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