Seen in the Toronto International Film Festival
First thing, the English translation of the title is inaccurate. The Chinese title says "The sun rises as usual". I don't know if the mistranslation is due to oversight, incompetence or, this is a long shot, a sneaky ploy to draw attention to the film by subliminally invoking a connection with Hemingway's novel of the same name.
Top Chinese actor JIANG Wen's third try at the director's chair seems to have been inspired by works like "Amores Perros" (2000), "21 grams" (2003) and Babel (2006). Should that really be the case, what has been achieved is only form, not substance. Under the superficial structure of interlinked stories and non-linear time frames, the complexity of the plot is nowhere near that of the three mentioned. While there are red herrings abound, there is really no ingenuous cause-and-effect links as in these others.
The individual stories are however worth watching. While there are three, plus an epilogue that purportedly links everything together (which it kind of does, but in a rather haphazard way), I'll only mention the middle one. At 46, Joan Chen can still do neurotic-erotic like nobody else can. Anthony Wong, strumming a few acoustic chords and crooning a popular Indonesian folk ballad, is irresistible, to young girls and middle-age women alike:
Bengawan Solo
River of love we know
Where my heart was set aglow
When we loved not long ago
(he sang in Chinese)
Overall, the movie is well shot, with all the once avant-garde elements of camera deployment, montages, mise-en-scene, extensive voice over, visual and audio motifs, occasional wandering into the surreal, you name it. The effort is commendable and the result is watchable. Add a pinch of ingenuity in the next one and director Jiang will certainly be heading in the right direction.
First thing, the English translation of the title is inaccurate. The Chinese title says "The sun rises as usual". I don't know if the mistranslation is due to oversight, incompetence or, this is a long shot, a sneaky ploy to draw attention to the film by subliminally invoking a connection with Hemingway's novel of the same name.
Top Chinese actor JIANG Wen's third try at the director's chair seems to have been inspired by works like "Amores Perros" (2000), "21 grams" (2003) and Babel (2006). Should that really be the case, what has been achieved is only form, not substance. Under the superficial structure of interlinked stories and non-linear time frames, the complexity of the plot is nowhere near that of the three mentioned. While there are red herrings abound, there is really no ingenuous cause-and-effect links as in these others.
The individual stories are however worth watching. While there are three, plus an epilogue that purportedly links everything together (which it kind of does, but in a rather haphazard way), I'll only mention the middle one. At 46, Joan Chen can still do neurotic-erotic like nobody else can. Anthony Wong, strumming a few acoustic chords and crooning a popular Indonesian folk ballad, is irresistible, to young girls and middle-age women alike:
Bengawan Solo
River of love we know
Where my heart was set aglow
When we loved not long ago
(he sang in Chinese)
Overall, the movie is well shot, with all the once avant-garde elements of camera deployment, montages, mise-en-scene, extensive voice over, visual and audio motifs, occasional wandering into the surreal, you name it. The effort is commendable and the result is watchable. Add a pinch of ingenuity in the next one and director Jiang will certainly be heading in the right direction.