Sun Also Rises an eye-catching China fantasy
Ray Bennett

VENICE, Italy—Fluid motion and glorious colors provide a visual treat in Jiang Wen’s sumptuous romantic fantasy “The Sun Also Rises,” which screened in competition at the Venice International Film Festival. Flowers in bloom, intricately embroidered slippers, billowing curtains and a belly as soft as velvet are among the sensuous elements in a quartet of interrelated stories about characters who are variously addled, lecherous, vengeful and yearning in the four quadrants of China in the mid-1970s.
Lavishly produced and imaginatively shot, the film will delight audiences who enjoy extravagantly gorgeous imagery without the violence that usually accompanies it. Box office potential looks good in art houses worldwide. The first sequence is all about madness and mischief as a single mother (Zhuo Yun) drives her devoted son (Jaycee Chan) to distraction with her daredevil antics in pursuit of tranquility. The agile mom climbs tall trees and stands perilously astride a small earthen raft on the river. She treasures a beautiful pair of slippers that she is forever losing, and the son fears that, one day, the footwear will remain while his mother disappears.
Then, on a college campus, two old friends find their friendship tested by rivalry over a woman. Doctor Lin (Joan Chen) is the mistress of Old Tang (director Jiang), but she finds herself drawn to teacher Liang (Anthony Wong), who is catnip to beautiful women. When Liang is accused of groping women at a campus gathering, Lin offers her rear end behind a curtain to determine whose was the guilty hand. Old Tang, who is a hunter, has a young wife (Kong Wei) who begins a relationship with the madwoman’s son. One day, Tang overhears their noises of passion and his wife whispering that her husband says her belly is like velvet. He determines to shoot the young man but is given pause when the boy asks him, “What is velvet?”