The Sun Rises on Us All
日掛中天
China, 2025, colour, 1.66:1, 130 mins.
Director: Cai Shangjun 蔡尚君.
Rating: 6/10.
Under-rated Mainland actress Xin Zhilei is the main event in this potentially interesting relationships drama that’s flawed by a poorly structured, over-long script.
STORY
Guangzhou city, southern China, the present day, summer. Zeng Meiyun (Xin Zhilei), 36, runs a small women’s clothing shop in a mall, as well as selling goods online. Following a hospital examination, finds she is pregnant, though there are complications with the foetus, which doesn’t have a heartbeat. The problem may be due to an abortion she once had on the recommendation of her married lover, Chen Qifeng (Feng Shaofeng). On the same day she visits a man, Wu Baoshu (Zhang Songwen), whom she’d spotted while waiting at the hospital; he had also seen and avoided her. He is a patient who’s recovering after an operation; when Zeng Meiyun visits him in the ward, he seems to resent her presence. Chen Qifeng calls and says he needs to see her while he’s in nearby Foshan on business. In his hotel he says he’s been receiving text messages threatening to expose a secret he has and he’s now paranoid about their past affaire being discovered. He tells Zeng Meiyun he’s planning to get a divorce but won’t see her for a while until he clears up the mystery of who is sending the texts. Back in Guangzhou Zeng Meiyun finds Wu Baoshu has discharged himself from hospital. When she tracks him down, he says he’s still very angry with her, and she admits she owes him a lot. She invites him to stay at her small flat until he’s fully recovered; he asks her to transfer some money that he borrowed to pay his medical bills, though she says she’s waiting for a refund from a clothing supplier for damaged goods that she returned. One evening Chen Qiming drops by her flat and he and Wu Baoshu start talking. Wu Baoshu says he was in prison for five years for a hit-and-run traffic accident in which a man died; he was released two or three years ago. Zeng Meiyun goes for a drive with Chen Qifeng, explaining that Wu Baoshu has stage-four stomach cancer and no one to care for him. She left him about seven years ago when he went to prison. During the drive, Chen Qifeng is called by his demanding young daughter, Chen Zilin (Ye Peishi), to pick her up as soon as possible. In the process, Chen Zilin acidentally cuts her wrist and they take her to a hospital. There Chen Qiming confesses to Zeng Meiyun that the text messages were from Chen Zilin. In turn, she confesses to him that the hit-and-run accident was all her fault, for which Wu Baoshu took the blame as they were in love. One year into his prison sentence she left Wu Baoshu and then started up with Chen Qiming. She says she accepts all the blame for how she treated Wu Baoshu – though it was only because she thought she’d never see him again and because she had fallen in love with Chen Qiming. Next day, at her workplace, Zeng Meiyun and Wu Baoshu have an intense but quiet heart-to-heart; later, at her flat, he tries to rape her but stops. She starts viewing two-bedroom flats so the two of them can live together more spaciously, and also visits the factory of her clothing supplier to try to get her refund. But just when she finds a conveniently located flat for Wu Baoshu’s future chemotherapy, everything changes.
REVIEW
Heilongjiang-born actress Xin Zhilei 辛芷蕾 – last seen as the long-lost elder sibling in The Unseen Sister 乔妍的心事 (2024) and the pragmatic, drum-playing wife in Upstream 逆行人生 (2024) – finally gets the substantial leading role she’s long deserved in The Sun Rises on Us All 日掛中天, a relationships drama by Mainland writer-director Cai Shangjun 蔡尚君, 58, that’s his first feature in eight years. Unfortunately, apart from Xin’s performance, the film as a whole turns out to be not quite worth the wait. A potentially interesting three-way drama in which various forms of guilt get in the way of achieving real happiness is let down by a script that wilfully keeps the the audience in the dark for too long, and lacks enough interior tension to justify a running time of over two hours. Following its premiere at this year’s Venice festival, where Xin won the Best Actress award, it opened in China two months later, taking RMB23 million, a modest but okay amount for such fare and Cai’s biggest box-office to date.
Sun is only Cai’s fourth directing stint in almost two decades, after co-writing the relationship movies Spicy Love Soup 爱情麻辣烫 (1997), Shower 洗澡 (1999) and Sunflower 向日葵 (2005), all directed by Zhang Yang 张扬. After his first film as a director, the low-key but strikingly shot father-son drama The Red Awn 红色康拜因 (2007), Cai made his biggest mark with People Mountain People Sea 人山人海 (2011), a simple revenge story with apocalyptic ambitions that was only let down by being over-elliptical. His third feature as director, the grittily intense psychodrama The Conformist 冰之下, starring Huang Bo 黄渤, Song Jia 宋佳, Xiaoshenyang 小沈阳 and Liu Hua 刘桦, and centred on a police informant in a wintry Sino-Russian bordertown, still remains unreleased in China after premiering at the Shanghai festival in Jun 2017.
Work on Sun actually began in early 2020, with Cai’s wife, Han Nianjin 韩念锦, replacing his usual co-writer, Gu Xiaobai 顾小白, on a story examining moral issues rather than social problems. Though far less dramatic on the surface than People or Conformist, it’s still very much within the emotional orbit of Cai’s movies, with a central character who’s caught up in the legacy of past events. The problem is that the viewer can’t get properly engaged in the heroine’s dilemma until at least 35 minutes into the film, when background that’s previously been hidden is suddenly revealed in large chunks of dialogue. Until then, all the audience has been shown is a 36-year-old woman who runs a small clothing business, has just discovered she’s pregnant (with problems), and has two men in her life – one terminally ill who’s angry at her and one married who’s being anonymously sent threatening text messages.
After finally filling in all this background (in some 20 minutes of dialogue), the characters belatedly come into focus around the hour mark. Also, the film at last gains a dramatic objective: the woman’s quest for redemption over how she treated the terminally ill man in the past. This should be the meat of the movie. But with her married lover suddenly removed from the story by this point, the second hour becomes a rather dull and undramatic plod through the remaining two characters’ life together, as she looks for a larger flat to care for him properly in his final months. A dramatically o.t.t. ending that seems to come out of nowhere is more jaw-dropping than emotionally overhelming.
Though she’s also worked consistently in TVDs, Xin, 39, has been giving notable performances in all kinds of films for over a decade without really breaking through as a major star: as the trigger to the main story in horror Bunshinsaba II 笔仙II (2013), as the wannabe entrepreneur in family comedy Impossible 不可思异 (2015), as the super-swordswoman in Brotherhood of Blades II: The Infernal Battlefield 绣春刀II 修罗战场 (2017), and as the cyborg bodyguard in Yes, I Do! 我的女友是机器人 (2020), to name just a few. In Sun she’s the unadorned heart and soul of the movie, which she still manages to carry (and give the film an extra point) despite the script’s structural weaknesses. It’s a remarkable, quietly intense performance, strengthened by Xin’s killer stare and consistent underplaying of a driven single woman who’s still burdened by guilt over her past mistakes. Her best scenes are with the experienced Feng Shaofeng 冯绍峰 as the married man she still loves, despite his constant equivocations about settling down. Both actors give of their best and are well balanced with each other – making his sudden disappearance from the film even more dramatically damaging to the movie.
Too often, Xin is left holding the film together on her own, and especially not helped by the way in which the terminally ill man’s character is written – as an arrogant and naggy victim. Zhang Songwen 张颂文 is a dependable character actor but, unlike Feng, not really a leading man: his performance here is solid but hamstrung by a script that doesn’t engender any sympathy for his character, who’s little more than a constant grouch (his long soliloquy at the 100-minute mark isn’t nearly as moving as it should be). This raises the question about whether Xin’s character will ever be able to repay her moral debt to him – another dramatic weakness of the script.
As in all of Cai’s films, production values are fine, though visually it’s much more low-key than his previous movies, with a natural look by South Korean d.p. Gim Hyeon-seok 김현석 | 金炫锡 (Poetry 시, 2010; So Long, My Son 地久天长, 2019) to the everyday locations in Guangzhou and Shaoguan, and with a gentle, piano-dominated score by Guo Sida 郭思达 that enters occasionally. Overall, the film could easily lose 20-30 minutes, with some major tightening of the second half, including the woman’s visit to a clothing factory that is an entertaining vignette but not a structural necessity. Shooting started in Guangdong province in mid-Jul 2024 and lasted 50 days. The Chinese title roughly means “The Sun Hangs High in the Sky”.
CREDITS
Presented by Guangzhou Mint Pictures (CN), Dongyang Jingyu Film & TV Culture Media (CN), Ningbo Mint Pictures (CN), Tianjin Maoyan Weiying Cultural Media (CN), Shaoguan Transportation & Tourism Investment Group (CN), Guangming Vision (Shenzhen) Film Industry (CN), Sil-Metropole Organisation (Guangzhou) Film & Culture (CN), Beijing Kajiutiao Culture & Media (CN). Produced by Guangzhou Zizai Media (CN).
Script: Han Nianjin, Cai Shangjun. Photography: Gim Hyeon-seok. Editing: Matthieu Laclau, Cai Yanshan. Music: Guo Sida. Art direction: Zhao Tao. Costumes: Li Binbin. Styling: Wang Jiahui. Sound: Lou Kun. Action: Huang Mingjian. Visual effects: Zhang Wenchao (Joyidea). Executive direction: Ying Tong.
Cast: Xin Zhilei (Zeng Meiyun), Zhang Songwen (Wu Baoshu), Feng Shaofeng (Chen Qifeng), Qiao Linkai (estate agent), Yi Xinyun (clothing factory owner’s wife), Ye Peishi (Chen Zilin, Chen Qifeng’s daughter), Shan Baozhong, Li Yuehui (doctors).
Premiere: Venice Film Festival (Competition), 5 Sep 2025.
Release: China, 7 Nov 2025.