Fathers and sons – Sunflower

‘Why don’t you start a Chinese film blog?’

‘Because I don’t have enough time to watch Chinese films.’

‘Hm.’

Possibly a little unfair in the circs – sorry, love. I'm actually developing a bit of a backlog of films to write about, and more are (YesAsia assures me) in the post.

Sunflower (Zhang Yang 200?) should be powerful and engaging. However. (Are we getting negative in our old age?) Xiangyang’s father, Gengnian, coming back to Beijing after years in countryside during Cultural Revolution, is dismayed at nine-year-old Xiangyang’s unruliness and determined that he is not going to waste talent as painter (Gengnian himself is a former painter whose hands were ruined by beatings). After Xiangyang (nearly?) blinds son of neighbour with catapult, Gengnian forces him to stay in drawing and drives him on through art school. Teenage Xiangyang resists father’s plans – skips class to sell greetings cards, tries to escape to Guangzhou – but Gengnian retrieves him and compels Xiangyang’s girlfriend to terminate her pregnancy. Twelve years later, adult Xiangyang and his wife end another pregnancy because – Xiangyang tells his father – he does not feel ready to be a good parent and does not want to blight his own child’s life by being as bad a father as Gengnian. Resolution and a form of reconciliation come only once Gengnian disappears, allowing Xiangyang to think of him as a benign absence rather than a suffocating presence.

The film shows us the pressures of China in transition – fractured families, tensions between neighbours, conflicting desires (Do we want a model child? Do we want a new apartment? Do we want love or do we want our own way?), battles over authority; but in the three central characters (Gengnian, Xiangyang, and his mother [always a bad sign if you can’t remember a central character’s name]) we see three people who seem to change only to become more fixed in their ways, on divergent paths. Gengnian’s relationship with neighbour Old Liu (who wrote the appraisal that led to his exile) is more compelling, but develops largely off-camera.

In themes and setting, Sunflower invites comparison with Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang) and Together (Chen Kaige) but lacks the strong central relationship that characterises and humanises those films. Sunflower is honest in showing the long-term damage that the Cultural Revolution could do to families and to individuals (not that Blue Kite was coy on that point as far as it went), but it does not draw us (me) in. It is as if we see the worst in each of the central characters – we can see signs that they must have a warmer side but the film rarely shows it.







Who was it who said you have to blog every day? What kind of a life...............?