Sun Also Arises

(viewed on Jan. 23, 2008, DVD purchased in Nanjing)

Jiang Wen: I have no control over film; film controls me.

I knew little about this film before I watched it. However, I read that Jiang Wen spent a great amount of time to edit this film more or less in a self solitary confinement. That, for me, explained why this film is made of puzzles of memory and fragments of dreams.

Characters appeared, disappeared, and reappeared in the film. They met, became friends, mother and son, husband and wife, stranger and lover. They were also born and killed. More important, they were busy to reincarnate into each other's lives within their co-existence.

There were only a few tangible and intangible things loosely tied them together: a Russian name, a gun, and a song. Nobody truly has either personal knowledge or objective observation and memory of "what happened". All the statements are vague and unbelievable, even the statement is about her own past. Each witness is not reliable or may be only an imaginary figure, even when the witness is the accused himself.

The baby was born after his mother headed to "no end". His birth at the end of the film does not intend to tie up the story or clear the time line, but only draws an arrow to an unclear point into the past to start another random cycle on the old track. The blurred time line diminished the individual and period identities in the film, but hint us how all of them and us dream the dream, live to live and die to die.

However, when the reality and imagination both can be broken to pieces, they can be mixed, then put together as puzzles by power of dream.