Actually and metaphorically, of course, it's a long time before Xiangyang (played by actors at 9, 19 and 30 over the film's three chapters) gets anywhere near sun, or, in any satisfying way, art. The first hurdle is the Cultural Revolution. Gengian runs afoul of the Red Guard in 1970, is sentenced to a forced labor camp for six years. He returns home a literally broken man brutal captors have stomped on and broken his hands, which never heal properly. His slingshot-wielding six-year-old son, growing up as a street kid who gets into trouble a lot with his pal, Chicken Droppings, is far from happy to see him. The boy regards him as an intrusive stranger and resents him, to the consternation of Chen's mom and wife, caught in the middle, even after they and most of their neighbors survive a literal earthquake on top of the political one.
Determined that his son should live the life he has been denied (his hands still shake), Gengnian pushes the boy into art lessons. He has a talent for art, but resists attaching himself to it in a series of father-son skirmishes as their wills clash for the next couple of decades. Ironically, when he picks up a stray firecracker during a parade in order to injure his own hand to free himself from the lessons, he's regarded as a selfless little hero for protecting his classmates and taken into the Red Guards. Movingly, when his father won't let him join his pals at a movie, but insists he stay home and draw a still life. Sunflower finally stops fighting his own talent when his sketching earns him pocket money from home-made greeting cards and the attention of a cute girl in a red scarf, attracted by his drawings of her. The problem is that the old man, although well-intended, keeps behaving in hard-headed ways that stoke his son's enmity, culminating when he drags the teen off a train south, where he was headed with the girl and another pal.
The human interchanges seem at times deliberately flattened, muted, avoiding kinds of editing and rhythms that would heighten emotions. Perhaps the idea was to parallel stylistically the father's stubborn sense of principle, which deepens tensions in the marriage, as the hitherto forbearing and compliant woman of the house begins pushing her husband to do what many others do, along the lines of bribing and cajoling officials, to get them out of their rickety house on an old-fashioned courtyard into one of the new apartments. As he did in Shower, the filmmaker makes it clear that the aging artist likes their shabby but cozy old enclave that time seems in a rush to leave behind. As he digs in, and is sustained by his lifelong neighbor next door, with whom he bonds after forgiving the latter for turning him in to the Red Guards, he seems more and more a figure about to be left behind by time -- and even his wife. She divorces him in order to be assigned one of the new apartments for workers, of which she has become.
By the time the film arrives in the '80s, the landscape begins to assert itself as a character as it looms over the tiled roofs of the old neighborhood and as cars begin to crowd bicycles on widened streets. By 1999, when the film ends, huge apartment slabs dot the landscape, jutting upward like alien rockets from another world, displacing the one the increasingly marginalized and alienated father clings to. As the sociology grows larger, the characters seem to grow smaller, even when the son, in adulthood, has successfully embraced an artistic career that surpasses anything his father could have hoped for, as the old man generously admits. After an abortion his father pushed his son's first love to have depicted in tellingly increasing layers of distancing Sunflower's father and mother now ironically reverse themselves and pressure their Jeep Cherokee-driving son and his new wife to have a child. And so modernization accelerates, life pushes on, patterns come full circle as Yang veers between the macro and the micro of Chinese life roaring out of its past to face the smog.
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by Jay Carr
