A Sun


A Sun is a 2019 Taiwanese drama film directed and co-written by Chung Mong-hong. The film stars Chen Yi-wen, Samantha Ko, Wu Chien-ho, Greg Hsu, and Liu Kuan-ting. Its story centres on Chen Jian Ho, a troubled teenager who has been arrested, and Hao, Ho's accomplished brother who commits suicide due to familial pressure. It explores Ho's re-entry into society and his father's efforts to acknowledge his son, something he had never done. Juvenile delinquency and suicide are the film's main themes, with visual motifs including light and dark. The film, which incorporates many conventions of Asian cinema, also explores socioeconomic inequality in Taiwan.
The film was conceived after a high-school friend told Chung about a crime he had committed as a teenager. This became the opening sequence, which prefaces the narrative. Chang Yao-sheng was enlisted to co-write the screenplay with Chung, a process which took over a year. Filming began in 2018, with a tight 38-day schedule for budgetary reasons. Chung asked the cast not to consult him about their acting and rehearse on their own, although he would often direct them during filming. He was also the film's cinematographer under the pseudonym of Nagao Nakashima. Lai Hsiu-hsiung edited the film to a runtime of 155 minutes, Chung's longest film by far, and Lin Sheng Xiang composed the score.
A Sun premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 6 September 2019, before its theatrical release in Taiwan. The film under-performed financially, as did Chung's previous films. It was released on Netflix in 2020; poor marketing contributed to it not receiving much attention, before Peter Debruge of Variety called it the best film of 2020. The film received many positive reviews for its story, diversity of themes, audiovisual quality, and acting. It received a number of accolades, including 11 nominations at the 56th Golden Horse Awards; it received the Best Feature Film award and the Best Director award for Chung. The film was the Taiwanese entry for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards, where it made the 15-film shortlist.

Plot

In 2013 Taipei, troubled teenager Chen Jian-ho and his friend, Radish, approach a young man named Oden at a restaurant; to Ho's surprise, Radish cuts off Oden's hand with a machete. Ho is sentenced to juvenile detention, and Radish receives a harsher sentence. Ho's father, Wen, disowns him; however, his wife Qin still visits their son in prison. Wen focuses on Ho's shy older brother, Hao, who is attending a cram school in preparation for medical school. Wen is pestered for money at his job as a driving instructor by Oden's father; he refuses to pay, claiming no legal responsibility because his son did not injure Oden.
Fifteen-year-old Wang Ming-yu and her guardian, Yin, meet Qin; she is pregnant with Ho's child. Although Qin supports Yu throughout the pregnancy, Ho is not informed of it. Hao tells him, and Ho rages against the longtime secrecy. When Hao commits suicide by jumping from the apartment balcony, Hao's romantic interest Guo Xiao-zhen tells Qin that Hao felt overwhelmed by the constant attention and scrutiny on him, and had nowhere to be alone. Ho and Yu marry; Wen continues to ignore him when he is released a year and a half later, and Ho works at a car wash to support his family. Wen, tormented by visions of his dead son, goes out one night to buy cigarettes. He sees Ho at a convenience store at which his son had taken a night shift; they speak briefly about Hao, and seem to reconcile.
Ho is approached for money three years later by the recently released Radish, but he refuses. Radish later tells him to fire a gun at a legislator's office, and he grudgingly does so. Wen offers him money to stay away from his son; Radish refuses, and visits Ho late at night at the car wash, coercing him to borrow a client's car and go for a drive. They stop on a highway, where Radish tells him to enter a forest and deliver a package; he is paid a large sum of money. Upon returning, Radish is missing, and he flees.
A group of thugs kidnap Ho sometime later and demand the money because Radish was found dead. After Ho complies, they beat him, give him another large sum of money, and drop him off. Atop Qixing Mountain, Wen tells Qin that he had been skipping work to tail Ho and Radish. Wen saw their late-night drive, then attacked Radish when Ho left to get the money, dragging Radish into the forest and killing him with a rock. As Qin reacts in horror, Wen explains that this was the best way he could think of to help his only remaining son.
Ho and his mother later bond over a stack of old notebooks which Wen had given Hao at medical school, each labeled with Wen's motto: "Seize the day, decide your path"; all are empty. Ho steals a bicycle and he and Qin ride it through a park, the ambivalent Qin gazing at the surrounding scenery.

Cast

  • Chen Yi-wen as Wen, father of Chen Jian-ho and Hao and husband of Qin. He works as a driving instructor; his driving school has the slogan "Seize the day, decide your path", which he uses as a moral principle.
  • Samantha Ko as Qin, mother of Ho and Hao and wife of Wen. She owns and is a hairdresser for a salon, which she relocates midway through the film.
  • Wu Chien-ho as Chen Jian-ho, son of Wen and Qi and younger brother of Hao. He and Radish are imprisoned for assault, but he receives a lighter sentence. He impregnates Xiao Yu, short before going to prison. Then he marries her before his release. After his release, he works as a car washer and a cashier to support his wife and baby.
  • Greg Hsu as Chen Jian-hao, son of Wen and Qi and elder brother of Ho. The more accomplished and better-mannered son, he is studying to prepare for medical school. He becomes depressed and commits suicide.
  • Liu Kuan-ting as Radish, who orders Ho to follow him in the assault. After his release, he offers Ho criminal jobs for extra money, as a form of ransom for what happened in the past.
  • Apple Wu as Wang Ming-yu, a 15-year-old, ninth-grade student impregnated by Ho. Qin supports her throughout her pregnancy, and later Yu works as a hairdresser alongside Qin, who taught her. She is colloquially referred to as Xiao Yu.
  • Wen Chen-ling as Guo Xiao-zhen, Hao's classmate and romantic interest, who notices his gradual descent into depression and receives his poetic suicide text.
  • Ivy Yin as Yin, Yu's aunt, who has raised her since the girl was orphaned at age 5 after a car accident in which the bus she was riding in with her family caught fire, causing the death of both her parents.

    Production

Background and pre-production

Director Chung Mong-hong conceived A Sun when he met his once-troubled high-school friend, who told him about how he and his friend had cut off someone's hand in his youth and how it affected him psychologically for some time. Later, while having dinner with friends and family, he visualized a hand boiling in a hot pot; this drove him to write the film. After writing the opening sequence, Chung began to think about suicide and the familial and social effects of suicide and juvenile delinquency. The family members were given a traditional upbringing. Although no other films were creative inspirations, he later discovered that the plot is reminiscent of Fargo ; the latter begins with a light scene, followed by a lingering chaos. With making A Sun, Chung also aimed to explore the unknown within the story's themes.
Chung wanted another person to write the screenplay, but struggled to find the right person. He called Chang Yao-sheng perfect: collaborative and analytical, with a novelist's style. According to Chung, this helped him and others understand the feelings he wanted to evoke. He had finished a rough screenplay, with core elements of the film, in 40 days. He employed a typist to outpour his stream of thoughts onto the screenplay. The collaborative nature of producing A Sun was new to Chung, who had worked harder on his previous films; he described those films as worse, and called A Sun more stylistically diverse. As co-writer of the screenplay, Chung struggled to develop the characters; he wanted everyone in the story to be involved in driving it, saying that that would give the characters "life." Chang researched juvenile delinquency, and interviewed a former juvenile delinquent to ensure a realistic depiction. One year was spent on writing the film.
When casting the film, Chung wanted a four-person family and for its adult characters to be around his age. Chen Yi-wen was the first to be cast as Wen. He and Chung had collaborated in Godspeed, and Chung believed that Chen could do justice to Wen. He called Chen "fun" and stylistically unique. Chung equated the father's mind–body dualism with sunshine and shadow, related but separated. Greg Hsu met Chung twice before being cast as Hao, and noted his awkward communication. Wu Jian-he, preparing for his role as Ho at least six or seven months before, talked with teenagers who had been imprisoned; this gave him insight into the merciless atmosphere of a prison. Chung did not try to develop a deep relationship with the cast, and conducted no group preparations; he simply asked them to bring the screenplay home, learn their characters, and come on set to portray them. He largely attributed this to his lack of knowledge about acting.
Investors included Chung's 3 NG Film, MandarinVision, Eight Eight Nine Films, MirrorFiction and UNI Connect Broadcast Production. The Ministry of Culture supported the production, and Chung’s frequent collaborator Yeh Ju-feng and his wife Tseng Shao-Chien were producers. Yeh found the last two lines of the screenplay memorable; they translate as "Ah-Ho takes his mother for a ride on a bicycle, and the sun dazzlingly shines on the fallen leaves, bit by bit".

Filming

of A Sun began in September 2018 and took 38 days, a tight schedule given the film's 155-minute runtime. Chung attributed the schedule to the lack of popularity of his films in the Taiwanese market. Its financing was not completed during filming, a recurring problem with Chung's films. Eventually, the team settled a budget of NT$ 44million. Despite his desire to use film stock, Chung decided to use digital cinematography instead; he said that the warmth of a film is not solely dependent on the medium, but on the production collaboration.
The latter part of the opening sequence was shot on the first day; it was the most lighthearted day for Chung, who remembered laughing at the model hand in the soup. Area gangsters appeared as extras. The opening shots of Ho and Radish riding a motorcycle were filmed in July 2018, during Typhoon Maria. Filming required a quick call for the production team to rush to Civic Boulevard. Since Chung was satisfied by the windy rain, he told actors Wu and Liu Kuan-ting to stop riding as soon as the camera stopped filming. During a scene in which Ho is beaten by fellow inmates, the production team did not want Wu to be injured; cast members were told to ease up but keep the fight looking realistic.
Because of the film's solar motif, the weather largely determined its shooting schedule; this often meant changing a scheduled time to be able to film scenes in daylight. The Qixing Mountain scene was achieved by waiting during the filming days for a day when several weather forecasts predicted sunlight. Blue and yellow were chosen as the main colour tones. According to Chung, blue represents sorrow and apathy, and yellow represents warmth. The final shot was challenging to film, although it is a common phenomenon when driving. The mountain scene was backlit with sunlight, often blocked to evoke the scene's dualism. Chung had considered depicting Hao's death, but decided to allude to it by having him exit as the camera looks at the opposing wall and his shadow grows.
During filming, Chung remembered not feeling confident that the film would work. A Sun is a melodrama; more familiar with art films, he struggled to balance the genres. Chung originally wanted the mountain scene to be more cooler and more restrained, but later understood that melodramatic elements are often inevitable. He would often scold the cast and crew, annoying them; during editing, he saw that their scenes were effective and well-executed. Dark humor has its moments in the film, such as raw sewage being sprayed on Wen's workplace from what seems like a proton pack from the Ghostbusters films. This kind of humor was reminiscent of Chung's previous films as well.
Like his other films, A Sun was filmed by Chung under the pseudonym of Nagao Nakashima. According to Chung, his role as director-cinematographer was easier in this film. He came to think of the camera as "a very powerful tool", through which he could analyze the cast's every move as director. The cast would often be interrupted when Chung felt their performances were substandard, occasionally disturbing the sound mixers. He considers cinematography a tool to depict the scope of a scene: "As long as the lighting and colors are right, the atmosphere will pop out as the actors step in," he said. Despite pushing the cast, he also allowed for fluidity. Chung has cited Raising Arizona, Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Lost Highway as influences, and the cinematography of Last Tango in Paris was also an inspiration. Chung would keep the camera recording until his vision was achieved, a technique he used since he filmed car commercials early in his career.