A Sun (Chung Mong-hong)

[Philip J. Fry]

Trailer:
[

Show Spoiler

]

IMDb / wiki / RT / Metacritic

On Netflix

[dreamdead]

Reposting from the Top 10 thread to help this one know a bit more love:

Trying to catch up on a lot and some things will inevitably fall behind, but Chung Mong-hong's A Sun is deserving of the praise that the Variety writer Peter Debruge threw its way when he namechecked it as the year's best film. It operates across multiple registers, as a low-key gangster film, as a family melodrama, and as a study on lower-class life and beliefs in aspiration. It feels like a slice-of-life text, and the comparisons to Lee Chang-dong's scripts is apropos--this Taiwanese film is pretty understated, yet there are echoes and reverberations that feel similar to the way that Lee's Secret Sunshine or Poetry operated, where payoffs on those small moments occur some time later. There are a slew of gorgeous individual shots and moments, from the hotpot visual to the dream sequence to the sequence that gives the film's its English title, to the coda. Just a marvel.

[Stay Puft]

I found this a little more uneven; it's understated at times but overstated at others, or maybe that's just a negative reaction to certain stylistic choices. I don't want to spoil anything but e.g. in the monologue at the end, the fade-out cuts and the flashback images I found annoying and heavy-handed; we already know what happened at that point, and cutting away to the literal images of violence felt a little sensationalistic in that context (blunting the emotional impact; it would have been stronger to just stay on the actors). It's also uneven in its plotting. It moves briskly, but I would have preferred something shorter (it's nearly 3 hours already) with some of its wayward subplots excised, and an actual slower pace to allow more scenes time to breathe and give the film a more lived-in atmosphere. It's juggling too much, specifically in the first half, where some plots are left alone for too long, and others end up going nowhere (e.g. the prison rivalry).

But reservations aside, I did enjoy the film. It's always engaging and I have a soft spot for these sorts of rambling narratives (there's even an animated sequence thrown in here) that try to chase something ineffable, particularly in the plot threads involving the eldest son and the mother; some of those scenes hit me really hard. The final scene is quite lovely, too.