In the opening scenes of Cai Shangjun’s The Sun Rises on Us All, a woman in her mid-30s, Meiyun (Xin Zhilei), is getting an ultrasound. The technician cannot find a heartbeat, but quickly brushes Meiyun off, telling her to go to some other part of the hospital to talk to a doctor. Following this disturbing news, she returns to her boutique in the mall and starts a promotional livestream on Douyin (Chinese TikTok). She is all smiles, gazing into the ring light and holding up pastel-colored pairs of pants. But soon after, she is seen tending to a man in a hospital bed, struggling to move. We eventually learn that this is Baoshu (Zhang Songwen), Meijun’s ex-husband who is suffering from stomach cancer. Before long, Meijun is caught in a low-key showdown between her current partner Qifeng (William Feng), who happens to be married with a young child, and Baoshu. Neither man knows that Meijun is pregnant.
To its credit, The Sun Rises on Us All takes its time explaining how we got to this point. Meijun and Baoshu have a very complicated past, and as we gather more details, our perception of these characters shifts significantly. Baoshu seems like a grim, vindictive stalker, preventing Meijun from moving on with her life. But Meijun, it seems, came to the city to run away from some of the worst, most indefensible parts of herself, things of which Baoshu is an unwilling reminder. For his part, he is a broken man, but hardly a saint, as his violent behavior makes clear. While orchestrated as a subdued melodrama, The Sun Rises exhibits shades of noir, in the sense that everyone is compromised, the weight of the past is inescapable, and no one gets away clean.
Chinese director Cai Shangjun is probably best known for his second feature, People Mountain People Sea, which, like his latest, competed for the Golden Lion in Venice. That film was a revenge story, whereas The Sun Shines on Us All offers a glimpse of a world well past the point of settling scores. One could make a fair argument that Cai’s latest is a deep dive into miserablism, a pitiless gaze at three people whose bad choices are quickly coming to an ugly fruition. But there’s something else at work in The Sun Shines that maybe has to do with the current state of Chinese cinema. The film emphasizes a kind of misguided agency, its characters reacting to trying circumstances in cowardly ways. But as we see throughout the film, this benighted love triangle is happening against a hostile, ruined landscape. The larger environment of Guangdong province is a venal, dog-eat-dog universe in which everyone is angry and embittered, rationality has evaporated, and rapacious gangster capitalism has turned ordinary people into cornered animals. In this context, honor is a fool’s game, and trying to do the right thing only makes you an easy mark.
Watching The Sun Shines on Us All, one is reminded a bit of Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation. The films don’t share much in the way of tone: Farhadi’s film has an Ibsenesque literary precision, where Cai seems more comfortable with muted melodrama. But what unites these two films is the delicate way their directors thread the needle of state censorship and authoritarian oversight. Both films are chamber pieces focused on a small group of people experiencing struggles in their private lives, ones that spill out onto the body politic. And in both cases, the directors slowly reveal to us just how flawed their characters are, leading to a sense of plausible deniability. In Cai’s film, China, like Iran, is not an oppressive hellhole; these are just people who chose badly in their own lives.
But of course, both films clearly display the extent to which these people were constrained by desperation, social mores, and political indifference. The Sun Rises on Us All sidesteps miserabilism by asking us to sympathize with imperfect people trying to make their way in a society that appears irreparably broken. Any noble deed is actually just penance for some earlier misdeed. In the final scene, Baoshu goes to the bus station to try to go back to the countryside, finally leaving Meijun in peace. But there is no goodbye, no reconciliation, just the sudden eruption of the violence that has been simmering under the surface throughout. In the end, the tragedy of two people is mere background noise, as dozens of young people offboard the bus in Guangzhou, new blood for the 21st century Moloch.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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