阳光灿烂的日子 (In the Heat of the Sun) is one of a few select movies that is of deep personal significance to me and that I hold dear to my heart like a beloved family heirloom. It is in my honest opinion, one of the masterpieces of world cinema. Having recently re-watched it, I was surprised by how fresh this film felt and how many surprises it holds upon a second viewing. This was Chinese actor Jiang Wen’s (姜文) first movie as a director. He has so far made two more movies, all of which are excellent, but none can compare to the sheer cinematic brilliance that is captured in 阳光灿烂的日子.
阳光灿烂的日子is Jiang Wen’s most personal film and also, his magnum opus.阳光灿烂的日子 is known in English as “In the Heat of the Sun”. I don’t know who made the translation but it absolutely fails to convey any of the poetic meaning in the Chinese title. The title literally means “The Days when the Sun Shone Brightly.” Although the title describes the setting of the movie, taking place during one summer in the life of the main character, the more subtle meaning conveys a sense of nostalgia, of warmth, and of longing for a bygone era that exists only in scenes of memory. It sounds like the finishing words of an autobiography where the author is remembering the long gone days of his youth.
阳光灿烂的日子 is the coming-of-age story of the young Ma Xiao Jun (played by the extremely talented Xia Yu aka 夏雨) and his gang of friends as they deal with the slings and arrows of young adulthood including parents, his male comrades and that most mysterious of creatures to young teenage boys: the teenage girl. It is set in Beijing amongst the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. Ma Xiao Jun’s father is a People’s Liberation Army soldier and is always away to occupy his military post in a distant province. He lives with his mother but the film has very few scenes of him at home. Most of his days are spent out with his gang of male friends.
He is a lanky young boy hitting puberty and slowly discovering human sexuality. There is a comical scene where Xiao Jun plays around with what looks like a balloon from his father’s drawer only to find out later that it was a condom. During the summer, he hangs out with his gang, a group of people very much like the rebellious youth from Rebel Without a Cause. They gets into fights with other gangs when one of their own gets hurt and they flirt with girls they see on the streets. The gang’s leader is a dashing and handsome older boy named Liu Yi Ku who early on in the movie wants to know a popular girl named Mi Lan. Xiao Jun, who is a talented keymaker, has a favourite pastime which involves sneaking into the apartments of strangers while they are absent. He becomes fixated with the apartment of one stranger, a beautiful young girl whose portrait instantly captivates Xiao Jun. He prowls the rooftops like a silent guardian to wait for this girl and finally meets her one day in the streets. The girl is the famous Mi Lan, who is older and much more mature than the innocent Xiao Jun. The two develop what at best can be called a brother-sister relationship but as with any boy smitten by a girl, friendship alone does not suffice. Xiao Jun later introduces Mi Lan to his friends and tries to win her heart only to ultimately lose her affections to the handsome and mature Liu Yi Ku.
阳光灿烂的日子 is unique in that it takes no political stand on the Cultural Revolution, instead choosing to focus on the everyday experiences of young kids during the Revolution and their coming-of-age within this historical context. It is a fond remembrance of those days of the Cultural Revolution where young kids roamed free without parental supervision around the city of Beijing.
My father, who lived through the Cultural Revolution, would often reminisce about those days as a time of absolute freedom and liberty. He would tell me how intellectuals such as teachers, who were the target of persecution, would often be bullied by students right in the middle of class very much like a hilarious scene in the movie in a classroom. As most of the adults have gone to work in the countryside and factories in Chairman Mao’s proletariat movement, kids in those days didn’t even attend school. My father would tell me stories about roaming around the city of Beijing, which was like a ghost town due to the exodus of people to the countryside, with friends very much like the young boys depicted in the movie and get into fights with other local gangs. He told me some of the characters in the movie are based on real life, namely Xiao Huai Dan, the old gang leader who settled the truce only to be assassinated later on by other enemy gang members.
Jiang Wen skilfully and ingeniously portrays this bygone era in 阳光灿烂的日子 while simultaneously telling a brilliant coming-of-age story that is universal in its appeal. The main characters are so well developed and reflective of genuine emotions that anyone who has ever been young can identify with them. This film is one of the most honest and powerful portrayals of the adolescent experience I have ever seen and a powerful meditation on memory and time. Jiang Wen brilliantly uses an orange-red color palette to exude a feeling of warmth and youthful vivacity. The lush music of the Sicillian Opera, Cavelleria Rusticana (which appeared in the opening scene of Raging Bull) is used to great effect here, evoking the reveries of Ma Xiao Jun. The movie is ingeniously shot with soft focus lenses to convey images of reverie springing right out of one’s memory. The sceneries in memory are often diluted and unclear, eaten away as one forgets through age. It is often hard to see images from memory in sharp focus and there are details that we cannot see like how the radiant light of the summer sun can often blind our perception. Indeed, a major theme of the movie is the unreliability of memory. The narrator in the movie, voiced by Jiang Wen himself as the adult version of Ma Xiao Jun, often finds that he is contradicting himself, speaking of events that might never have happened.
There is an amazing scene where Ma Xiao Jun sneaks into the house of the girl he has a crush on, and notices a portrait of her in a swimming suit behind white veil. His observance of the portrait slowly dissolves into a closeup shot of another girl named Hu Pei Pei who hangs out with Xiao Jun’s gang. In a later scene, the portrait disappears. When Xiao Jun asks Mi Lan where the portrait had gone, she staunchly denies ever possessing one. Did the portrait ever exist or was it simply the product of Xiao Jun’s daydreams? In fact the unreliable narrator even later says that maybe Mi Lan and Hu Pei Pei might be the same person. The movie smartly never answers those questions.
It is said that the “first loves of adolescence are so powerful because they are not based on romance but on ideals.” Boys and girls fall in love because they think the other person is perfect. In fact Xiao Jun often acts out scenes from old Soviet movies pretending to be an idealistic Bolshevik warrior as a pastime and also to impress Mi Lan. Mi Lan to Xiao Jun is an object of Pygmalion fascination. It is fair to ask whether Xiao Jun really knows Mi Lan, or does she simply represent an ideal that commands his fascination and sexual desire? Xiao Jun tells us that his initial meetings with Mi Lan were pure bliss as he would often go to her apartment, dance with her and watch her lie down on the bed. Indeed, we often remember things not as they were, but as what we want to think they were. As the older Xiao Jun tells us through narration, his meeting of Mi Lan might never have been as enchanting as he remembers. It is interesting to note that Xiao Jun, and the audience, are first introduced to Mi Lan not by a facial encounter but through her feet. There are many shots of Mi Lan’s feet later on in the movie. What is Jiang Wen suggesting here? Is it a suggestion of foot fetish like in Quentin Tarantino’s movies? I think it’s an image of perfection that is firmly ingrained in Xiao Jun’s memory such that whenever he thinks of Mi Lan, he thinks of her feet. In other words, the feet symbolize the ideal that is Mi Lan.
There is a great scene where Xiao Jun first introduces Mi Lan to his friend, the gang leader Liu Yi Ku. He tries to woo and impress her, pretending to be a Bolshevik soldier and boasting that he can climb all the way to the top of a coal tower. He plays around with his friend only to see Mi Lan laughing and being touched by Liu Yi Ku. Immediately his attention is shifted to Mi Lan and Liu Yi Ku. Notice Xia Yu’s, who plays Ma Xiao Jun, subtle facial tensions as he looks on, jealousy and regret boiling underneath the surface. It is brilliant and subtle acting. Any boy who has ever stood by and watched a girl that one deeply likes laughing and being caressed by another boy can instantly identify with Xiao Jun’s rage and despair. The reaction is human and Xia Yu’s performance captures that reaction impeccably.
It is a shame that 阳光灿烂的日子is not widely known in the West. Although championed by the famous American director Quentin Tarantino, this movie has never found distribution rights in North America and remains unseen. It is a cinematic masterpiece and together with its director, Jiang Wen, deserves the same kind of honor and appreciation given to the works of Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee and Wong Kar-Wai. The film version I saw was badly deteriorated and in serious need of a restoration. I hope that one day a figure like Martin Scorsese, known for his work on film preservation and the championing of his Italian heritage by using his name to distribute Italian movies, would come and save this precious gem of a film that so wonderfully captures the essence of the adolescent experience. 阳光灿烂的日子 is not only a masterpiece of Chinese cinema, but also one of the greatest works of art, period.
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