Written by: Demi Guo
In America: “Crazy Rich Asians.” “Always Be My Maybe.” Suddenly, “The Farewell”! Drama!
In China: CGI. Yet another remake of the “Snake Goddess,” but what’s the story?
Enter Wen Ren, with starry skies, mainland actors and the official screen declaring it approved by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television of the People’s Republic of China. But Ren is from New Jersey. “The Last Sunrise” is a Chinese American film.
His film works on the other end of a gap that Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell” has been filling, and what it is is a good, quiet story that doesn’t need Crazy Rich money to help Asians and Asian Americans understand each other. Independent films might do the trick.
It’s no secret that Asians have been making moves all over the world. No one, as Ren puts it, expected Asian Americans to explode so fast into Hollywood through “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Always Be My Maybe.” And the now-economical mainland China has in recent years been valuing market over art, with the gaudy CGI and wild castings in what are meant to be blockbuster films. Hollywood and China are scrambling to break into each other’s industries. Just ask “The Great Wall.” “Mulan” might still do okay.
Ren saw it for himself. He gave it to me straight. “It’s like real estate,” he said.
“The Last Sunrise” opens with the sun suddenly dying in a future dependent on solar energy. The stern-faced astronomer Sun Yang (Zhang Jue) and his bubbly neighbor Chen Mu (Zhang Yue) make their way out of the city as it falls into a panic, and embark on a journey to the last safe district.
It’s based off of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which — as Ren explains at every film festival — is why it takes eight minutes and twenty seconds before anyone realizes the sun has gone out, why the stars shine much more starkly in the sky, and why the earth is suddenly an orphan planet, drifting alone in the universe.
There’s a metaphor here. The entire film is bound up in social commentary and allegory. Where do the rich go versus the poor when the world ends? If we become nothing more than animals in crisis, who turns on who? And how, oh how, do we live in a world without our smartphones?
These are things I have been asking myself. Most end-of-the-world media doesn’t seem particularly bothered about those questions, but they are very real now that my generation faces the reality of climate change.
Zhang Jue and Zhang Yue give us different answers based on the kind of people their characters are. The pessimistic survivor Sun Yang drives Chen Mu to safety. Chen Mu, quite helpless at the beginning, insists on stopping for desperate stragglers calling for help on the side of the road. Sun Yang just keeps driving.
Nevertheless, there are moments when each gives up. That’s why they have each other. If Sun Yang is too cold, then remember he would only ever stop for Chen Mu’s wellbeing. If Chen Mu ever seems too irritating, she is the one who is determined to not just survive, but keep her humanity. People have layers, and it’s difficult to not fall in love with them at the end.
The apocalypse is as bleak as in any disaster film. There are moments that are especially heartbreaking to me, as many characters sport a northern Chinese accent; it’s like watching my own family and neighbors pressure me, break me, turn on me.
It also reminds us that the universe always gives us a tiny sliver of an opportunity to go on, and maybe even live. That’s as much as I can say about the punches Ren packs into this film. One thing he did say that you should consider when you see it to the end, though — “The key is in the watch.”
So why science fiction? The multiple choice answer is, of course, “market.” The short answer is: Asian American films usually talk about identity, but Ren decided to “go back to China” to see if there was anything more he could bring to the narrative.
“We have a very specific experience,” he said. As an overseas Chinese, he got into a lot of arguments in China, and one Shanghainese peer in particular said:
“The biggest difference I see between us Chinese people and you ABCs [American-Born Chinese] is that ABCs spend all their time struggling to be American. The Chinese are homogenous. We are okay with being Chinese.”
“The point he was trying to make,” Ren said, “is that the reason we struggle so much is that we are so focused on trying to create our new identity, but not really embracing where we come from.” Identity is the main topic, but it’s not the only one that’s important. “We should also make films that try to connect who we are and who we were.”
“Crazy Rich Asians” broke the market as the first all-Asian casted film in years and caused a ripple in the Asian American community. But mainland Chinese viewers were unimpressed with Yet Another Asian Rom-Com — something they comparably take for granted — and downright offended by the portrayal of Asians as the stereotypical “tuhao,” or ostentatious rich person. The upside of “The Farewell,” Ren said, is that it spent the whole film steepling the cultural differences of Asians and Asian Americans against each other until it finally broke down to the audience where the misunderstanding between the two is.
The mainland crowd is currently captivated by “Wandering Earth,” the sci-fi film that recently became the highest-grossing Chinese film on IMAX, but before that, Ren was surprised to find that the sci-fi scene in the country was quite small.
“It’s almost impossible to imagine a future without Asian influence,” he said. “Hollywood manages to do that, they just put it in the background in a qipao or something.”
So while the two giants bump into each other on top of the box-office-bombed-out remains of “The Great Wall” and blink at “Crazy Rich Asians,” this $250,000 independent film sits next to “The Farewell” as a work that can afford to be creative.
“In China, I brought my American aesthetic,” Ren said. But, he recalled, he directed the Chinese cast and crew with the attitude of one who was there to learn, not to teach. He made a film before he turned 30, and got a sound language and cultural education out of it. After all, one reason he went back was that he didn’t want the rift between his two sides to deepen any more.
“In China, there’s still 1.4 billion who wanna watch stories, who wanna be touched,” he said. “We can, as this bridge, do it. I don’t think Hollywood could do it. This is for all filmmakers who are able and interested to broaden this perspective. We’ve proven ourselves in romantic comedies, we’ve proven ourselves in drama. Let’s do horror, and sci-fi.”
Director: Wen Ren
Stars: Zhang Jue, Zhang Yue
Running Time: 1 hour 44 minutes
Genre: Narrative, Sci-Fi