‘The Sun Rises on Us All’ Review: Cai Shangjun’s Latest is Often an Aimless Take on ‘Past Lives’ [C] Venice

The underlying theme of the 2025 Venice Film Festival seems to be the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by human beings: the implications of one’s choices, as represented by Paolo Sorrentino in La Grazia and Kathryn Bigelow in A House of Dynamite, or the consequences of people’s actions, as in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin, are at the heart of many films this year. Every day we make choices, based on our own conscience, on our desires: sometimes those choices reward us, sometimes they fail us, and with that failure comes a certain reckoning, a moment where we have to deal with consequences that might be unpleasant or downright punishing.

Cai Shangjun’s new film, Rì guà zhōng tiān (The Sun Rises On Us All), explores this theme on a much more intimate scale. It tells the story of Meiyun, a woman from the Chinese province of Guangdong. She’s a businesswoman, she’s the owner of a clothes shop and she’s dating a married man, Qifeng. Their relationship seems to be flourishing; she’s 6-weeks pregnant, and Qifeng reveals that he’s about to ask his wife for divorce. One Day, during a visit to the hospital for a check-up on her pregnancy, she hears the name of her ex-partner Baoshu, who she hasn’t seen in several years. She finds out that Baoshu is sick with cancer, and she decides to help him. There is friction between them, and we soon learn why: many years before, while Meiyun was driving and Baoshu was asleep, there was an accident that killed a person. Out of love for his partner, Baoshu took the fall and claimed responsibility for the act, resulting in him going to jail. After a few years, while Baoshu was still paying the price of love, Meiyun decided to move on and start a new life with Qifeng. The different choices made by Meiyun and Baoshu now catch up with them, and time has come for them to confront each other about them.

Almost the result of a triangular inspiration from Celine Song’s Past Lives, the moral enigmas of Asghar Farhadi’s cinema and Chinese master Jia Zhangke’s alienation, The Sun Rises On Us All is a film that raises interesting questions. How much can we move on from our past, especially when it’s as troubled as Meiyun and Baoshu’s? How much of a chance do we have to start anew, and how can two people with such opposing sentiments achieve reconciliation? The film wants to walk a fine line between understanding its characters and finding a resolution, even when a resolution is clearly difficult to reach. The chasm between its intentions and its result is what causes the film to be promising but also ultimately middling.

For a long stretch, especially for the first hour, it seems like the movie is moving in circles without finding a true focal point. The film shows the relationship between Meyiun and Baoshu as a troubled one, but it never quite gets to the point as to how it should evolve. We hear Baoshu blaming Meyiun for abandoning him in jail, and at the same time he tries to physically and mentally impose himself on her by raping her – not just an unpleasant scene to see but also a trite cliché. Ridden with guilt, Meyiun acts quite passively in front of her own former partner. Yes, she helps him with his cancer care, and she genuinely hopes he can start afresh, and yet, at the same time, she knows that there is no future for them together, for obvious reasons. Stuck in this limbo, the film doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. It’s not until Baoshu, in a moment of reckoning, opens up to Meyiun and confesses his feelings, in a mixture of abandonment, despair and disillusionment, that the movie starts finding its footing. It’s a beautifully acted scene, evidence that the film works when it lets its two actors take control of the scene, which doesn’t happen enough. It’s a shame because Zhilei Xin and Songwen Zhang have a somewhat dark chemistry that goes in favor of the film, naturally underlining the troubled and tempestuous relationship their characters share.

Even though it is shot in simple and unassuming way, making it an interesting visual journey, The Sun Rises On Us All commits the capital crime of relying on a script that banalizes its characters and going for gratuitous and displeasing plot developments – not just the already mentioned rape scene, but also a sequence ending with a 10-year-old girl slashing her wrists, and the highly emphatic and controversial ending. Because of this, the impact of what could have been a compelling story about redemption and release is dramatically lessened.

Grade: C

This review is from the 2025 Venice Film Festival. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.

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Roberto Ruggio

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