The Day the Sun Turned Cold

viewed January 7, 2000 on video

For more information about this film, click here.

This film makes me enthusiastic about the collaborative potential between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese filmmakers.  The realism that has dominated Mainland cinema is given a refreshing injection of film noir, as a haunted young man investigates the death of his father several years ago.  The prime suspect in his mind is his mother, who has since remarried.  The evidence he first presents to the authorities seems fatuous: he recently read a book on poisonings, sparking long-buried memories of his father's illness.  But his findings prove to be more substantial, and as his mother appears more and more culpable, the film raises searing questions that problematize the ideology of filial piety.  What is the cost of bringing his own mother to justice, and what is truly gained by doing so? 

The film unveils the secrets of the man's death through a series of beautifully rendered flashbacks, set in the wintry surroundings of northern China, and quite remarkably triggers sentiments of nostalgia for what amounts to a brutal past with an abusive father.  At the same time, the harshness of the geographic and social environs makes us appreciate the genuine warmth and desire that ignites the mother's affair.  The breaths of the lovers drifting in the frozen air is the most memorable image of this frost-lit film.  With Taiwan star Chung Hua Tao looking very unglamorous as the son, and Mainland actors Jinggu Ma and Gaowa Siqin as his parents.

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