A Sun: Taiwan’s heartbreaking epic and Oscar hopeful hidden on Netflix

Less than two minutes into A Sun, two youths storm into a restaurant and slice off an unsuspecting customer’s hand. Blood splatters on diners’ faces, a piercing scream ripples through the air. The camera zooms in on the dismembered body part, its five fingers simmering in a hotpot of otherwise delicious-looking stew. From that moment on, the viewer is on tenterhooks, half-expecting any quietude to be disrupted by more stomach-turning gore. If it’s a chopped-off right hand during the opening credits, then what’s next on the menu? The left one?

What writer-director Chung Mong-hong does instead is even more unpredictable: the Tarantino-esque cold open actually sets up an engrossing, slow-burn family drama designed to make you weep and seek forgiveness from any relatives you have wronged. “The hand-slashing scene is based on a story of a friend of mine when he was young,” the Taiwanese filmmaker writes to Dazed, over email, via a translator. “For many young people, before those terrible things happen, it’s all big talk. When it actually happens, they realise it’s a lot more serious… they never think that the consequences would be beyond repair or would trigger unexpected events.”

Set in Taipei, the captivating, 156-minute story follows the aftermath of that initial machete madness. Not so much the lost hand – that’s gone, along with the meal – but the family of A-Ho (Wu Chien-ho). Radish (Liu Kuan-ting) and A-Ho were supposed to frighten their target; to A-Ho’s horror, Radish wielded his weapon, and they’re both locked up for years. The fallout extends to A-Ho’s pregnant girlfriend (Wen Chen-ling); his secretive brother, A-Hao (Greg Han Hsu); and his heartbroken parents (Samantha Ko, Chen Yi-wen). The father disowns A-Ho, even asking the judge, “I hope you put him away to teach him some discipline.” When A-Ho leaves the juvenile detention centre, he’s fundamentally changed, but so are the people he tries to make amends with. “(The slashed hand) shocks the audience in the very beginning, and the rest of the film shows the audience what a normal family life is like,” Chung says. “Many things in life originate from unknown violence and accidents.”

A Sun – an accidental pun when translated from its Mandarin title into English – marks Chung’s sixth feature and his most acclaimed to date. Although Chung’s fiction debut, Parking, competed for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2008, A Sun has received extra attention recently for making the shortlist for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Oscars. It was also named by Variety as the number-one best film of 2020. The publication observed that the drama “transcends subtitles to address universal truths about the way approval and encouragement works in parent-child relationships”.

“When the Variety list emerged, I felt that it was an encouragement for Taiwanese filmmakers, and even for Taiwan herself, because ever since Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang, Taiwanese film have rarely enjoyed international spotlight or recognition,” Chung says. “I myself have to face the pressure because the film is now being talked about again, being in the Oscars shortlist, and even the possibility of the upcoming nomination. So many people are very excited because this has not happened to Taiwan for a very long time. I hope I will not let them down.”

After a lengthy research process, Chung wrote the script in 40 days along with novelist Chang Yao-sheng. The reason for the swiftness, Chung explains, is that the events felt “quite true to real life”; so much so, he employed a typist to transcribe his thoughts, allowing the ideas to unspool unconsciously. Thus the narrative avoids Hollywood conventions. While the UK version of A Sun would be a 90-minute indie or an overlong, multi-part TV series, Chung’s two-and-a-half hour epic masterfully paces out the family’s evolving dynamics for one unforgettable sitting. Instead of expositional screaming matches in which ordinary people suddenly turn into RSC auditionees, A Sun depicts an accumulation of silences and miscommunication. When two relatives struggle to hold a conversation, that speaks louder than words.

“In the families that I have observed, including my own, when conflicts occur, many people would withdraw themselves, which in a way enhances conflicts,” Chung says. “This kind of conflict can be the most terrible. Sometimes when everyone speaks their mind and shouts it out, the conflict would go away. But when someone withdraws, the invisible tension can be really scary. Silence ignites misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and even more incidents.”

While the film appears to revolve around A-Ho, it’s A-Hao whose subplot proves the most devastating. A-Hao, in comparison, is the parents’ golden boy; he excels in his studies and is painfully well-behaved. Seemingly out of nowhere, A-Hao takes his own life. Chung notes, “I do not think he is just introverted. In Taiwan, the pressure of getting into better schools is overwhelming. It is not just about being responsible for oneself. It is also about meeting the expectations of the last generations, and facing peer pressure. Sometimes you would see the media cover such heartbreaking tragedies. The tragic death of A-Hao is not just due to his personality. It is also the pressure he faced and could not get out of that pushes him off the edge.”

A-Hao’s passing is a reminder that we are constantly surprised by human beings, even those closest to us. A-Hao’s grieving girlfriend is left pondering his cryptic remark on their final date: the sun is the fairest thing in the world. A-Hao doesn’t explain why. “In 2006 I made a documentary, Doctor,” Chung says. “In it a mother talks about her son, that he prepared everything in advance before he died so he would not have to bother anyone. This left a very deep impression in my mind. What kind of kids would make such a decision, in such a calm manner? Many people wouldn’t understand, because they think that death is such a serious matter. How would someone deal with death so calmly? But there really are people like that, who see the power of life in mysterious ways.”

“In the families that I have observed, including my own, when conflicts occur, many people would withdraw themselves, which in a way enhances conflicts” – Chung Mong-hong

“Before I filmed A-Hao’s death scene, I wondered if he should stand on the rooftop and look down. When I worked on the lighting, I saw a shadow on a wall that grew bigger and bigger, almost filling up the entire frame. It really shook me. I thought it would be a great metaphor of someone approaching the end of his life.”

Other examples of visual poetry add colour to A Sun, as well as a hand-drawn animated sequence and deft moments of black humour. The diner who lost a hand has a father who demands payment from A-Ho’s family; raw sewage is showered all over A-Ho’s father workplace from what looks like the faeces version of a Ghostbusters Proton pack. The cinematography is credited to Nagao Nakashima, a pseudonym for Chung, who claims to be more inspired by American films than, say, those of Edward Yang. Chung refers to Gene Wilder, John Huston, and John Ford as “(representing) the origin, the charm of cinema, its explosive force”, and specifically cites the Coen brothers’ Fargo and Raising Arizona, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law, and David Lynch’s Lost Highway as points of reference.

One moment that feels particularly Jarmuschian is A-Hao’s father watching a bear eat a fish on TV. Chung requested this creature combo from the Animal Planet channel and was surprised they had the specific footage to share. “The father isn’t paying attention to what’s on the TV, he’s waiting for his son to come back. (I don’t believe he’s) so hungry for knowledge to watch a bear eating the fish… he wasn’t thinking anything, he was just staring at the TV. So anything happening in his life was just like the blankness and awkwardness before his son came back.”

While A Sun may seem like a new release, it premiered at TIFF in 2019 and won six prizes at the Golden Horse Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor. It’s also been on Netflix since January 2020 – mostly going unnoticed, even during a global pandemic. Ironically, when Bong Joon Ho’s “one-inch barrier of subtitles” speech went viral, A Sun was sat on our laptops the entire time. In a way, it’s like discovering £5 down the side of your sofa (£5 doesn’t cover a month of Netflix, but you know what I mean). Of course, some people watched it, but it’s a potential Oscar contender that still hasn’t been covered by the Guardian or the New York Times; in IndieWire’s review, published 11 months after its Netflix release, the critic admits he hadn’t heard about it until Variety’s end-of-year list in December 2020.

“When someone told me about the (Variety) news, I thought there was a mistake, that it was some other film from another country with a similar title,” says Chung, referring to how long ago the film was released in Taiwan. In fact, the director has already moved onto his next feature, The Falls, which he hopes to release in September. With regards to the plot, he teases, “I’ve always wanted to make a film about a virus – not about a transmitting disease that terrifies people and eventually kills everyone, but about how we see and share emotions in this world greatly affected by the virus, and how we deal with the cruellest aspect of our lives.”

In the few English-language interviews I could find online, I was struck by a comment Chung made in 2010 that “the audience in Taiwan doesn’t like my work”. While he can’t remember the precise context for that quote, he has a guess. “The box office of my films has always been a failure,” he says. “I mean not just a failure but a massive failure. So I was wondering where the audiences for my films were. I’ve always wanted to make films for the audience, but if they always feel distanced from my films then I couldn’t understand why. That troubled me a lot and I even began to question the reason why I make films. One day I talked to my wife and shared my perplexity with her. She told me that I should step back and think why I wanted to make films. She believes that filmmaking should be the voice from within. If you really don’t have anything to say then stop doing it, instead of caring too much about the box office.

“Of course it’s frustrating when you fail at the box office. It makes you feel sad. I believe that my films are not really bad or unbearable, I just thought I could not communicate with my audiences or they were not willing to accept my works. Even though A Sun had some improvement in the box office, it doesn’t mean that I can earn profits with filmmaking. I’ve still lost a lot of money in making movies. There are always some people who believe in me and like my films. They always support me and encourage me to keep making films. So in the past 10 or more years, I rely on these people and their support keeps me going.”

A Sun is streaming on Netflix