Due to lack of adult
supervision during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the mischievous boys
of military fathers are free to spend their summer left to their own devices.
Too young to join other youths working in the countryside, they spend their
time riding their bikes, getting into gang fights, picking up girls, and
asserting their masculinity. Chosen as one of 100 best Chinese films of
the century by Asia Weekly Magazine, Wen Jiang’s In the Heat of the Sun
is a coming of age story set in Beijing in the 1970s after the Red Guards
had been disbanded. The first film by a sixth generation Chinese director,
it played to packed audiences of young people when it first opened in Beijing
in 1995, but has never been released in North America.
In the Heat of the Sun
is based on the novel “Wild Beast” by Wang Shou, a controversial Chinese
author who has written many stories about rebellious teenagers. The film
is a subjective recollection about a group of friends who meet when their
Army dads are shipped out to support Chairman Mao in 1969, recollections
embellished by the narrator’s fanciful memory. Steeped in eroticism and
youth violence, it is a sharp turn from the melodramatic epics of the early
1990s that interpreted China’s past as a time of sexual repression. Jiang
does not wallow in marketable clichés or make a special appeal to
Western audiences but, like the young people in the film, imparts to the
work a freshness and authenticity that sets it apart.
The film stars 17-year
old Yu Xia as “Monkey” Ma Xiaojun, a rebellious teenager who is a stand-in
for the director as a young man. Xia (whose name translates as 'Summer
Rain') won the award for best actor at the 1994 Venice Film Festival, the
youngest actor ever to win this award. Narrated by the director who is
also a popular Chinese actor, the opening narration tells us that “Peking
has changed so fast. In 20 years, it's become a modern city. Almost nothing
is as I remembered. Change has wiped out my memories. I can't tell what's
imagined from what's real.” The film’s leitmotif is introduced almost immediately
and we understand the reason for the title. “My stories always take place
in summer”, the narrator continues.
“The sunlight was so relentless,
so bright, that our eyes were washed in waves of blackness. In the Heat
of the Sun. In the raging storms of Revolution. The soldiers' hearts turn
towards the sun.” During that summer, Monkey acts out fantasies that make
him feel like a hero and talks about characters from Russian novels and
films dealing with revolutionary heroes searching for glory. He imagines
himself standing up to bullies and enemies of the state in an imagined
World War III and, in his fantasy, is willing to die for his country and
his honor with women. He fights for his group, sending a rival gang member
to the hospital for a month, sneaks into people’s apartments with a self-made
key (though he never steals anything), and watches films banned as inappropriate
for children by the authorities.
Monkey’s main focus, unsurprisingly,
is a girl whose portrait hanging on the wall of an apartment he let himself
into is immediately captivating. His pursuit of Mi Lan (Ning Jing), who
is a few years older than him, is, however, fraught with rejection, jealousy
of group leader Liu Yiku, and passion that veers out of control. Although
Jiang problematically redefines the Cultural Revolution as a period of
spontaneity and freedom rather than dislocation and chaos, the film is
not about politics but about the perilous transition from adolescence to
maturity. Unlike other coming of age films, it is not a reflection of sadness
and longing but an odyssey filled with the excitement of a new found freedom
and revolutionary ardor.
GRADE: A
Howard
Schumann