Taiwan has, I believe, a cinematic heritage of films about juvenile delinquency and A Sun can be regarded as a continuation of that tradition. It is epic in length as it tracks its young delinquent’s imprisonment, rehabilitation and reintegration into society while the dynamics of his family are also upended. While the film has its moments, especially while playing around with absurdist jokes, I believe its light-and-dark motif to be too facile and the structure and theme too traditionally Asian to be very interesting.

After Chen Jian-Ho and a partner Radish attack and maim another youth, Jian-Ho is imprisoned and his father, Wen, a driving school instructor disowns him. His mother Qin is the only one who visits him and tries to help him. His pregnant girlfriend also turns up at the house, bringing more troubles to the family while the father of the maimed youth hounds Wen for compensation. By contrast his older brother Hao is a model student and is slated to enter medical school. Even as Jian-Ho slowly learns to get along with the other prisoners, Hao is revealed to be feeling himself to be under tremendous pressure. To everyone’s shock, he commits suicide by jumping from the balcony. Nonetheless the parents persevere and Wen keeps spouting his motto about seizing the day to decide on your own path. They get Jian-Ho and his girlfriend married even before he is released and welcome her and the baby into the family. But even after he is released and tries to support his family with simple jobs, his brush with the underworld during his youth return to haunt him.

While I liked director Chung Mong-hong’s previous film Godspeed well enough, I found this one to be too long, too muddle-headed and too traditional. It plays up the story of the two brothers, with one obviously being in the light and the other in the dark, but it not only junks Hao’s character rather early on, there is no real interaction between them either. Wen and Qin are pretty old-fashioned parents but there doesn’t seem to be any real causal connection between their parenting styles and the two different outcomes for their sons. As my wife notes, the story of each brother really needs to be its own film and it seems to me that the director wants it this way only to create an appealing to him motif of one being in the sun and the other being in shadow. It doesn’t help either that Wu Chien-ho as Jian-Ho acts woodenly, resorting to the same stock scowls and gestures over and over again. I read that the director asked the actors to develop their characters as they saw fit without asking him about their mindset. I interpret this to mean that the director had some rough ideas and a specific visual sense of how the film should look but didn’t care to develop each character deeply.

My favorite bits of the film are the absurdist humor such as when a straight-faced social worker abruptly sets off a single party popper when Jian-Ho signs his marriage certificate. Yet this humor doesn’t match the tone of the rest of the film, which is effectively a straight-laced, traditional melodrama. I also found myself irritated that Jian-Ho is the central character yet the film has nothing at all to say about his girlfriend and later wife and their child. This fits the conception of the project as one that is about particular motifs and character archetypes but not deep dives into the psychologies of specific characters. I think this approach may fit storylines that are truly universal. But the story here is so specific about one golden brother and one black sheep of the family that it really needs detailed character development.

The result is a film that while not being bad per se, isn’t anything that is actually good either and is far overrated by the awards it won in Taiwan. In so many ways, it makes such safe, traditional choices that it feels like a film from an older era, making it a strange throwback for a director with a reputation for boldness.