Runtime: 2 hrs 9 mins
Synopsis: This drama from Zhang Yang (SHOWER) explores the life of one Chinese family over the latter part of the 20th century. [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Joan Chen, Sun Haiying
An odd combination of sociopolitical metaphor and conventional melodrama, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yang's Sunflower has moments of keen insight and power touching on the ways in which human character and personality are shaped by historical experience.
The film's father-son friction grows occasionally repetitious, but it springs from a sensitive, well-written melodrama that earns its emotions with tender sincerity.
There is so much going on in Sunflower that you may want to see it more than once.
Sunflower succeeds as both a moving family drama and a microcosm of China's social history since the 1970s.
Although filled with a plethora of dramatic events, including earthquakes and floods, the film never achieves real dramatic momentum, due in large part to its needlessly sluggish pacing.
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While individual moments are quite moving, Sunflower conveys the passage of its history-changing years in what seems like real time.
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Whatever the movie lacks in sociopolitical insight, it makes up for with moving storytelling.
Like Douglas Sirk without the throw pillows, Sunflower is a shamelessly old-fashioned melodrama performed with such sincerity that resistance is futile.
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Paging John O'Hara. One would have to reach back to those melodramatic family potboilers of the '50s to find such an unfettered blast of guilt-tripping and misdirected love.
A fascinating portrait of 30 years in a turbulent relationship between a domineering Chinese father and his stubborn son.
Sunflower plays less like the epic it aspires to be than an episode of Full House: Beijing.
This film marks a return to more accessible fare for Chinese director Zhang Yang.
The most conventional, but paradoxically the deepest felt and most emotionally affecting, of mainland Chinese helmer Zhang Yang's four pics.
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