A Sun: The film Netflix doesn’t want you to see
Despite availing himself of their financial backing for his $200m mob epic The Irishman, Martin Scorsese is no fan of Netflix — or at the very least he is not fan of their distribution model.
Writing in the March issue of Harpers magazine the Taxi Driver director said:
“…the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, ‘content’.”
The ever-growing demand for ‘content’ and its method of distribution through all-powerful streaming sites :
“…has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is ‘suggested’ by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema?”
This is an issue that has become even more prevalent and acute during the Covid-19 pandemic with cinemas and movie theatres shuttered worldwide.
Scorsese’s essay (read it in full here) could have been wrriten about the criminal overlooking of A Sun — a Taiwanese crime/family epic that has languished on Netflix in the UK since January 2020 with no effort at promotion.
The Chung Mong-hong drama, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019, earned 11 nominations at the 56th Golden Horse Awards (winning two) and was picked up for distribution by Netflix.
It was also the Taiwanese entry for Best International Feature Film at this year’s Academy Awards (it made the shortlist but not the final list of nominees).
Despite such acclaim — Variety’s chief film critic Peter Debruge called it a ‘Mandarin-language masterpiece’ — A Sun has disappeared without so much as a trace.
One would think an arthouse-friendly algorithm such as my own would have thrown this up in front of me as an option (and not, say, The One, Behind Her Eyes or whatever the latest viral true crime documentary is).
Netflix’s algorithm failed me, and it was only last week, when I chanced upon a video essay by Eyebrow Cinema dubbed ‘The Decay of Cinema’, that I was drawn to watching A Sun.
Unlike the widespread coverage afforded to Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, A Sun has instead languished in foreign language arthouse circles (at the time of writing it had just nine reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and three on Metacritic).
Indiewire’s David Ehrlich, in something of a mea culpa, wrote: “Movies have never been more accessible… and they’ve never been harder to find.”
A Sun’s release on Netflix on January 24 2020 was a harbinger of what was to come in a year when many awards front runners debuted on streaming services and not in the cinema.
Whereas before you just needed £8 (or thereabouts) to watch the best films of the year, now you need to pay a subscription.
Netflix bought the distribution rights to A Sun and then chucked it out on their platform just as the 2020 Sundance Film Festival was ramping up and absorbing the skills of all of North America’s film critics.
Like it or lump it critics — mostly through the medium of aggregating sites such as Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic — can still have considerable power over the commercial success or failure of a film.
Whereas it was once the bespoke critic who ‘curated’ the desires of filmgoers now it can just boil down to the Tomato-meter (either that or the aforementioned algorithm). And when you slip between those cracks… films disappear.
And what a film for so many to miss. Comparison’s to Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (also an epic Taiwanese family drama) are inevitable.
Like Yi Yi Chung’s feature, his fifth, also deals with the family ramifications of a tragedy although this one is more dramatic, although by no means overblown or overwrought.
A-Ho, one of two sons, lands in juvenile detention after a psychopathic friend slices the hand off a rival in a blistering opening five minutes.
Soon his dad Mr Chen, who works as a driving instructor, is telling his customers he has only one son, the smart but quiet A-Hao.
The Chen family are left reeling by A-Ho’s abhorrent crime and are further thrown into a flux when his pregnant teenage girlfriend lands on their doorstep.
‘Seize the day. Decide your path’, is a frequent refrain of Mr Chen’s whose arc with his troubled son centres the 155-minute runtime. He says that life should be just like driving a car along a city street but he soon discovers that it’s not that simple, and it is not enough to simply disavow his bad son.
He shouts at one student who doesn’t want to learn how to drive an automatic: “If a car moves, you’re driving — who cares if it’s manual or not?”.
Through this family of four we are told a tale of crime, punishment, tragedy and healing.
There are gangster-movie flourishes, especially in the third act, but Chung takes a more thoughtful approach to the results of criminality and the ever-present spectre and threat of organised crime.
Chung handles the lighting of his films (under the name Nagao Nakashima) and with a title like A Sun it’s no surprise that the poetic mood owes much to it. Glossy supercars have never glistened quite this much, rain is overbearing and oppressive and darkness leaves characters lonely and isolated.
When the camera shows birds chirping and flying through the sky at the end, it’s finally time to come up for breath — and realise what we’ve been through.
Don’t miss it.
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