Taiwanese movie A Sun takes off when teenagers Chen Jian Ho and his friend Radish chops off the hand of a young man in a restaurant. Grotesquely the hand lands in a pot of soup, but don’t let this violent start deter you from watching this movie. Violence is not a common thread in A Sun.
Chen Jian Ho and Radish are arrested shortly after and imprisoned. Ho’s father who works as a driving school instructor refuses to acknowledge Ho’s existence after his criminal act. The father will only now accept the elder brother Hao who studies to become admitted to medical school.
Furthermore, Ho’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend is pregnant, but he doesn’t know and is not told by his mother when she visits him in prison. Only when his brother Hao tells him does he know.
Things escalate when the father is awakened one night and told by his neighbor that Hao has committed suicide by jumping off the balcony. According to a fellow student who he had a romantic fling with Hao had difficulties in coping with the great expectations they had to him.
Ho and You are married and after Ho is released from prison they live with his parents. His father continues to ignore him. Ho lands a job at a car wash and a second job at a convenience store so that he can feed his family. One night the father happens to run into Ho at the store and they start talking for the first time in a long time.
Three years later Ho is contacted by Radish who has just been released from prison. Radish wants to borrow money from Ho who denies having any. However, Radish tries to lure Ho into criminality again which Ho’s father learns about and he contacts Radish and offers him a sum of money to let Ho alone. Radish arrogantly rejects the father’s offer.
Radish contacts Ho again and forces Ho to take a customer’s Bentley and persuades Ho to give a group of criminals a mysterious package. Ho receives a large amount of money in return but when Ho returns to the Bentley Radish has vanished and Ho hurriedly returns the Bentley to the carwash.
Sometime after Ho is adducted by the same group of criminals who beat him up and want the money back. Ho gives them the money and the gangsters tell him that Radish has been found dead in a ditch. They throw Ho out of their van and give him some of money as a thank you for his help in the transaction.
Meanwhile Ho’s mother and father has gone for a hike and during the trip the father tells his wife that he has for a couple of weeks been following Ho and that he saw Ho borrowing the Bentley with Radish. Furthermore, the father tells the mother that he ran Radish over in his car and killed him to help Ho stay out of criminality. The mother is terribly upset when hearing this confession from her husband.
The film ends with Ho and his mother taking a bicycle ride and while Ho is riding the bike his mother is looking up at the sun which her late son had a very special relationship to.
A Sun is a fascinating film about a dysfunctional family in which wife and husband hardly talk to each other and where expectations to their two boys are quite different. The oldest son is admired and put on a pedestal whereas the youngest son is neglected and forgotten. These complex problems paralyze the individual members of the family. Violent acts happen in the movie which take their toll on the family and cause them great pain. But despite the violent acts the movie is not a tiresome melodrama. On the contrary you often smile while watching the film. A Sun is an excellent movie which deservedly has won a number of awards. You can watch A Sun on Netflix.
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