The Day the Sun Turned Cold
A striking moment in Mina Shum’s Double Happiness–a recent Canadian feature about an aspiring young actress in a North American city–reveals something about our attitudes toward Chinese culture. The Chinese-American heroine is auditioning for a small part as a waitress in a TV movie. After she runs through her lines, her prospective employers ask how good she is with accents. Pretty good, she replies; at this point we’ve already heard her southern drawl, and now she asks them in a French accent what kind of accent they want–French, perhaps, or something else? There’s a long, embarrassed silence, until she figures out that they want her to speak with a Chinese accent. She promptly does so, and with the same exaggeration she’d given her Southern Belle and Basic Frog. She immediately gets the part.
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Perhaps this helps explain why Yim Ho’s The Day the Sun Turned Cold, an unusually gripping Chinese murder mystery and melodrama set only five years ago, was picked up by Kino International rather than Miramax, and why it’s been getting scant attention from the tastemakers who’ve made big meals out of Farewell My Concubine, Raise the Red Lantern, The Blue Kite, and various John Woo bullet pies. Yim’s movie is something of a shocker: it tells the story of a 24-year-old factory welder (Tuo Zhong Hua) who brings formal charges against his mother (Siqin Gowa) for having murdered his father (Ma Jing Wu) ten years earlier. But one gets the impression from some American reviewers that this kind of shocker isn’t what we want or expect from the Chinese, perhaps because it sounds too much like one of our own sordid news stories. (One shortsighted New York critic even went so far as to call this picture “misogynist” solely on the basis of its plot, overlooking the fact that Yim goes out of his way to make the homicide understandable: the husband abuses and exploits his wife.) Good crime melodramas aren’t all that common nowadays, and we should treasure them wherever we find them.
Born in Hong Kong in 1952, Yim Ho attended the London Film School in his early 20s before returning to work in television in Hong Kong as a producer, screenwriter, and director (he also assumes all three roles on The Day the Sun Turned Cold). Between 1975 and 1977 he directed several one-hour TV dramas, most of them in 16-millimeter, that garnered him a lot of attention. In 1978 he set up a production company with two fellow filmmakers and shot his first feature, a comedy about movie extras that was a critical and commercial success.
The son has waited a full decade to bring charges because he only recently read about a Frenchwoman poisoning her husband by putting arsenic in a bowl of milk, claiming that the white powder was sugar. In 1980 he’d seen his mother sprinkling white powder on chicken, claiming it was MSG; shortly afterward his father became seriously ill and was taken to the hospital. The son insists that he doesn’t hate his mother, despite the fact that he’s bringing charges against her; he says he considers her a good woman and merely wants to see justice done regarding his father.
