In the Heat of the Sun (1994) on Netflix
Beijing, the early 1970s. With schools shut, Ma Xiaojun and his friends roam the streets. A key the fourteen-year-old made lets him into a stranger's apartment, where he encounters Mi Lan.
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- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb8.0/106,399 votes
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Trailer
Plot summary
As an adult, Ma Xiaojun looks back on his teenage years in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, admitting that his memory of those days is unreliable. The schools are shut and most adults have been driven to the provinces, so the fourteen-year-old and his friends roam freely and fill their days with mischief. Ma Xiaojun, known to his friends as Monkey, makes a key for himself and slips into homes that are not his own. One of those apartments belongs to Mi Lan, a girl older than he is. Smitten with her, he spends his days near her building and tries to befriend her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about In the Heat of the Sun (1994)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jiang Wen cast young non-professionals with athletic backgrounds instead of trained actors, choosing Xia Yu, a skateboarding champion from Qingdao, as teenage Ma Xiaojun partly for his resemblance to Jiang Wen himself. The film also marked the acting debuts of synchronized swimmer Tao Hong and rhythmic gymnast Zuo Xiaoqing.
- Chinese censors issued seven modification requests and insisted sensitive material be cut or muted, including the Communist anthem L'Internationale played over a street fight. Jiang Wen argued to keep the scene, but the anthem's volume was heavily lowered in the final 1995 release.
- The film was widely acclaimed at home and abroad, and Xia Yu won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 1994, making him the youngest recipient of that award.
- At the 33rd Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan the film won Best Feature, Best Director, Best Actor and three more prizes. It was the first film from the People's Republic of China to take Best Feature there, in the first year mainland Chinese-language films were allowed to compete.
- Producer Jean-Louis Piel joined after seeing a rough cut and helped complete post-production; a ten-minute excerpt he took to Cannes caught the attention of German director Volker Schlöndorff, whose backing let Jiang Wen finish the sound mixing at Germany's Babelsberg Studios.
- The film ran into serious money trouble early: a real-estate sponsor withdrew before filming began because of the economic recession, and executive producer Liu Xiaoqing covered the debts out of her own pocket.
- Jiang Wen filmed himself playing the adult Ma Xiaojun in several scenes but removed them from the final cut, unsatisfied with his performance and working against time limits.
- To stress the subjectivity of memory over objective fact, Jiang Wen freezes the image so the narrator can pause and reflect, a Brechtian break that presents the moment as filtered through personal memory.
