"Sunny Flowers": Feng Xiaogang writes another kind of "Youth"

Warning: This article contains spoilers

"Sunny Flower", released during the Qingming Festival, is a powerful and impactful film. Director Feng Xiaogang uses sharp realistic brushstrokes and the voice of Gao Yuexiang, played by Zhao Liying, to question the society's definition of "crime and punishment", and also rewrites another kind of "Fanghua" belonging to women - this time, it is not the beauty of youth, but the resilience of life.

Poster of Sunflower

Zhao Liying's roles over the years have been more stunning and powerful. This "hardworking woman" uses her sharp eyes to take on more challenging scripts and create more vital roles. Gao Yuexiang in "Sunny Flower" is bare-faced, speaks in a dialect, and uses vulgar and dirty words. Zhao Liying completely abandons the halo of a female star and becomes a piece of "iron" repeatedly beaten by fate. The actresses around her, such as Lan Xiya and Wang Ju, also give people a subversive impression.

Zhao Liying has another breakthrough performance

The core of the narrative of "Sunny Flower" is how marginalized women in society help each other and find a way out under prejudice and survival pressure. Gao Yuexiang (played by Zhao Liying) was imprisoned for theft, just to save 200,000 yuan for a cochlear implant for her hearing-impaired daughter; the deaf-mute Heimei (played by Lan Xiya) grew up in a den of thieves, and stealing is her only survival skill; Hu Ping (played by Wang Ju) became addicted to drugs because of her father, a drug dealer... Behind these characters, there are individual tragedies, as well as the complex reality of lack of social security, limitations of the judicial system and gender discrimination.

Hu Ping played by Wang Ju, Heimei played by Lan Xiya

Director Feng Xiaogang is still a good storyteller. There are many characters and the plot is complicated, but he advances the story in a balanced way. Although some plots force conflicts between the characters and reach reconciliation too quickly, he is able to cram in a huge amount of information in a short period of time, while making each character have completeness, personality and arc, which still shows his mature skill.

Although there have been constant doubts about director Lao Deng's "exploiting women's dividends" since the official announcement of the film, it is undeniable that he did put together a good game. Each of the five "golden flowers" inside and outside the prison gave an impressive performance.

Zhao Liying

It goes without saying that Zhao Liying is fierce. When she was selling alcohol at a nightclub, she looked tired and numb in her charming expression, soberly "consuming" her "gender bonus"; facing the bully who bullied the black girl, she waved a knife and screamed, "I came out of the prison, either you kill me or I stab you to death", her ferocious expression and hoarse voice were chilling; when her daughter, whom she had been thinking about day and night, stood in front of her holding a sign, she dodged her eyes and avoided them, without shedding a tear, but the audience felt heartbroken...

Lan Xiya's aphasia, but her stubborn and unruly eyes hide thousands of words; Wang Ju's street and underworld style, with a hint of comedy, injects fresh vitality into the gloomy narrative; Chuo Ni plays the prison guard Deng Hong, who wavers between rules and humanity, and her origin also carries a sense of fate that points to the theme.

In 2017, Feng Xiaogang's "Youth" used the collective memory of the art troupe to engrave the ideals and disillusionments of youth for a generation; in 2025, "Sunny Flowers" used the survival records of women released from prison to narrate other "youth" that are too easily ignored and forgotten. The two works were made eight years apart, both are about women, and together they constitute Feng Xiaogang's mirror-like questioning of "how kind people survive."

Stills from Youth

The women in "Flowers to the Sun" are not perfect victims. Each of them has their own helplessness in committing crimes and their own "obstinacy". In prison, the "mutual monitoring group" with a "grateful heart" mode of getting along with each other planted the seeds for the later "growing up to the sun". The real bond and conclusion was after being released from prison. "Studying together" may not allow them to see each other, but experiencing the difficulties of life together allows these women to truly understand each other.

Gao Yuexiang and Heimei protect each other

As a released prisoner, the difficulty of getting back on track is foreseeable, but the director's lens and the actors' performances present this difficulty in a more concrete way to the audience. The more precious part is that there are many unexplored female topics hidden in the film, which are only mentioned in a few words, but they sharply cut the dark imaginary boundary - Gao Yuexiang, as a victim of "exchange marriage" to marry a disabled brother, married the disabled brother of the brother's wife; because she was beaten for giving birth to a daughter, her mother was imprisoned and her daughter was abandoned; pregnant women with big bellies in the den of thieves are nurturing the miserable fate of the next generation; even the policewoman who warms the background of the whole story was once an abandoned baby abandoned in the cold weather...

Prison guard Deng Hong was an abandoned baby saved by a prisoner at the cost of his own life

After watching the film, you will be surprised to find that, on the surface, "Sunny Flower" focuses on the criminal motives behind prisoners and the difficulties of prisoners reintegrating into social life. In fact, the whole film is a powerful questioning of the fate of women at the bottom of society. It does not stop at simple moral judgment or cheap sympathy. It uses rough lens language to tear open the wounds that are deliberately ignored by society - women's suffering is never an individual tragedy, but a projection of systemic oppression on personal destiny.

Stills from "Sunny Flower"

When the black girl returned to the thieves' den with no other options, the disguised "legal and compliant" criminal gang made the judicial authorities helpless. Gao Yuexiang cursed the policewoman and complained about her disappointment with their inaction. The price of blood and the blood debt brought the tragedy of the characters' fate to a climax.

The final "divine soldiers descending from the sky" and surviving the catastrophe are a happy ending, but the poverty, judicial, and gender issues that were folded into the process, and the "justice" that society owed them behind the "crimes" they committed, are all seen on their road to rebirth this time. Although there are no standard answers to these questions, the courage to ask them is another progress in domestic reality-themed works.