Who Loves the Sun is a small personal dramedy
about five people isolated in a rural cabin during a
pleasant Canadian summer. The exquisite beauty of
the setting contrasts to the pain of the characters.
Will has mysteriously reappeared in the small town
after an unexplained five year absence during which
nobody heard from him. He drifts into the house of
his former best friend's parents, but he is
uncommunicative, so the middle aged couple call up
their son in New York and then call the wandering
man's ex-wife, both of whom make their way to the
cabin for a reunion.
Family secrets start to spill out like beer from a
power tap. The long-lost Will left town when he
caught his best friend and his wife doing the deed.
He's angry, but not as angry as the wife, who
genuinely loved him, but also had deep feelings for
the best friend. Will left without trying to work
things out, and refused to communicate with anyone.
They had, more or less given him up for dead.
Will makes such a complete ass of himself for two
days that his friend's middle-aged dad finally calls
him aside and gives him a lecture, which includes a
revelation that he also caught his wife with another
man when they were first married, and somehow he
managed to survive without running away or making
everyone around him miserable. This shared bit of
intimacy, sworn to secrecy, is supposed to reach out
to Will, but instead triggers a chain of further
revelations about the result of that affair so long
ago, all of which have great relevance to the
current enmity between the former best friends.
The film sort of loses its momentum under the drag
of the many, many secrets and correlations between
the present and the distant past. At first it seems
that the three members of the love triangle just
have to try to sort everything out, forgive, and
move on appropriately, and that would have been
enough story for a small, independent film,
especially given the natural dialogue, the credible
characters, and the fine technical values of the
film. The scriptwriter didn't have the good sense to
stay with his central premise, but wandered into
enough "organ chord" revelations to fill an entire
year of Days of our Lives. Without revealing the
specifics, let it suffice to say that Darth Vader is
the father of all five characters.
By the end of the movie, however, I was willing to
forgive the script's excesses. The mistakes it makes
are overcome by its strengths, especially by the
fact that we always seem to be watching real people
talking about things that really happened. They
sometimes speak seriously, sometimes hesitantly,
sometimes comically, sometimes bitterly, and
sometimes sentimentally, as the characters go
through the inevitable cycle of avoidance,
confrontation and forgiveness. While some of the
plot's coincidences seem forced, they are all tied
together remarkably well in a nifty little script
and the unlikely secrets, once revealed, seem
appropriate to the characters. The characters
themselves are likeable enough once they let down
their hair, but are not instantly likeable, and
possess numerous quirks and unpleasant aspects to
their personalities, as do we all. The script uses
no short-cuts to coax our identification with the
characters. They have to earn our empathy, as they
have to earn one another's. The film also redeems
its plot contrivances with a completely uncontrived
ending in which situations resolve themselves, or
fail to, as they would have if they had happened to
real people. In other words, this quiet little film
is good in enough ways to earn a bit of dramatic
license.
Who Loves the Sun is not even the slightest bit
"hip" and it's absolutely not a film for action
lovers. I suppose it will play best with females and
older males. It's just five people wandering around
a cabin for a few days and talking about their
feelings, but as such it demonstrates how a good
movie can be created from virtually no budget. The
film succeeds because the script is smart and stays
within its capabilities.
