Review of The Sun Is Also a Star (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

The Sun Is Also A Star is probably better as a book, or a trailer for that matter.

My two predictions about The Sun Is Also A Star going in were that there would be a lot fewer artistic cutaways in the actual movie compared to the trailer and that the action of the story would span no longer than the hour of the actual “date” and that we would be left on a cliffhanger about what was to come afterwards. It turns out, yes, there were not that many more cutaways with juxtaposed image clouds in the film, but the structure of the plot runs far away from Linklater’s Before trilogy style–in ways that border on the absurd, the ridiculous, and the absurdly ridiculous.

I’m writing this in the spirit of one who does not expect you to end up seeing this tryhard of a **** You Trump romance featuring an interracial couple that’s 50% undocumented, or at least in the spirit of one who goes in fully cognizant of the brittle quality of life’s small joys, the rare and exquisite alchemy of cheese and suspended disbelief. This is the moment when I make a joke about how fun it was to watch two 28-year-olds play make believe as high school kids, but after doing the most cursory of Google searches, I should admit that joke would only be half right, as our lead Tasha is played by an actual teenager, Yara Shahidi from Larry Wilmore’s wonderful Black-ish, while the unbelievably 18-year-old Daniel Bae is played by the very believably 28 year old Charles Melton from Riverdale, where he fits in a lot more seamlessly amongst a bevy of kids in their early twenties playing teens.

Regardless, the premise of this film is at once pretty adorable while also being low-key creepy. A boy, Daniel, who has better things he should be doing, is derailed from a day of end-of-school-year chores by a girl who looks up at the ceiling in Grand Central Station, something “no one ever does,” despite the fact that it seems like EVERY person in a rom com that’s ever visited NYC ends up doing just that. Can someone link/make me to a supercut of all the people who’ve done this over the years? Anyway, once he decides that “destiny” has brought them together, he decides to… follow–yes, let’s say follow and not “stalk”–her around the city until the correct moment when he can save (?) her from a reckless driver in a way that makes her amenable to listen to him for long enough to strike up a report, at which point he says that he can “make” her fall in love with him (by an actually kind of cute method, all things considered).

If you can brush past the set up though, you’re in for a treat, because these two actually have some great chemistry. Wife says she liked the fact that Daniel is portrayed as a the rose-tinted romantic for a change, so that Tasha can play the cynic, but I think there are ways in which her hard-nosed posture shows cracks from the very beginning, the way that she is fighting for her family’s immigration status long-past the point of no return, so to speak, and how her resistance to a relationship with Daniel actually puts the ball in her court to turn all dewy-eyed and giggly, since he’s already on board.

In any other film, we would ask ourselves, “Why didn’t they just get married?” to solve all their problems, which is what requires our two heroes to be suspended in a perpetual state of teenhood, like Bart and Lisa Simpson, like Arthur after his twenty-second season as a boy-aardvark, like the boys and girls from Peanuts, like mosquitoes in amber. Because they are not of the age of consent they are beholden to their parents’ whims. Their lives are not their own. On this premise rests the drama of the film. The least believable part of the film to me, as a child from a bi-racial household with an Asian parent is the fact that these two kids stayed out all night without calling in and were able to return to their home without being killed on the spot. I could swallow the fact that Daniel and Tasha “fell asleep” in a park in May without being stabbed or robbed, but the moment they walk into Tasha’s apartment with 15 unanswered calls from Mom without a prodigious ass-whooping, the entire physics of the world started to break down for me.

John Leguizamo plays the most well-connected lawyer in New York City with the least effective means of addressing an immigration case (a personal meeting between the hours of 5pm and 9am with a judge), who promises a lot and predictably fails to deliver.

Check it out if you are willing to turn your brain off for 90 minutes and you don’t mind a “5 Years Later” time card to resolve the film for you at the very end.