Picture Perfect
Tom Lin’s mother-daughter drama gets upstaged by Kartik Vijay’s visual storytelling. Woops.
Yen and Ai-Lee
Director: Tom Lin • Writer: Tom Lin
Starring: Kimi Hsia, Yang Kuei-mei, Sam Tseng, Ng Ki-pin
Taiwan • 1hr 47mins
Opens Hong Kong Nov 28 • IIB
Grade: B-
Yen and Ai-Lee | 小雁與吳愛麗 is one of those movies that hoodwinks you into believing it’s a tremendous piece of cinema because it’s a tremendous looking piece of cinema. As lensed by Kartik Vijay, director Tom Lin Shu-yu’s DOP on his lush The Garden of Evening Mists and Jin Ong’s critical darling Abang Adik, in an evocative, hard black-and-white, the deliberate opening long shot of a blood-spattered Yen (Kimi Hsia Yu-chiao, American Girl) cycling towards the camera is an intriguing opening salvo that sends your brain off in a million directions. Is someone dead? Was there an accident? Was she in danger? Is this a noir thriller? Is it horror?
But like Mists and Abang, there’s a ton of beautiful surfaces, some compelling ideas on the periphery and one or two stellar performances but not a lot else. Yen and Ai-lee won the Busan International Film Festival’s Kim Jiseok Award this year, and if anything sends mixed messages it’s that. BIFF’s award winners are notoriously “highbrow”, with a lot of people sitting around smoking in a still shot and claiming profundity. Yen is needlessly arty and narratively superfluous – there’s no real mystery around Yen’s doppelgänger and that tease didn’t need to be there – but it’s also fleetingly insightful and authentic, which makes for a frustrating watch. Frustrating, but at least 100% gorgeous all the time.
Pause, print, frame, mount.
It turns out Yen’s bloody bike ride was to the cop shop, and we meet her again as a parolee following an eight-year prison bit for defending her mother Ai-lee (Tsai Ming-liang regular Yang Kuei-mei) and murdering her abusive father. She comes home to her mother’s home in a Kaohsiung suburb and promptly fails to fit in. She and Ai-lee are awkward around each other, and in a sadly repeating pattern, Ai-lee’s new boyfriend Ren (Taiwanese MC Sam Tseng Kuo-cheng) is another abusive piece of shit Yen takes an immediate dislike to. Making matters worse, Yen can only get work at an industrial laundry largely staffed by other cons, and she’s been saddled with babysitting Wei (Hsieh I-le), the half-brother born to her father’s mistress, after she dumps him and takes off. A bright spot in Yen’s stilted existence is her budding friendship with Cheng (EggPlantEgg member Ng Ki-pin) a fried chicken vendor she went to high school with. While all this is going on, a dead ringer for Yen called Allie (also Hsia) takes drama classes at a community college.
The real drama in Yen and Ai-lee is, of course, the emotional one between the women of the title, somehow made sharper and more vivid by Vijay’s cinematography. And Tom Lin Hsin-ming’s editing is admittedly graceful in how it weaves together the Yen and Allie storyline. The thing is, the subterfuge just adds empty calories where they’re not needed. Allie’s big moment comes when her teacher, a professional mourner, assigns her the role of funeral guest in an exercise. There’s zero reason this needs to be Allie, and if I’m honest, for anyone paying only passing attention (shame on you!) the conceit could easily muddle the story. When Lin the director trains his focus on Yen’s difficult reconciliation with the past, sometimes through her slowly growing connection to the heartbreaking Wei, Ai-lee’s decision to ultimately break the cycle of violence, and on mother and daughter finding a way to heal Yen and Ai-lee is pretty affecting, if far from groundbreaking. That’s down to Hsia and Yang’s performances and their natural – and believable – mother-daughter dynamic, in which they’re allowed to be irritating, baffling and vulnerable in ways that feel all too real. It makes their baby steps towards resolution feels earned – even if the film really belongs to Vijay.