‘Yen And Ai-Lee’: Busan Review

Dir/scr: Tom Lin Shu-yu. Taiwan. 2024. 108mins

A mom and daughter wrestle to heal their relationship after a tough previous in Taiwanese filmmaker Tom Lin Shu-yu’s poignant black and white drama. Leaning into each the ache and the darkish comedy of this fractured household because it makes an attempt to place itself again collectively, Yen And Ai-Lee advantages significantly from performances from Kimi Hsia and Yang Kuei-mei alongside monochromatic visuals that throw the emotion of the story into sharp reduction.

Monochromatic visuals throw the emotion of the story into sharp reduction

Having premiered in Busan’s Jeosok strand, Yen And Ai-Lee will open in Taiwan on October 10. Nominated for eight Golden Horse Awards together with nods for each central performances (Lin’s earlier movie, 2019’s The Backyard Of Night Mists, acquired 9 nominations), the movie ought to definitely discover favour with a home viewers. Additional afield, it might nicely draw the eye of a specialist streamer.

Yen And Ai-Lee opens with a hanging sequence, which showcases the deep, textural black-and-white cinematography of Kartik Vijay (coming back from The Backyard Of Night Mists) and the appreciable display screen presence of Hsia, a Taiwanese actress greatest know for her rom-coms who places in a uncooked efficiency right here. A protracted-shot takes in a nighttime avenue in a small rural Taiwanese village, nonetheless and quiet. A girl on a bicycle abruptly rides into body, stopping immediately in entrance of the digital camera to stare down its lens, panic-stricken, lined in blood and holding a knife.

The story is just not, nonetheless, about this traumatic occasion, slightly its impression. We instantly transfer ahead eight years as Yen (Hsia), the lady on the bicycle, is launched from jail after serving time for against the law that’s slowly revealed over the course of the movie, and returns to reside together with her mom Ai-Lee (veteran Taiwanese actress Yang). Regardless of Ai-Lee’s pleasure at having her daughter residence, there’s a distance between them, captured of their stilted dialog and the awkwardness of their bodily interactions — neither fairly remembers the best way to share an area with the opposite. A lot of Lin’s screenplay is about issues not mentioned, long-held resentments effervescent below the floor, often leading to explosive moments earlier than being pushed again down.

The movie then shifts a gear, transferring to the experiences of a reserved younger girl named Allie (additionally performed by Hsia) at a neighborhood faculty drama class within the metropolis of Kaohsiung, overseen by a girl who was a ‘wailing filial daughter’ — employed by households to encourage mourners to cry at funerals. As Allie slowly learns to open up and let herself go, editor Tom Lin Hsin-ming easily cuts between these lessons and the central story (with the assistance of chapter headings), permitting the hyperlink between the 2 to emerge organically.

But it’s no nice thriller as to what’s going on, and neither does Lin intend the twin narratives to be something extra difficult than two halves of a complete, each in service to the shifting sands of this mother-daughter relationship. This intensely emotional premise is heightened additional when Yen’s younger half-brother Wei (I-le Hsieh) — the product of an affair her father had earlier than his loss of life — is foisted on them by his mom, shortly earlier than she does a disappearing act.

Vijay’s black-and-white aesthetic is a world away from the sepia tint of nostalgia; wealthy, crisp and sharply outlined, it really works in tandem with Penny Tsai Pei-ling’s heat manufacturing design to emphasize the truth that these are atypical individuals doing their greatest with the playing cards life has dealt. All through, Lin paints evocatively in mild and shadow, emphasising moments of ache but in addition of hope because the pair learns to reconnect and slowly overcome the errors of the previous.