It’s perhaps apt that a performance workshop is central to the story of Yen and Ai-lee, as Tom Lin Shu-yu’s latest outing is basically an acting masterclass in action. Featuring a surprisingly rugged turn from renowned rom-com queen Kimi Hsia as a paroled murderer and Taiwanese cinema doyenne Yang Kuei-mei as her boisterous mother – with the pair scoring nominations at the Golden Horse Awards with their turns – the CalArts-educated director’s fifth feature thrives on the two leads’ ability to tease out the tension and trauma in a mother-daughter relationship, one rendered extremely volatile by the past and present men in their lives.
Despite pivoting sharply from the lush, tropical and intensely romantic period drama he delivered five years ago with the 1950s-set The Garden of Evening Mists, Lin retains his trademark melancholy with the help of Kartik Vijay’s gorgeous black-and-white camerawork. Too gorgeous, in fact: one could argue that the monochrome palette is a red herring of sorts, as is Lin’s decision to interweave the story with scenes from a seemingly parallel universe where Hsia plays an urbane woman trying to attain some kind of catharsis through a community college acting course.
The film begins with a bloodied young woman staggering through the night and then into a police station. Cut straight to eight years later, and she’s introduced to the viewer (through an intertitle bearing her name) as Yen (Hsia), who arrives home after spending eight years in prison for a violent crime which Lin elects to reveal drip by drip. The most obvious hints are dropped through Yen’s often acerbic, sometimes explosive rows with her mother (Yang), an earthy shopkeeper with a terrible taste in men. This is something which irks Yen the most, as she despairs of the things she sees in her ruffian lover Ren (Sam Tseng, who also received a Golden Horse nomination for this role).
Barely has Lin brought this array of small town mortals into view than the film abruptly jumps to the city of Kaohsiung, where the mild-mannered Allie (also played by Hsia) joins a company of Uber drivers, housemakers and schoolteachers for weekly bouts of amateur dramatics in a modern rehearsal studio. Egged on by an instructor who earns part of her living as a proxy “wailing filial daughter” at local funerals, the meek and mysterious Allie learns to unleash her penned-up angst, whose source we can only speculate.
Yen and Allie take turns appearing in the film. Lin, who wrote the screenplay, has certainly inserted some intrigue into the proceedings with this doppelganger device. But all the guessing distracts the viewer from what should be key to Yen and Ai-lee: that is, the way Yen and her mother nearly repeat the fatal tragedy that broke up their family and drove them apart years ago, and how they rebuild their bonds with the help of a boy (Hsieh I-le) who is imposed on them by Yen’s father’s lover (Elsie Yeh).
Amidst the youth-oriented comedies and puppyish romances dominating Taiwanese cinema today, Yen and Ai-lee appears remarkably refined in both its values and its aesthetics. The latter is felt in Masaki Hayashi’s subtle score and Penny Tsai Pei-ling’s art direction – her designs for the two protagonists’ homely appearances, their rough-hewn home and its provincial environs, provide the two leads with a visual springboard to plunge headlong into their characters.
Director, screenplay: Tom Lin Shu-yu
Cast: Kimi Hsia, Yang Kuei-mei
Producers: Clifford Miu, Linhan Zhang
Director of photography: Kartik Vijay
Editor: Tom Lin Hsin-ming
Production designer: Penny Tsai Pei-ling
Music composer: Masaki Hayashi
Sound designer: Kuo Li-chi
Production companies: Bering Pictures
World sales: Lights On
Venue: Busan International Film Festival
In Mandarin, Taiwanese
108 minutes
