Yen and Ai-Lee 
小雁與吳愛麗 「Xiǎoyàn yǔ Wú Àilì」
Release Date: October 10th, 2024
Duration: 106 mins.
Director: Tom Lin Shu-yu
Writer: Tom Lin Shu-yu (Screenplay)
Starring: Kimi Hsia (Yen/Allie), Yang Kuei-mei (Ai-lee), Sam Tseng (Ren), Ng Ki-pin (Chen), Hsieh I-Ie (Wei), Winnie Chang (Linda),
Yen and Ai-Lee is Tom Lin Shu-yu’s fifth feature film. It stands in stark contrast to his last film, The Garden of Evening Mists (2019), a sumptuously shot historical romance which featured an international cast. His latest is a pared-back character study of a daughter and mother seeking forgiveness for a traumatic event that is set in contemporary Taiwan. Originally conceived as a project allowing Lin to work with his wife Kimi Hsia, it is defined by visually dazzling black-and-white cinematography and a stunner of a performance from leading lady Hsia and strong support from veteran Yang Kuei-mei.
The film starts strikingly enough in the immediate aftermath of a violent event with a long take showing Yen (Kimi Hsia), bloodied and wielding a knife, turning herself in to the police.
Flash forward eight years later, during a humid summer, Yen is released on parole and returns to her mother Ai-Lee (Yang Kuei-mei) in their rural Hakkanese home town where she tries to rehabilitate her life. Her new digs is a small room above a little corner store from which Ai-Lee’s petty thug boyfriend Ren (Sam Tseng) operates a scam lottery racket. His presence becomes a source of tension between mother and daughter. Another stressor arrives when Yen’s half-brother Wei (Hsieh I-Ie) is literally dumped on their doorstep by her father’s mistress.
Amidst this emotionally febrile atmosphere during their long hot summer together, the details of what happened are teased out slowly through Yen’s encounters with supportive neighbours who just stop short of telling all. The focus of the film is more on the lingering trauma felt by Yen and Ai-Lee. This is told marvellously by Kimi Hsia (nominated for a Golden Horse Award for Best Actress) and Yang Kuei-mei (winner of a Golden Horse Award for Best Supporting Actress) who display the awkward body language of two women inhabiting the same house but not quite feeling at home with each other due to guilt and resentment. They are abrupt with biting backchat when their characters bug each other, and tense, talking tersely lest conversations erupt into arguments. All the while, the men in their lives act as fuel to their simmering anguish.
The film is split equally between these two women, indicated with intertitles and the thematic threads of selfishness and the limits of filial piety, lousy parents and lost children are pulled at in every scene.
Intercut into their drama are the experiences of an enigmatic young woman named Allie (also played Kimi Hsia) in Kaohsiung city. She is the spitting image of Yen and we watch her learn acting at community college classes conducted by Ling-Yi Lin aka Linda (Winnie Chang), a renowned professional mourner who teaches her students to tap into inner feelings to channel performances. These are like scenes from another life, the possibilities that Yen may have had if she had chosen a different path away from her mother.
Crucially, this character and Yen allow Kimi Hsia ample screentime to play out the two radically different women. Her performances are the highlights of the film as she does a marvellous job in differentiating distinctly between her roles beyond just a simple haircut, from long to short, and costume change from dark clothes to light.
When she plays Yen, she carries herself with an almost perma-frown or downcast eyes and hunched posture that suggests a physical antagonism and need for defensiveness when dealing a world that has already hurt her. Allie, in contrast, looks hesitant but curious of the world around her. A gentleness is felt through her grin and more open body language while a demureness is felt in her reticence.
As the storylines reach emotional crescendos in both characters, Hsia is able to summon a raw performance that had my stomach in knots – Yen reliving her traumatic incident and the camera slowly zooming in on her face. My gaze was rooted to her eyes which were wide with panic, tears of fear welling up. I spotted her lip quivering and felt her panic through seeing her shoulders locked with tension. Hsia’s physicality mainlined the horror of that moment to me in such a way that I whispered “oh no,” held my breath and was moved to tears watching her. Then comes Allie’s own confessional moment as an actress where the words and their delivery held such a vulnerability and lostness. As she spoke of anguish clouding her view forward, I felt my heart break as it was like listening to a child try to describe how profoundly they were.
As mysterious a presence as Allie is, she becomes a graceful way to tie together the bifurcated narrative as Yen and Ai-Lee travel towards some form of forgiveness.
The supporting cast are fantastic with Yang Kuei-mei being both amusingly spirited and spirit-crushingly awful but ultimately sympathetic as Yen’s indelicate mother who is forced to face her wayward nature. Then there was Sam Tseng bringing a rowdy presence to leaven the tone and make the film a little lighter.
These performances are enhanced with stripped-down visual design as Kartik Vijay. He also lensed The Garden of Evening Mists, but his switch to black-and-white is an attractive choice as it starkly defines details of places and faces so the tiniest tremors of fear, the loudest roars of anger, and tears tracking down faces registered with me. This style also catches the beauty of rain-slicked roads and enhances the production design, thus ensuring the drama is enriched with vivid performances and places that supercharge its story and make it emotionally resonate. These were real people seeking catharsis and I was there with them and caring for them.
Yen and Ai-Lee was screened on Sunday, March 16, at T-Joy Umeda Screen 7. It will be screened again on Friday, March 21, at 18:50 at ABC Hall.