Ann Hui’s A Simple Life, which begins a weeklong run at Facets Cinematheque on Friday, is the sort of film in which every detail feels unforced but essential. It seems to have been assembled casually from personal observation, and in a sense it was. The story—about a middle-aged bachelor devoting himself to his family’s longtime maid after she suffers a stroke—is drawn from the experience of Roger Lee, the producer and cowriter. Deanie Ip and Andy Lau, who play the maid and her caretaker, are real-life godmother and godson, which probably accounts for their easy onscreen rapport. Lau’s character works as a financial supervisor for a film company, and some of Hui’s colleagues make cameo appearances as themselves, as if to suggest there’s no division between their lives and the movies they produce. A Simple Life considers the loneliness of contemporary life and the plight of the elderly in 21st-century Hong Kong, yet its observations are too small to suggest a grand statement; its themes and melancholy subtext emerge only in retrospect.
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Or maybe he doesn’t. Characters in the movie never state their feelings explicitly; they’re too composed and polite. As in the late features of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (which A Simple Life often recalls), Hui asks us to guess at complex emotional states from oblique behavioral cues. And aside from Ah-Tao’s steadily diminishing health, the story offers little opportunity for convenient emotional outpourings. It progresses more as an accumulation of moments: Roger’s frequent visits to the nursing home, his all-business business trips, Ah-Tao’s interactions with the other residents. Characters are revealed through their routines and social affiliations, the way people are in real life.
Directed by Ann Hui
