Jason’s Rating: B+ (Very Good)
With two features dealing with the aged women and their troubled relations to either their siblings or strangers, woman director Ma Liwen, a graduate from Beijing-based Central Academy of Theater Arts, gains solid ground on a profession that is disproportionately dominated by BFA-educated (Beijing Film Academy) filmmakers. Gone is the One Who Held Me the Dearest (2002), Ma’s directorial debut, is adapted from a novella by a famed Chinese writer. This time, however, Ma scripted her own film, and the result of which is a story with literary refinement and psychological depth that looks as if it was adapted from a literary work.
You and Me is punctuated by four seasons, a structure that is increasingly favored by directors of art film. Picture starts with an impressive wide shot of the snow-covered barren landscape of Beijing, in which Xiao Ma, a newly arrived college freshman, is introduced. Looking for a cheap yet well-located place to live, she knocks on doors in cold weather and ends up with no choice but renting a cramped room in a siheyuan (a four-walled compound surrounding a central courtyard) owned by a seemingly stingy old woman in her 80s. From the first day Xiao Ma moves in, the unlikely couple finds each other intolerable and stubbornly selfish. While the old woman insists on unreasonable charges for phone, gas, and electricity, Xiao Ma fights her way to get it even. As the two feisty women spit out insults on each other, they also develop a strange closeness when the spring sunshine gradually melts away the cold winter. The old woman finds Xiao Ma a delightful remedy to her lonely life, while Xiao Ma discovers a warm and caring old lady behind the “mask” of stubbornness and eccentricity. The picture ends with Xiao Ma becoming an intimate friend to the old lady in her last days.
From the very beginning, the picture is dominated by a suffocating bluish look, which perfectly matches the spatial confinement resulted from extreme close-ups and monotonous life in the shabby siheyuan. The director skillfully explores the space and color, which almost turn into a third character besides the old lady and Xiao Ma. Jin Yaqin’s performance, for which she was crowned Best Actress at the Tokyo International Film Festival and the Golden Rooster Film Festival of China, is unforgettably superb and mesmerizing. Gong Zhe, on the other hand, brightens the film with her convincing portrayal of a college student in Beijing.
Ma’s script is not without flaws, however. In the scene where Xiao Ma comes home with a video camera to interview the old lady, for example, Ma could have used the rare opportunity to let the old lady reminisce her past so as to add depth and likeability to the character. The closeness between the old lady and Xiao Ma could have been exclamatorily reinforced by adding a scene in which the old lady hands the painting, although almost a part of her life, to Xiao Ma when she moves out of the siheyuan. It is true that film is the art of regrets, as the old saying proclaims, but these script flaws could be easily fixed before the camera starts to crank.
In general, the movie leaves me with the impression that the director is so ambitious in creating a dramatically entertaining conflict between the two main characters that there are too many traits symbolizing such conflict in the set, the props, even the color tones of the scenes - which, from certain prospective, appears to be a little pretentious. For example, the tenant, who seems to be an art major college student in her twenties, is mostly labeled with bright colors - the red jumper inside the old army coat, the bright and vivid decoration of her small room, even the blush from coldness on her young, innocent face. In the mean time, the tinges representing the old landlady are always dull – mainly gray. Conceivably, along with the bettering up of the relationship between the two characters, these representative colors gradually merge into the world of each other, just as we can see from a scene (which turns out to be the very first significant turning point of the whole plot) where the young girl was decorating the little yard with colorful paper lanterns, smiling gaily at the old landlady sitting leisurely outside the door of her room.The director apparently develops so much affection for the capital city of China that she, to some extent, seems to be endeavoring to create on the big screen an ideal Beijing in her head. The story begins on a clear sunny day after a heavy snow in a freezing winter in a quiet old szu-ho-yuan, a sort of compound with traditional Chinese houses of greybricks and tiles built around a courtyard. Used to be the most conspicuous symbols of Beijing, however, such old courtyard and high clear sky are actually more and more unlikely to be seen today largely due to the prosperous urban planning and reconstruction almost everywhere in this city as well as the heavy pollution of the air and the greenhouse effect. Besides their exotic appeal to the foreign audiences who are not so familiar with the "good old Beijing", these highly personalized features also added some reminiscent flavor into the movie, which reminds me of Amelie, in which the director even cleared for the hide-and-seek scene the Saint Coeur Church, where was always crowded with tons of tourists in Paris.Despite these sedulous strokes, the film is still, at least in general, a quite agreeable cameo. This is largely due to the way the director is telling the story – for most of the time, the plot is smoothly developed despite sort of avoidable triteness in the cinematography and some of the dialogues. Although such lack of genius can commonly be seen in the debut works of new directors, Ma's genuine and sincere endeavors, especially when comparing with those too tactical techniques played by some of the famous movie makers, still manage to demonstrate her ability to produce an generally entertaining and touching film.The performance of the two main heroines is also a remarkable feature of this film. Jin Yaqin, the 84-year-old actress in Beijing People's Art Theatre which is the most premier and high-level national drama art theater in China, won the award of best actress in Tokyo Film Festival; while Gong Zhe, who herself was a art major college student then and had never had any acting experience before, also made her debut in the film a quite memorable one by her natural and fresh performance – although the highly frequent scene of her pushing the old big bicycle in exactly the same way do make audience feel hilariously bored. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0757376/usercomments
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