Ann Hui
A Simple Life

LA RECENSIONE

The news of the awarding of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Tilda Swinton and Ann Hui is from a few weeks ago. But while we all know the great English actress, few know the latter, however, a very important director in Hong Kong cinema. Her most famous film is undoubtedly A Simple Life, also distributed in Italy. A magnificent film, based on a true story of immense humanity, which I recommend to everyone.

A precious and rare film, which does not seek easy emotion, on the contrary, but precisely because of this inevitably achieves it, at the end of a journey approaching the inevitable (already announced, in fact, in the very first lines of the voiceover), in which aging, illness, death, are faced as natural phases in the existence of anyone. The gratitude and affection Roger feels towards Ah Tao, a domestic worker (to simplify in Western style a much more complex figure, recurring more frequently in Eastern culture) who raised him like a son, are not taken-for-granted sentiments and, as recounted by the real Roger Lee (whose story, indeed, inspired the film), cannot be conveyed in words. Even more so in a globalized context where relationships between people are conditioned by distances, work commitments, and in various ways alienating components from the values of a world that no longer exists (a discourse that Ozu, evidently extremely farsighted, had already addressed in Tokyo Story). Thus, Ann Hui (from Hong Kong but of Chinese and Japanese origins) shows the visits, the memories tied to photos and objects, the places, the rootedness, the solitude without self-pity, a life spanning several generations. The small succession of daily life within a Hong Kong nursing home, the slow progression towards the end, without dramatic emphasis or excesses of any kind, with the same naturalness and simplicity alluded to in the film's title, characteristics belonging only to the greatest in cinema.

A film of great grace and wisdom, incredibly valuable and extraordinary as it shows something not in vogue, yet still extremely earthly and universal, which many might prefer not to think about. Reflecting on the meaning of a life without regrets and on what it means to arrive serenely at the end in normalcy. "A simple life," indeed. A small great lesson.