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A Simple Life(桃姐)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Hong Kong · 2011
1h 58m
Director Ann Hui
Starring Andy Lau, Deannie Yip, Fuli Wang, Paul Chun Pui
Genre Drama

Roger Leung is an unmarried film producer who has lived with Chung Chun-to, his family's domestic worker, for his entire life. One day Chung suffers from a stroke and requests to be moved to a nursing home. As Roger assists Chung, their lengthy relationship deepens and blossoms.

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What are critics saying?

63

Slant Magazine by

A Simple Life may have one of the most accurate titles in all of cinema, as the film has a bracingly casual sense of day-to-day working-class life that recalls the films of Jean Renoir or, more recently, Olivier Assayas.

70

Village Voice by Ernest Hardy

A deceptively simple film, gingerly peels layer after layer of sharp insights into the dynamics of familial love, using compassion and droll humor as its tools. Its strength is that it manages to tap genuine emotion without succumbing to sentimentality.

80

Variety by Justin Chang

Suffused with the gentle, unforced humanity viewers have come to expect from Hong Kong helmer Ann Hui, A Simple Life is a tender ode to the elderly, their caregivers and the mutual generosity of spirit that makes their limited time together worthwhile.

90

The New York Times by Rachel Saltz

Ms. Hui, a rare successful female director in the Hong Kong film industry, drew her story from real events, and the movie retains a tonic flavor of the everyday: its drama unfolds simply, without explosive moments but not without emotion. She and her two excellent leads keep the film buoyant.

80

Empire by Simon Crook

Director Hui shows a different side to Hong Kong cinema in a tender drama that's illuminated by the marvellous Ip.

80

Time Out London by Trevor Johnston

Lau’s astute performance is rather like the film as a whole – at first you think it’s underdone, but it’s actually cannily judged to favour genuine feeling over pushy sentimentality.

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