A Home with a View

The always prolific Herman Yau directs “A Home with a View”, a middling satire about a working class Hong Kong family who tries to remove a billboard that has blocked the ocean view of their apartment. 

Yau has honestly never been much of an aesthete, but he is a director with a workmanlike touch that translates to an appreciation for cause-and-effect. It’s only when you watch a Herman Yau film that you realize how half-assed everybody else is at staging a scene and how effortlessly Yau seems to always find the rigorous logic that drives one.

Having said that, Yau also has his weaknesses. Namely, for a director who is so unusually talented at visually delineating narrative logic, he has a strange affinity towards the schematic. This is especially apparent in “A Home with a View”, where every time Yau tries to work out a theme, he finds room for small scenes that distract from the overall narrative. For example, the scene in the real estate office is, by itself, a well-constructed sequence, but the only purpose it seems to serve is to fulfill a talking point more than anything else.

Despite my complaints, Herman Yau at this point in his career is Hong Kong cinema icon and I always look forward to his films because I like the way he thinks through his scenes. This, along with his recent pet topics of economic instability and problematic consumer behavior, puts him in a similar ballpark as his American contemporary Steven Soderbergh. For the longest time, Hong Kong cinema fans have rightfully lauded him as a master of low-budget features. Maybe it is time we start giving Yau his due as a thinker.

The always prolific Herman Yau directs “A Home with a View”, a middling satire about a working class Hong Kong family who tries to remove a billboard that has blocked the ocean view of their apartment. 

Yau has honestly never been much of an aesthete, but he is a director with a workmanlike touch that translates to an appreciation for cause-and-effect. It’s only when you watch a Herman Yau film that you realize how half-assed everybody else is at staging a scene and how effortlessly Yau seems to always find the rigorous logic that drives one.

Having said that, Yau also has his weaknesses. Namely, for a director who is so unusually talented at visually delineating narrative logic, he has a strange affinity towards the schematic. This is especially apparent in “A Home with a View”, where every time Yau tries to work out a theme, he finds room for small scenes that distract from the overall narrative. For example, the scene in the real estate office is, by itself, a well-constructed sequence, but the only purpose it seems to serve is to fulfill a talking point more than anything else.

Despite my complaints, Herman Yau at this point in his career is Hong Kong cinema icon and I always look forward to his films because I like the way he thinks through his scenes. This, along with his recent pet topics of economic instability and problematic consumer behavior, puts him in a similar ballpark as his American contemporary Steven Soderbergh. For the longest time, Hong Kong cinema fans have rightfully lauded him as a master of low-budget features. Maybe it is time we start giving Yau his due as a thinker.