Writer-director Lee Yun Chan's first feature in 16 years follows the sometimes surprising long-term trajectory of an already struggling family in the wake of a life-changing accident.
By Guy Lodge
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Film Critic
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Busan International Film Festival A high-speed traffic accident leaves a college student in a wheelchair for life, but that’s merely the starting point of the narrative in “To Be Ordinary,” a sensitive, slowly enveloping film with scant interest in disability-drama cliché — instead offering an expansive portrait of how the young man’s entire family is affected by his accident over the course of more than a decade. Spanning marital strife, economic upheaval, coming-of-age pains and moral crisis, Taiwanese writer-director Lee Yun Chan‘s fourth feature — her first since 2010’s “Dancing Without You” — has a lot of story to wrangle, but does so with a mostly delicate, empathetic touch, with a script that treats all individuals in this unhappy scenario with equal care and interest.
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