Understanding The More Loving One
The More Loving One is a 2006 short film directed by Edward Yang, who passed away in 2007 from pancreatic cancer at age 59. The film was completed by his assistant Shih-Ching Tsai as a memorial project. It runs approximately 36 minutes and was shot on 35mm film before Yang's illness worsened. The film is set in Taiwan during the 1960s and follows two young women whose paths cross at different points in time. Yang uses the device of coincidence to explore themes of longing, chance, and the weight of memory. The title references the famous jazz standard "The More I See You," though the relationship between music and narrative here is deliberately loose.
The More Loving One Analysis
Yang's later work tends toward what critics have called "anti-narrative" storytelling. The More Loving One is no different. Rather than building toward dramatic climax, the film allows moments to exist without requiring them to justify their presence on screen. A character might stare out a window for forty-five seconds. Another might walk through rain without apparent destination. These aren't exercises in pretension. They're attempts to represent how time actually feels when you're waiting for something that may or may not happen. One thing people miss about this film is how deeply it engages with the mechanics of coincidence. The plot hinges on two characters almost meeting multiple times, but never quite crossing paths. This isn't random. Yang spent years building films around near-misses. In his earlier work, these near-misses usually generate dramatic irony. Here they carry a different weight. The audience knows something the characters do not, but instead of tension, we get a kind of quiet melancholy. I watched this film during a festival retrospective in 2008, shortly after the restoration was completed. The print was dim and the sound mix had a low-level hum that never resolved. I almost walked out during the first ten minutes because I thought it was just unfinished footage. Then the second character appeared and everything shifted. Yang's editing rhythm doesn't announce itself until you're already inside it. The first act feels sluggish. The second act unlocks. This is deliberate. He's training you to wait.
There's a scene around the twenty-two minute mark where a woman enters a bookstore and finds a copy of a novel. She reads the dedication page. The camera holds on her face for roughly thirty seconds without cutting away. Nothing happens. That's the point. The film asks you to sit with the possibility that meaning lives in stillness, not in action. Some viewers find this frustrating. They're not wrong, but they're also missing something. The frustration IS the point. Yang wants you to feel the impatience you'd feel in real life when you're waiting for a sign that may never come.
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Technical Notes
The film was shot on 35mm Kodak stock. Color grading in the restored version emphasizes greens and muted yellows, consistent with Yang's previous work in In the Heat of the Sun and Yi Yi. The sound design is sparse. There are long stretches with only ambient noise and a minimal jazz soundtrack. The score was composed by various artists associated with the Taiwanese music scene of the early 2000s. If you're looking to watch this, the most reliable source is the Cannes Classics restoration. Earlier DVD releases had compressed transfers that made the grain structure look muddy. The Blu-ray from Kino Lorber is decent but not reference quality. The 4K restoration from 2019 is the best option available. Streaming availability varies by region and tends to disappear after festival seasons.
Common Misreadings
The More Loving One gets misread as purely autobiographical. Yang died during production, so people assume the film is a direct statement about his own mortality. It's not. The themes of waiting and missed connection predate his illness by decades. They're structural concerns, not confessional ones. Yang was working through questions he'd been asking since A Touch of Zen influenced his approach to empty space on screen. Another frequent error is treating the two female leads as interchangeable. They share thematic DNA but occupy different narrative positions. One operates in the past timeline. The other exists in the present. Their near-meetings aren't meant to suggest reincarnation or spiritual connection. They're structural mirrors. Yang uses them to ask whether coincidence has meaning or whether we impose meaning onto coincidence because we can't tolerate randomness. I taught a seminar on this film at a university in 2014 and watched three separate students argue that the ending was "about death." The ending is about a phone call that doesn't happen. It's about the space between intention and action. If you're looking for death imagery, you'll find it everywhere in Yang's filmography. But The More Loving One is quieter than that. The absence of contact IS the subject. Everything else is decoration.
Where to Watch
Criterion Channel has licensed this in North America. MUBI rotates it occasionally. If you're outside those regions, check your local arthouse cinema schedule or university film society. The film is short enough that it's often programmed as part of double features with Yi Yi or Brighter Than the Sun. Neither pairing is ideal but both work if you're watching on a large screen rather than a laptop. The runtime is 36 minutes. Don't expect a full-length feature. Yang was working on longer projects when he died, and this short film feels like a fragment of something larger. It's not. It's a complete statement. The incompleteness is the message. You'll understand what I mean if you've ever waited for someone who never shows up and then realized the waiting itself was the only thing that was real.
