Y uno y dos

Admittedly, I was a little skeptical that this long and fairly slow-moving movie would be able to hold my attention throughout its 173 minute running time - how wrong I was to be skeptical! Yi Yi is a thoroughly captivating film that I enjoyed immensely, and I completely enjoyed every moment of it. The director's technique of filming a lot through windows and at wide angles gives it an almost voyeuristic feel, but this doesn't alienate the viewer, instead it gives the feeling you're watching real lives unfold, a kind of privileged 'fly on the wall' style, and the 'slice-of-life' term often used to describe Yi Yi is appropriate. The film manages to balance humor, sensitivity, and emotion. It's beautifully shot, sensitively directed, and incredibly well acted by all involved. It sounds like a cliche to say it, but it is one of those movies that has everything: cute kids, family dysfunction, reminisces of decisions made in the past, regret, love, hope, and beauty. It's an uplifting piece of filmmaking but also tinged with sadness, very human, and utterly absorbing.

I'd love to do a systematic investigation of every reflective shot in this movie. I can think of 10 stunning examples off the top of my head. In the director's comments track on the DVD you can hear Edward get noticeably excited when another reflective shot presents itself on screen. He points them all out, and it's true that the shots do seem to present themselves to the director. Although you must assume he had something to do with them, he confesses that it was magic that he discovered when he got to the location. Neither he nor I can explain what effect the superimposition of a night cityscape on a dark office space has on our understanding of the emotional world of the character sandwiched between the layers of light.

It seems there is magic at work all around. But it is not magic at all, as we learn from Mr. Ota's card trick -- merely attention. Maybe it's the reflection's ability to split out attention out into many streams of thought and quickly focus it back down that gives his scenes their vertiginous exhilaration. How else to explain the rush one feels from looking at a completely static shot where you can barely make out the actors?

He set out to make a film about family but I think he discovered he also wanted to make a film about life in Taipei. The reflections are the device that lets him make two movies at once. I think that's what is most special about each reflective shot. It is the instantaneous visual realization of an epic goal, and a reminder to the audience of both themes working in the movie.

His assuredness and gentleness astounds me.

This is without a doubt the best film of 2000, a masterpiece of sublety and understatement. It is long--just under three hours--but during that three hours, the entire range of human experience is covered. It is about life--that's it. But, to make a statement about life, you have to illustrate it with lives, and this Yang does exquisitely. There is a tragic undercurrent running through this film, and while I was watching it I thought of Thoreau's observation that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Yet, in spite of the travails the film's characters undergo, it is ultimately a work of affirmation. This is about as good as the art of cinema can get.

Yang Yang the boy character in the film takes pictures to help those around him see what they cannot, and Yang the director takes pictures to help us see what we usually do not - that every moment of life is beautiful, deep, wonderful, rich.

Yang masterfully uses the everyday things of life on a least two levels - the literal and the figurative - beginning with the title of the film, which means literally "one one" (in Chinese) or "individual", but is presented as a Chinese "one" on the screen, followed slowly by another Chinese "one" appearing on the screen below it, which then becomes "two". (In Chinese, one is a single line, and two is two singles lines, one above the other.)

We are individuals, together. Our lives involve us, and others. Our lives involve relationships, get their meanings from relationships.

Relationships like that of little boy Yang Yang's encounters with girls, violent at first as they poke him from behind (in the back of his head, where he cannot see), and he pops balloons in their faces, scaring them. And then as the electricity builds between them, between Yang Yang and the girl in his school, just as in the nature film in the science lesson presented in the audio-visual classroom, passion as an electrical spark comes to his life.

There is Yang Yang's sister Ting Ting in the school of life too, with her ever-present potted plant that cannot seem to bloom. In class, she is told that overfeeding can cause it not to bloom - and Ting Ting herself tries too hard to bloom, longing for "music in her life" as she listens to the concert duet played by a man and a woman while she glances at her date, the boy called "Fatty" - he is slim but does he dine too much at life's banquet? (That question is answered later, as violent storms - storms of love, of life - pass overhead, not expected again "until Thursday".) Ting Ting wears white, and could be at her wedding, but she is not.

Their dad, NJ, does manage to find the music of his life once again when he encounters Sherry, the flame of his youth. They take a train back into time they remember as simple and romantic, but the memories of the past veil the complexities that existed then, and now, for the two of them.

NJ's wife Ming Ming wishes to escape. Her work colleague Nancy asks her, "You're still here?" to which she replies "Where can I go?"

Indeed, where can we go? No, we must stay and wake up each day, and try to remember that each day is a first time, that we never live the same day twice, as enchanting Mr. Ota, NJ's potential business partner, reminds him, and us.

Yi Yi (2000)

Losing director Edward Lang recently (he died in 2007) was hard on the film world in general, as well as on Chinese language films with an international reach. And "Yi Yi" is a great, offbeat and yet accessible, likable film. What happens is very simple--an extended family is portrayed over several months as they enter relationships and life takes its usual tragic-comic toll. In a way, nothing in particular happens. There is no grand focus to the film in the usual sense (a murder, a love affair, a business deal gone wrong) but instead all of these things happen and overlap.

Some viewers will surely find it too dull and slow to withstand, but most viewers (the majority) once you give it a chance, will find the humanity bracing, the honesty of the acting and the writing (also by Lang) alive and well. It is filmed with straight forward storytelling expertise, but it is paced and edited with a higher order of intelligence. The sequence of disparate events, as young and old people fall in love and have close calls with death, is meshed together with intuitive brilliance.

It might somehow not be a great film. It might lack the larger turning point drama to make it stand out and make a viewer stand up. But it's a quiet, almost magical film with terrific acting. Maybe the largest thing I took away from it is how universal people's activities are. True, this is Taiwan and not mainland China, so things are more Westernized, but we can identify with everything so acutely it's quite amazing. A gem of a film, too long, but still a gem.