Yi yi

This movie is a beautiful piece of art. Every shot of the movie is like a painting in its own right. Hats off to cinematographer Wei-han Yang for getting so many splendid images on film. From his serene reflective shots against a city nocturnal background, to innovative bird eye-view shots, to neat mirror shots, to the perspective of the bedridden grandmother in a coma, to cars passing by in front of the actors, to gorgeous corporate buildings... everything on camera was meticulously thought out.

Director Edward Yang uses this visual candy diligently and incorporates it nicely into his narrative. His script is very poetic and allows for a lot of reflective pause... which is, you've guessed it, supported by silent stunning images. The characters feel very real and their problems and concerns move us. The little boy is simply adorable and his perspective on life is quite refreshing. The dialogue is rich and intelligent and if you listen carefully you'll understand why this movie is so long... But the length does not drag the movie. Rather it allows us to think and to appreciate. There is enough material in this movie (both words and images) to have anyone musing for days if he so desires.

The ending of the movie is very well done and you don't really know if you feel like laughing or crying at that point, but you certainly know that you have just witnessed an amazing movie, a movie without proper description. Because like Yang chose to do, I should just be silent and let you enjoy.

I don't think the term "soap opera" existed before the widespread growth of TV when it started to be used to define a genre of entertainment that dramatised the everyday lives of a cross section of interrelated characters that could theoretically go on for ever. The formula for the success of the longest running, the British "Coronation Street" and "Eastenders" for instance, is self-identification, the depiction in a heightened dramatic form of the sort of problems we all live with, bringing a degree of comfort and assurance to the audience watching a fictionalisation of its collective angst. When we liken a finite form such as a film to "soap" we tend to use the term in a derogatory sense isofar as we see it as dramatising trivia. However we must be careful about this as there have been examples of very high cinematic art that conform to the conventions of soap opera, "The Best Years of our Lives" for instance in the '40s, the German "Heimat" a few years back and more recently Edward Yang's "A One and a two". It is that very element of everyday anxiety viewed with such perception and truth that makes the Taiwanese film so compelling. Yang has moved away from the youth violence of "A Brighter Summer Day". His middle class family is involved with commerce and careers. However noone has an easy time of it. Each member of the family is plagued in their different ways by their inadequacy in coping with the infirmity of their eldest member. At the same time the father is troubled by his work and the complication of the reappearance in his life of a woman he met many years ago, his wife is seeking spiritual advice from a Buddhist guru, his teenage daughter becomes the butt of romantic jealousy from the girl next door. But it is the 8 year old son who seems most able to come to terms with the vicissitudes of life. He survives the spiteful taunts of his little girl peers and a bullying schoolmaster. His defence is an enquiring mind which he applies to his surroundings with a Kaspar Hauser fortitude and innocence. We already know that if any of these characters will be a survivor it is this youngest. Yang shoots the film with an almost Ozu-like purity, preferring long held shots rather than camera movements, although unlike Ozu he does not make a fetish of this. Often we see action through windows but not at a distance as in "Rear Window" so everything has an immediacy. It will need a few more viewings to assess whether "A One and a Two" is on the same level as Yang's earlier "A Brighter Summer Day". At the moment something tells me that is does not quite measure up to that savage masterpiece. Its very gentleness could be the reason, although I recognise this is hardly a valid argument. After three viewings it remains for me a rather elusive work, compelling in its way but curiously difficult to evaluate.

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.

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.

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.