Yi yi

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.

The action takes place in Taipei like it could take place in any other modern town of this world because the dramas that occur in our urban bourgeois society are the same everywhere. In fact we see here a very westernized society in terms of values and living standards both material and moral. The movie develops itself in a succession of apparently incoherent sequences which nevertheless are bound by a conducting wire that has much to do with life in itself concerning a chain of different generations, from the dying grandmother to the small boy who is not the less important character here. This succession reminds us of Godard's movies though this one and the sequences themselves are full of meaning. Even the silences they contain are very eloquent sometimes. The scenery is usually very neat, clear and quiet in terms of furniture, urban views and people and camera movements which doesn't make the story less dramatic at all. Particularly interesting and very well shown is the counterpoint between the love meetings of teenagers and the meeting of the fourtyish couple of the former lovers who meet for the first time again 30 years after their courtship had been broken in dramatic circumstances. Problems concerning the meaning of life and the real nature of love are shown mainly through the very incisive dialogues making us thinking once more that love is a much more complicated thing than romanticism depicts. It has features and ups and downs that remain unexplained sometimes. This movie is one of the most significant ones I have seen in which concerns human nature and its conflict with the values of modern bourgeois society on the one hand and also universal values of all times on the other. We watch here problems of children and teenagers but also of adults either marital, professional or spiritual. And all this told in a smooth and quiet way portraying normal people leading normal lives. This movie presents itself indeed like a kaleidoscope of real nowadays life.

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.

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.

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.