| Yi Yi: A One and A Two | |
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Yi Yi has been playing in "selected cities" for several months now and is steadily building more momentum. The Taiwanese film featured prominently in most critics' End-of-the-Year lists (it was #4 on mine), won Best Director at Cannes, Best Foreign Film from both the New York and LA critics, as well as Best Picture from the National Society of Film Critics.
A recent New York Times article not only compared Yi Yi favorably to American Beauty but also pictured it as spearheading something of an Asian film revival together with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Given all this buzz, it's not surprising that there is a wider release as well as Oscar hopes for Edward Yang's film. Not a bad time, then, to re-view and review Yi Yi.
Most critics balk at summarizing this sprawling three-hour film. It's easy to see why, but the immensity of the story is essential to the point of the film.
OK, ready? Here we go: Yi Yi is the story of NJ, an honest but dispirited Taipei business man, father of an inquisitive, artistic boy and husband to a spiritually dissatisfied wife, who meets his rejected first love after 30 years at the wedding banquet celebrating his irresponsible brother's marriage to a very pregnant woman which their mother, preferring the original and much more successful girlfriend, did not approve of yet cannot object to any longer because she falls into a coma possibly brought on by her granddaughter's failure to take out the garbage, causing the girl nearly as much grief as her thwarted love affair with the teenage neighbor's discarded boyfriend.
Got that?
In Yi Yi, everything and nothing happens--and I mean that literally. Yang paints with a very large canvas, beginning with a wedding, ending with a funeral, and placing a birth about halfway through the movie. The goal, it seems to me, is nothing less than to present the whole of human experience in one film, a complete, encyclopedic representation of life. Name a human emotion, name a human endeavor, and it's there -- joy, despair, grief, regret, hope, the making of friends, the breaking up with friends, superstition, birth, death, business, crime, religion, music, art, politics, food, power struggles, sports, and bodily functions. (Global mass culture, in the form of Dylan, the Beatles, Star Wars, Gershwin and Elvis, makes sly appearances at the margins). Best of all is the kaleidoscope of love in all its stages and incarnations: unrequited, fresh, old, tired, young, jealous, deceitful, lost, redeemed, clueless, and murderously intense.
All of this sounds as if it could make for a rushed, hectic movie, even at a more than generous 172 minutes. Instead, Yang's trademark long shots and subtly beautiful cinematography give the film an assured, stately grace. Most fascinating of all, when it's all over, hardly anything happened in the final tally -- all shifts provoked by the numerous plots are gradual, very much like in real life. As I said, in Yi Yi, everything and nothing happens.
Like Traffic or any Robert Altman movie, this is an ensemble piece, but its topic isn't the war on drugs or a city devoted to country music, but everyday life as lived by a middle-class Taiwanese family, and by extension, everyone. The danger with such a project is that the characters risk becoming stand-ins for the ideas they represent (one of the problems, in my opinion, with Steven Soderbergh's overpraised Traffic). In Yi Yi, the characters are specific enough that they are in no danger of becoming cyphers for abstract ideas -- they stay real, and we care about their moving, funny, sad lives.
Still, Yi Yi is finally about a certain way of viewing the world, about philosophical questions: is human experience fundamentally shared, or can we never truly know each other? What good is art, and what are movies for? The structure of the film, the way stories and characters overlap, suggests that we all live the same experiences, the most important of which are marked by rituals. But the title (which literally means "One-One" and refers to the separateness of individuals) and the boy's clever photography indicate that we can always only know half of the truth at best-- and that's what cameras are for, to "show people stuff they've never seen before."
Obviously, Yi Yi doesn't exactly offer a breathless thrill ride, despite its gentle humor and character-rich plot. Instead, Edward Yang has made a slow-burning film that reveals its rich treasures through reflection and patience. Critics and audiences seem to appreciate that these virtues, all but useless in face of the onslaught of Hollywood blockbusters, are finally rewarded by a touching, humane, and wise film.
Director: Edward Yang
Awards: Best Director, 2000 Cannes Film Festival; Best Foreign Film, 2000 New York Film Critics Circle; Best Foreign Film, 2000 Los Angeles Film Critics Association; Best Picture, 2001 National Society of Film Critics
Cast: Wu Nianzhen (N.J.), Kelly Lee (Ting-Ting), Jonathan Chang (Yang-Yang), Issey Ogata (Ota), Elaine Jin (Min-Min), Ke Suyun (Sherry), Hsi-Sheng Chen (Ah-Di), Shu-shen Hsiao (Hsiao Yen), Shu-Yuan Hsu, Adrian Lin (Li-Li), Ru-Yun Tang, Michael Tao, Hsin-Yi Tseng (Yun-Yung), Pang Chang Yu (Fatty)
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