(A ONE AND A TWO)
***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Nien-Jen Wu, Elaine Jin, Issei Ogata, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang, Hsi-Sheng Chen, Su-Yun Ko, Michael Tao, Shu-shen Hsiao, Adrian Lin, Pang Chang Yu, Ru-Yun Tang, Shu-Yuan Hsu, and Hsin-Yi Tseng
Directed & written by Edward Yang
2000
173 min PG13
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2000
I’m a sucker for the “large canvas” movie. You know, the movies where we follow a large number of characters in disparate storylines over a period of months, if not a year or so. Just to name a few, “Hannah and Her Sisters” follows three grown sisters, two troubled and one perfect, and their various combinations of husbands and boyfriends over several months. “Traffic” does the same with drug dealers, drug busters, and drug czars. “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” is a year in high school from a half-dozen different viewpoints. “Topsy-Turvy” follows the creation and production of an entire Gilbert & Sullivan musical, seen through the eyes of the writer, composer, actors, managers, and so on. If movies are about seeing life through someone else’s eyes, then sometimes the more eyes the merrier.
Acting in a large canvas movie is crucial because a true large canvas will not have a main character, or at least not an immediately apparent one. There can be a biggest face on the poster or someone that embodies all the disparate stories, but there can be no scene-stealing diva. This makes the large canvas more work for us because we don’t always know where our sympathies should lie from scene to scene. Actors must work swiftly to create distinct characters that suggest a lifetime of experiences we don’t have time to see, but at the same time its best if they only whet our appetite and not answer all our questions.
“Yi Yi” has 18 characters worth mentioning, but I’ll try not to mention them all. Loosely, it follows an extended family, and a neighboring family, in modern-day Taiwan for about half-a-year. The film touches on families, romance, faith, and the “Silicon Island” syndrome that’s sweeping free China, but mostly it’s about how everyday life can be both crushing and funny, and the movie does so with enormous affection for its often hapless protagonists. For the elderly there is a troubling wedding and a coma. For the adults there are business problems, a new birth, dangerous romantic affairs, and a mid-life Buddhist crisis. For the teenagers there is the thrill of young love and for the grader-schoolers there is a world still filled with wonder.
The movie begins with the wedding of A-Di Jian (Hsi-Sheng Chen), not to his longtime girlfriend, but to a younger replacement he knocked up. The old girlfriend makes a brief scene before the wedding and we know that’s not the last we’ll see of her. His older brother NJ (Nien-Jen Wu) runs into his boyhood flame Sherry (Su-Yun Ko) in the lobby outside the wedding. They haven’t seen each other in 30 years; at first she’s exuberant, then she’s irate that he stood her up so long ago. NJ’s daughter (Kelly Lee) is being incrementally drawn into the teenage love woes of their neighbors while his seven-year-old son (Jonathan Chang) is just plain awkward at school (his drill sergeant style dean doesn’t help). As if all that’s not enough, neither A-Di nor NJ is doing well in business. NJ’s long-time partner is frantic to invest in something, but is skeptical of the Japanese software designer Ota (Issei Ogata), while A-Di’s best man/business partner is a guy named Piggy. Not good. All this takes place in the shadow of the coma that has swallowed NJ’s mother-in-law (Ru-Yun Tang).
These may sound like melodramatic plot twists, but “Yi Yi” is unforced, slice-of-life, and naturalistic. It is not a soap opera and instead it achieves the singular feel of a detached observer, a fly-on-the-wall, through its style. Director Edward Yang, who won the Best Director award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, shoots the movie with his camera farther from his characters than we’re used to, in long, unbroken takes, and hardly ever comments on the action through non-diegetic music.
Dialogue is mostly the clipped, inarticulate talk of real people, and is seldom revelatory of their feelings. We must judge who they are only by their actions and I can’t count how many poignant, almost self-contained little scenes there are. NJ and his little son share a profound, meditative silence after their first run-in with Sherry; they’re sitting silent and floor-staring at the wedding, in the way of fathers and sons. Perhaps the most interesting of “Yi Yi’s” many relationships is between NJ and the software designer Ota. NJ has been uncommunicative with his wife and friends for a while by the time we enter the story and forms an interesting mid-life kinship with a man who has shared many of his hopes and disappointments.
“Yi Yi’s” narrative pattern of one story after another extending in different directions to far-off places is mirrored by the movie’s visual strategy. We constantly watch the Jians through windows or as reflections on windows. Not only are the Jians and their friends small in the frame but the reflections of the city around them double the amount of visual information. The world of “Yi Yi” extends in all directions, farther than we can see, into blurry skyscrapers, backward neon signs, passing traffic, and so on as far as the camera permits. When I saw the movie it had a barely out-of-focus, slightly murky look; I couldn’t decide if it was a stylistic choice or just a sloppy transfer to DVD.
So what’s it all about? What is the sum total of the lives and trials of these men and women? The movie is a fascinating document of real life, where the quiet desperation that sneaks up on us is too wordless to share with anyone. Sometimes we feel overwhelmed, sometimes we can fix it, sometimes we can’t, and sometimes it was all in our minds. We may not have the exact problems of the Jians when life comes crushing us, but they’re close enough. Sometimes if we just stand back from the events our lives, the way Yang’s camera does, everything comes into focus.
Finished July 11th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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