YI YI: A ONE AND A
TWO... A
Taiwan Japan (173 mi)
2000 d: Edward Yang
Why is the world so
different from what we thought it was? —Ting-Ting
(Kelly Lee)
Yang opened the 90’s with A
Brighter Summer Day (Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian) (1991) and
ends the decade with this film, another humanistic, novelistic masterpiece,
nearly three hours long, a slowly evolving story presented sequence by
sequence, event by event, in a slow moving, quiet elegance, unraveling layer
after layer of the outer and inner worlds of the Jian family in modern Taipei,
seen largely through the eyes of the two children. Yang wrote the notes for what would
eventually become YI YI 15 years ago when a friend’s father went into a coma,
stating: “I knew I was too young at the
time, so I put it aside.” There are no
spectacular, explosive scenes here, like the massacre in the night of A
BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY, instead Yang has created a much more poignant, reflective
work, a funny, quietly powerful portrait of an ordinary middle class family
struggling with their own personal self-doubts and alienation, their long, pent
up frustrations, their exploration to find love and meaning in their lives,
elegantly presented, deceptively simple, again, as is Yang’s signature, without
a hint of artifice, and with an underlying, deeply felt humanism. There is particularly effective use of
off-screen sound, as nearly all the angry expletives, or the explosive, unhappy
emotional scenes occur off-screen, even a murder sequence, which we never see,
while the camera shows us the stillness of life, the rhythms and routines, where
everything shown seems to resemble a universality of “normal.” Disappointed by indifferent reviews that
continued throughout his life’s work, Yang refused to release the film in
Taiwan where, amazingly, the film has never been screened theatrically.
Winner of the Best Director award at Cannes, the story
encapsulates the various phases of life itself with excrutiating honesty, masterfully
interweaving characters in the manner of Jean Renoir’s carefully observant THE
RULES OF THE GAME (1939), finding rhythms of experience that speak to
recognizable themes in describing the comic and tragic sides of the human
predicament, from birth to first awareness, school, bullying, friendships,
first love, break-ups, marriage, employment, infidelity, mid-life crisis,
illness, and death, while also exploring relationships of children with their
parents, marital partners, and with aging parents. What’s perhaps most surprising is the amount
of humor to be found alongside such a full range of emotional tones experienced
throughout this complex, yet seamlessly evolving drama. Yang uses non-professional actors for the two
most poignant acting performances, the Jian children, Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and
Yang-Yang Jonathan Chang). Yang himself
is seen briefly in the film simulating playing piano at a concert performance
featuring his wife, Kaili Peng, playing the cello. She is credited for the film’s music,
including the classical piano sequences.
A-Di (Chen Hsi-Sheng) and his pregnant wife-to-be (Hsiao Shu-shen) have
delayed their wedding several times so that it can take place on the most
auspicious day of the year, but as luck would have it, after a somewhat raucous
wedding ceremony, things take a turn for the worse. Granny (Tang Ru-Yun) suffers a stroke and
remains in a coma throughout the film, where various family members come to
talk to her at all hours of the day and night, all except 8-year old Yang-Yang,
who has yet to find his own voice, so eloquently expressed at the end of the
film, discovering wisdom beyond his years, as he comes to represent the spirit
and hope of the director himself.
NJ, played by Wu Nien-jen, 1980’s and 90’s screenwriter for
Hou Hsiao-hsien, also co-writer of Yang’s THAT DAY, ON THE BEACH (1983), is A-Di’s
brother in law and heads the Jian family, living in a modern, city apartment
featuring giant windows overlooking the ever flowing lines of traffic, which
are seen constantly moving outside, but are also reflected back against the
glass windows. Struggling to find his
own voice in a rigid society, NJ seems to be the only mature member of his
business associates at a software company, always called the most honest
looking in a floundering company heading for bankruptcy, where immediate cash
from a new investor is required. NJ
leans towards the extremely likeable and intelligent, though often eccentric,
Ota (Issey Ogata – a Japanese comedian), a computer games designer, as they
develop a friendship, which is conveyed when NJ takes Ota, who expresses an
interest in music, to a karaoke bar, and Ota is a big hit, bringing in happy,
paying customers while playing superficial hits like “Sukiyaki,” Sukiyaki (Ue o Muite Arukou)
- Kyu Sakamoto (English Translation ... YouTube (3:09), but when he starts
playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Beethoven-Moonlight Sonata
(Mvt. 1) - YouTube (6:08), this leads to utter silence from the patrons and
the overall mood of the film changes instantly from exteriors to more deeply
probing interiors. Despite his
enthusiastic recommendation, the other more unimaginative business partners opt
for a more flamboyant female CEO, chosen while NJ is still meeting Ota in
Japan, causing embarrassment and humiliation, a merger that proves disastrous, eventually
alienating NJ from the firm.
This company friction, along with the stress from Granny’s
stroke, his wife’s mother, leads to a personal split between NJ and his wife,
Ming-Ming (Elaine Jin, a Yang regular since A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY), who appears
to suffer a nervous breakdown, moving to a Zen mountain retreat. The business opportunity to meet Ota,
however, takes NJ to Japan where he has what amounts to a second chance
opportunity to see a young love Sherry (Ko Su-Yun, aka Kelly Ko) that he
abandoned 30 years earlier, someone he just happened to bump into at the
wedding. The Japanese sequence is
visually one of the most beautiful, contrasting the fluid modernity of an
upscale hotel to the stillness of ancient Buddhist relics, which matches the
changing moods of the two individuals, who are caught in shifting patterns of
darkness and light, beautifully expressed by cinematographer Yang Wei-han. Fond of shooting scenes through windows and
glass doors, Yang also carefully keeps his distance from his characters, but
evokes a genuine tenderness. This
reunion parallels in perfect unison with Ting-Ting’s first date with Fatty (Yu
Pang Chang), both occurring simultaneously as the older couple attempts to
relive their youth, with conversation from the older couple heard while the
young couple is shown onscreen, in a beautifully choreographed expression of dual
similarities and overlapping identities.
As it turns out, NJ makes the same decision he did 30 years earlier,
explaining he wouldn’t need a second chance in life, providing a calm,
intelligent voice of reason and maturity in this film, with Ming-Ming also
discovering that life is not nearly as complicated as it seems.
While both parents are out of town, Ting-Ting, the 16-year
old daughter who has been the go-between delivering messages between the next
door neighbor Lili (Adrian Lin) and her boyfriend Fatty, gets the opportunity
to go out with Fatty herself, eventually leading to a hotel room, Fatty dressed
in black, speechless, with Ting-Ting dressed in white, speechless, until Fatty
runs away, revealing “This feels wrong...”
Fatty subsequently rebukes her on the street, calling her a dreamer,
telling her to leave him alone, just before his troubles escalate off-screen to
murder. Ting-Ting is heartbroken and
spends hours crying silently in her room, tending to a small plant, a school
project, where other student’s plants are already in bloom, but not
Ting-Ting’s, so, for consolation, she talks to Granny, still in a coma, at all
hours of the night, afraid to sleep herself, asking for forgiveness, believing
she is responsible for the fall that led to Granny’s stroke, as she was taking
out the garbage that Ting-Ting forgot.
Ting-Ting is the heart of this film, and is at the center of one of the
most beautifully constructed scenes where she is sleepless and heartbroken,
home alone with Granny, only to discover her plant has finally bloomed, while
in the next room, she hears a voice. In
her mind, Granny is awake making a white origami butterfly and hands it to
Ting-Ting, who lays her head on Granny’s lap while Granny strokes her hair. Ting-Ting tells her, “Why is the world so
different from what we thought it was?” relaxed with the thought that she can
finally sleep now that Granny has forgiven her, but Granny dies while Ting-Ting
finally sleeps.
Little Yang-Yang is the soul and comic relief of this film,
the stand-in and alter ego of the director, borrowing his father’s camera to
take pictures of the backs of people’s heads, then showing them the picture
saying it was something they obviously could not see, verbalizing the director's
approach to filmmaking: “We only understand half of everything because we can
only see what’s in front of us,” and Yang’s camera aptly shows us “the other
side” of every situation, an acute artistic observation which parallels the
slowly revealed revelations in the small sequences of the film, as one rarely
sees the entire picture all at once, instead only bits and pieces are shown a little
bit at a time. Yang-Yang is constantly
picked on and ridiculed by older girls, one, the leader, is a girl swimmer, and
Yang-Yang can be seen sitting in the back at the pool watching her swim. Later, he locks himself in the bathroom
holding his breath while submerging his face underwater in the sink. Finally, he actually jumps in the swimming
pool with his clothes on, apparently still practicing holding his breath. But Yang-Yang seems most content in a scene
right out of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), the planetarium sequence. Here, he is sitting against the wall, arms
folded, in a darkened educational film room showing clouds and weather when his
nemesis, the girl swimmer, opens the door and walks into the light, silhouetted
against the screen as lightning explodes behind her, a brilliant scene
depicting romance in the dark for a young 8-year old boy, scene from Yi
Yi / A One and a Two (2000) - Edward Yang YouTube (1:29). Yang-Yang is perfectly delighted, but also has
the final word in this film. He has
avoided speaking to his comatose Granny throughout the film, leaving that to
other family members, but at the funeral service, it is Yang-Yang who wants to
talk to Granny, reading her a letter he wrote, in what is a tearful, yet
eloquent, final testimony to sweetness, hope, and light, an elegiac affirmation
that will stand as the director’s final testament, as he died from colon cancer
before making another film.
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