Yi Yi

Yi Yi – Edward Yang made this film in Taipei in 2000. The title means something like “fundamental units used to count with” – Yi is the first character in the system of Chinese ideographs, a simple dash, and marks of this kind are used to tally numbers. In English, the title is “A One and a Two” – but the film’s Chinese name is untranslatable. Yang’s picture is vast and novelistic, about three hours long, and it has the sweep and breadth of a Russian novel. A domestic chronicle, the movie explores the lives of three generations of an extended family. “NJ” Jian is a middle-aged high-tech entrepreneur. At the wedding of his feckless and superstitious brother, A.D., Jian meets an old flame – a woman that he abandoned thirty years earlier. The wedding is problematic: A.D. has, apparently, got an employee pregnant and has to marry her, causing him to leave his loyal girlfriend of many years. The Jian family matriarch, who opposes the wedding, has a stroke and, after a brief hospital stay, comes home to die in the family’s over-stuffed apartment – they live in a high-rise next to an elevated freeway. She is comatose and, at one time or another, all of the family members unburden themselves to the motionless, silent grandmother. NJ Jian has two children – Ting Ting, a seventeen-year old girl, and Yang Yang, an eight year old boy. NJ Jian’s wife suffers a nervous breakdown and retreats to a Buddhist monastery to recuperate. Jian has business dealings with a Japanese firm, travels to Tokyo, and meets his girlfriend (who is married to an American and lives in Chicago). Surrounding the principal characters are an array of quirky friends, uncles and aunts and other more distant relatives, business associates, former lovers, school teachers and other pople who come in contact with family members. These people are all prosperous and live in a way instantaneously recognizable to the audience – they are the inhabitants of great and glittering cities, more than a little dazed by all the bright and seductive chaos around them; the characters seem to fly back and forth between San Francisco and Seattle and Taipei – all of them speak, more or less, fluent English and everyone has lived for a while in the “States.” (Edward Yang, on the commentary, notes that he spent the first part of his career as a software designer in Seattle; one of his distinguished actresses he imported back to Taiwan from Vancouver where she was living). Yang’s ambition is nothing less than to cram all of life into this film, to make it a chronicle of how an educated, spoiled, if exceedingly hard-working, group of urbanites – people who are, at once, unique and individual and also completely representative – interact and lead their lives. Wang observes his character’s strivings and suffering with detachment but sympathy. Furthermore, he is a considerable visual stylist. Yang Yang, who seems a surrogate for the film maker, conceives the notion that no one can know the whole truth – his epistemology is spatial and geometric; because we can not see behind us, we don’t know what is happening in half the world. Director Yang, then, makes extensive use of reflections in his organization of shots: we see the characters through glass that reflects the landscape behind the camera. Indeed, almost all the pictures in the film feature reflective surfaces which depict, in some way, the vista behind the camera’s point of view. Yang’s interiors are compressed, characters tightly confined between various door frames and walls – interior spaces are sometimes delineated by different color schemes or saturated lighting of different hues. Many of his exterior shots are taken at considerable distance from the characters and show them as small figures in teeming landscapes of cars and commercial buidlings. Yang also makes faint, but perceptible nods towards a kind of pictorial expressionism – the corridor of a hotel where an adulterous tryst is planned has fluorescent lights that flicker in a sinister way, thunder rumbles in the sky, there are torrential downpours, and a ghost hands a girl an origami butterfly. Yang’s perspective seems Tolstoyan, a family chronicle that sprawls across time and space, although he doesn’t have huge battles and the violence in the film is limited to one horrifying incident that takes place off-screen. But there is something Russian about his characters as well – they are passionate, the women are exceedingly fierce and melodramatic, some characters are in the grip of primitive kinds of superstition, and everyone seems ready and willing to commit suicide (albeit unsuccessfully) at the drop of a hat. Yang is a fascinating director and will repay more study.