Old Yorker

  • Andrei Rublev

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Andrei Tarkovsky (1966)

    Yefim (Nikolay Glazkov) prepares to fly in a hot air balloon that is tethered to the spire of a riverside church.   Despite the efforts of a mob to frustrate his efforts, the balloon takes to the air.  ‘I’m flying!’ declares the euphoric pilot – and we see the world from his astonished point of view:  the river, the church and the people far below.  One screen minute later, the balloon is in free fall to a crash landing and Yefim isn’t seen again, dead or alive, in the course of Andrei Rublev but the impression made by this brief prologue persists throughout Andrei Tarkovsky’s long film (183 minutes).  Yefim is the first of several creatively enterprising figures to feature in the narrative, most notably the title character.  The short-lived aerial sequence anticipates Tarkovsky’s repeated use of God’s-eye-view shots.  At the same time, Yefim’s reaction to the unprecedented, dizzying experience of being airborne establishes instantly the pastness of the world that the film recreates.

    In Ingmar Bergman’s opinion, Tarkovsky was, among film-makers, ‘the greatest of them all’.  Andrei Rublev is occasionally boring (the philosophical-theological discourse, of which there’s plenty, is stubbornly inert); often appalling in its depiction of human violence (and in the cruel treatment of animals involved in the filming); but chiefly awe-inspiring.  As a realisation of the middle ages, it stands comparison with Bergman’s medieval masterpieces, The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960), even though it lacks their concentrated virtuosity (its running time is almost exactly that of the two Bergmans put together) and it’s consciously epic in ways that The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring don’t try to be.  The Russian Orthodox monk and icon painter Andrei Rublev was born between 1360 and 1370 and died between 1427 and 1430 (says Wikipedia).  Tarkovsky’s film comprises, in addition to the prologue and an epilogue, eight episodes, and the first seven of them span just twelve years (1400-1412).  The priority is evidently to dramatise, as much as Rublev’s life, the brutally turbulent times in which it was lived.  That, at least, is the impression made by the combined impact and length of the sixth episode, ‘The Raid’, in which the city of Vladimir, where Andrei (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and fellow painter Daniil (Nikolai Grinko) have been working on the decoration of a church, is invaded by Tartar horsemen, in cahoots with the perfidious younger brother of the absent Grand Duke who commissioned the work on the church.  (The brothers are played by the same actor, Yuri Nazarov.)   As you watch, the sustained carnage of ‘The Raid’ eclipses much of what’s gone before.  It was only after the film was over that I could properly recall earlier parts of the story.

    Thank goodness I could because graphic maiming, torture and killing are far from the only amazing things in Andrei Rublev.   A couple of examples of good things that aren’t appalling … The first episode is rightly named for its standout character – ‘The Jester’.   Andrei, Daniil and their colleague Kirill (Ivan Lapikov) have recently left the Andronikov Monastery in Moscow to seek work as painters.  Walking through countryside, they’re caught in heavy rain and shelter in a barn where a group of locals is enjoying the performance of a skomorokh.  Brilliantly played by Ronan Bykov, this little man is like a kind of medieval rapper – and nothing like the traditional English cap-and-bells figure, either in his derelict appearance or in the force of his bitter, sometimes obscene invective, which satirises the powers-that-be both religious and secular.  (The scene does turn appalling when soldiers arrive at the barn, drag the jester outside, break his stringed musical instrument, hit his head against a tree and carry him off, unconscious.  He reappears briefly, and to great effect, in the last of the eight episodes.)  Pausing briefly in his work at the Grand Duke’s mansion, Andrei is suddenly on the receiving end of a spray of white liquid.  It’s not paint but milk, thrown by a little blonde-haired child (the Grand Duke’s daughter?).  Andrei is amused; he laughs and jokes along with the little girl.  This is tonally so unusual in the film, and the child and Andrei’s reaction to her are so beautiful, that the moment has a paradisal quality, all the more potent for being unstressed.

    As suggested above, Andrei Rublev isn’t on screen continuously.  It’s no surprise that he’s not a major player in ‘The Raid’, even though he does, in the course of it, kill a soldier in order to save a holy-fool young woman (Irma Raush) from rape.  Andrei thereafter takes a vow of silence, to atone for killing the man, and returns to his Moscow monastery, where he no longer paints.  In terms of screen time, he doesn’t feature strongly either in Tarkovsky’s final episode, ‘The Bell’, which takes place in 1423-24, some fifteen years after the Tartar raid on Vladimir and eleven years after the immediately following ‘Silence’ episode. Yet Anatoly Solonitsyn is such a distinctive and, whether speaking or silent, an eloquent presence that Andrei remains the central consciousness of the film even when he’s not the evident protagonist.  Despite a superficial resemblance to Dennis Hopper that’s a bit distracting at the start, Solonitsyn soon becomes, in screen terms, his own man.  His handsome, persistently troubled, potentially noble face does more than hold the camera.  It registers so strongly that, when we’re not seeing it, we imagine it observing what we are seeing.

    The main character in ‘The Bell’ is a youth called Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev), the son of a master maker of bells.  When the Grand Duke’s men come looking for the latter to cast a great bronze bell, Boriska explains that his father, like most local residents, has died from the plague that has recently ravaged the community.  Boriska also claims, untruthfully, that his father passed on to him, and to him alone, in-depth knowledge of his craft.  Sceptical at first, the Grand Duke’s men take Boriska at his word and charge him to construct the bell.  In the course of what proves a lengthy and expensive project, Boriska’s dogmatic decision-making, informed mostly by instinct, leads to repeated fallings out with his late father’s workers.  At this point, three important characters return to the scene – Andrei, the jester and Kirill.  Recognising Andrei, the jester accuses him:  it was Andrei, he claims, who reported him to the soldiers and so brought about his abduction from the barn and consigned him to miserable years of imprisonment.  While Andrei maintains his silence in the face of these accusations, Kirill admits that it was he who reported the skomorokh to the soldiers.  Kirill also urges Andrei not to waste his God-given talent for painting.  As work on the bell nears completion, Boriska’s surface self-confidence is replaced by increasing apprehension; he tries, unsuccessfully, to fade into the background.  At the climax to the grand, highly suspenseful ceremony to inaugurate the bell, it rings perfectly and Boriska collapses, sobbing in relief.  Andrei breaks his vow of silence to comfort Boriska, telling him that they will work together – ‘You’ll cast bells, I’ll paint icons’.

    Each one of the main players in ‘The Bell’ matters in Tarkovsky’s scheme of creativity – including Kirill, because he isn’t a naturally gifted painter, for all that he’s ambitious and smart, and finally admits as much.  The jester, like Yefim, more than earns his place in the film’s gallery of daring, subversive talents that hidebound minds find threatening.  Boriska’s brass-necked bravado forces him to prove he’s capable of becoming what he lies about being.  Kirill’s words and Boriska’s deeds lead Andrei to recover his voice and return to his artistic vocation.  (This final episode brings to mind the message of W B Yeats’s Lapis Lazuli: ‘All things fall and are built again/And those that build them again are gay.’)  Tarkovsky’s epilogue – the only part of the film in colour rather than black and white – comprises some of the fruits of Andrei’s final resolve, as the camera moves over Rublev paintings of religious scenes.  The images are accompanied by suitably otherworldly music, composed by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov.

    The bell’s colossal size expresses the immensity of the effort involved in constructing it, and the huge sound that it makes the magnitude of the achievement it represents.  Whether or not he consciously intended it, these things also (the word has to be) chime with what Tarkovsky undertook and accomplished in Andrei Rublev.  The visual ambition and scale of Vadim Yusov’s cinematography, decades before CGI, is confounding.  Over the course of the film, you ask yourself, again and again, How on earth did they do that?  The forces determined to thwart creative enterprise in the story told by Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky, who shared the screenplay credit, also had a correlative in reality, in the form of Soviet censorship.  Tarkovsky’s biography of an icon painter was considered a work of iconoclasm:  in the words of the Central Committee of the Communist Party’s review, ‘the film’s ideological erroneousness is not open to doubt’.  Its release was delayed by several years but in December 1971 Andrei Rublev eventually opened in Moscow theatres, to sellout audiences.

    29 January 2023

  • Yi Yi

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Edward Yang (2000)

    It was sometimes hard not to yawn at Sight and Sound’s hyping, all through 2022, of its latest decennial poll.  The results, finally announced on 1st December, contain plenty of reasons to tut, or worse.  There are positives, though.  As in the previous poll, the Taiwanese director Edward Yang (1947-2007) has two films in the foothills of the top 100 – A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Yi Yi.  I didn’t know Yang’s work at all.  After reading a brief synopsis in the S&S roll of honour, I decided to see Yi Yi, the last of his seven features.  It’s so good that I came out of BFI feeling grateful to the poll or, at least, to voters who secured Yi Yi‘s position in it.

    What’s the film about?  A middle-class nuclear family in contemporary Taipei – NJ Jian (Nianzhen Wu), his wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin), their teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), their eight-year-old son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) – and people that particularly matter to them.  The set-up is unremarkable, the ensuing drama (Yang also wrote the screenplay) anything but.  It would be easy to summarise the plot and make Yi Yi sound soapy.  It’s harder to convey why it’s much more than that.

    A long, strong wedding episode kicking off a three-hour film can be a sign of plenty more good things to come and Yi Yi follows the example of The Godfather (1972) and The Deer Hunter (1978).  Yang uses the wedding reception of Min-Min’s brother, A-Di (Xisheng Chen), and his pregnant bride, Xiao Yan (Shushen Xiao), to introduce most of his main characters.  Two pivotal events occur at or on the margins of the reception.  Yang-Yang is being teased by a gaggle of girls and not enjoying the wedding food either:  he demands to be taken to a nearby McDonald’s.  NJ, a born peacemaker, sneaks his son out briefly.  When they return to the hotel where the reception’s being held, NJ bumps into an old flame, Sherry (Suyun Ke), now married to an American and living in Chicago but back in Taipei on a visit.  Feeling unwell, Min-Min’s mother (Ruyun Tang), who lives with the family, is taken home early from the reception by NJ, accompanied by Ting-Ting.  He then returns once more to the wedding celebrations.  At the Jians’ apartment block, the old lady decides to put out the rubbish, which Ting-Ting was meant to see to, and collapses in the effort.  She has suffered a major stroke that puts her in a coma.

    The combination of these two events dictates much of the ensuing narrative.  A doctor encourages the Jians to talk each day to their unconscious relative but Min-Min soon finds the routine intolerably depressing.  She leaves home temporarily for a Buddhist retreat in the mountains and it’s while she’s away that NJ spends time again with Sherry, who is still distressed that, decades ago, he broke things off without explanation.  Their reunion is enabled also by NJ’s work.  He’s an engineering executive in a business that’s struggling financially; his boss (Michael Tao) is desperately courting a wealthy Japanese client, Mr Ota (Issei Ogata).  Although NJ is reluctant to do as the boss instructs and schmooze with Ota over dinner and drinks, the two men get on well and NJ is subsequently sent to Tokyo to pursue discussions with Ota.  Sherry travels from Chicago to meet up with NJ there.  Back in Taipei, Ting-Ting makes friends with a new neighbour, Lili (Adrian Lin).  After Lili and her boyfriend, Fatty (Yupang Chang), break up, he starts sending letters to her via Ting-Ting but it’s not long before Fatty (a nickname that’s misleading for the Anglophone audience) is telling the go-between he’s attracted to her.  Ting-Ting and Fatty go on a date then back to a hotel room together.  Before they get much further, Fatty has second thoughts, declaring ‘It’s not right’ and making an exit.  Soon after that, Ting-Ting sees him with Lili again.

    Precociously bright, quirky Yang-Yang, meanwhile, is pursuing his own sentimental (and existential) education.  Yang-Yang doesn’t talk to his comatose grandmother because he doesn’t think she can hear him.  Fascinated by the idea that no one can see themselves from behind, he starts taking photographs of the backs of heads.  He’s fascinated too by a slightly older girl, who’s a keen swimmer and makes fun of him because he can’t swim.  So Yang-Yang teaches himself.   Yang may be a common name but it’s surely significant that it’s one shared by this little boy and the film’s writer-director.  Yang-Yang, like his creator, uses a camera as a means of making sense of the world.  A dialogue between him and NJ makes very clear that the unseeable occiput serves as a metaphor:  half-truths and incomplete understanding of other people and oneself are a central theme of Yi Yi.  Edward Yang doesn’t labour the idea, though, and Jonathan Chang, whom he directs very skilfully, is so vividly engaging that there’s no danger he’ll be upstaged by symbolism.

    In a story full of absorbing interactions, unexpected or otherwise, there’s strikingly little contact between Ting-Tang and Yang-Yang – presumably a consequence of the age-plus-gender difference between sister and brother.  The film abounds in echoes and contrasts, and repeatedly blurs the line between melodramatic comedy and tragedy.  At the wedding reception, Min-Min’s mother has to listen to the noisy self-pity of Yun-Yun (Xinyi Zeng), A-Di’s ex-girlfriend, who tells her she’s the one that ought to have been marrying the old lady’s son.  It may or may not be a coincidence that, soon after this outburst, the groom’s mother starts feeling ill.  (This it-should-have-been-me lament also anticipates Sherry’s feelings for NJ and his for her, although they’re less shrilly articulated than Yun-Yun’s.)  After losing money on an investment, A-Di is kicked out by his new wife and returns to Yun-Yun for financial help and a bed to sleep in.  Xiao Yan lets him return for the birth of their baby but the marital ceasefire ends abruptly when Yun-Yun gatecrashes a gathering to celebrate the new arrival.  A-Di and Xiao Yen reconcile again only after she returns home to find him unconscious – she fears dead – after a gas leak in their apartment.

    Two schoolteachers feature – both moral grotesques but, at first, figures of fun.  A class teacher (Liangzuo Liu), who enjoys the admiration of his girl pupils, is enraged by Yang-Yang’s eccentric candour and takes every opportunity to humiliate him.  In the closest this often funny film comes to slapstick humour, Yang-Yang chucks a balloon filled with water from a great height:  the missile is aimed at two girls but hits the blustering teacher.  Lili’s English teacher (Linhua Chen) has sex with her and then with Lili’s mother (Shuyuan Xu).  Lili, when she finds them in flagrante delicto, is distressed but the promiscuous teacher is presented as despicably ridiculous.  Fatty’s drama queen tendencies, which seem to reach a peak when he rejects Ting-Ting and returns to Lili, are similarly laughable.  These two philanderers, and Fatty’s self-dramatising, are suddenly made to look very different when he’s arrested for killing the English teacher.

    Nianzhen Wu’s NJ is, as well as the centre of Yang’s narrative, the epitome of the film – an ordinary-looking man who richly repays closer attention.  Wu was at the time, and presumably still is, better known in Taiwan as a screenwriter than as an actor (his IMDb entry includes seventeen acting and seventy writing credits) but he’s highly and naturally expressive in front of the camera.   The regrets and anxieties of dependable, introverted NJ are less conspicuous than those of his sociable, unsubtle brother-in-law but no less keenly felt than A-Di’s.  When his relationship with Sherry founders for a second time and Min-Min returns home, NJ talks somewhat cryptically to his wife about what’s happened in her absence.  It has made him realise, he says, that he has everything he wants in life, that a second chance would be surplus to his requirements.  It’s typical of the film’s ambiguous complexity, and of Nianzhen Wu’s fine performance, that NJ, when he makes this speech, seems at the same time to believe what he’s saying and to be trying to convince himself it’s true.

    At the wedding reception, Min-Min registers as very together but her mother’s illness changes that.  When Min Min tells NJ she can’t go on telling her mother ‘the same things every day – I have so little.  How can it be so little?’, Elaine Jin does some of the most convincing screen weeping this viewer’s seen in a long time.  Her husband’s thoughtful response is that talking to someone in a coma is like praying:  you’re not sure either that you’re being sincere or that the other party is listening.  Edward Yang shows a further potential of the monologues at the old woman’s bedside (especially those of Ting-Ting, who continues to feel guilty about leaving her grandmother to carry out the trash):  confiding in someone comatose is a way of unburdening yourself in the virtual certainty that what you say won’t be passed on to others.  Even when Ting-Ting, emotionally exhausted, falls asleep and imagines that her grandmother has regained consciousness, the latter remains speechless as she sits caressing Ting-Ting’s hair to calm her.  Although it’s predictable that Ting-Ting wakes from the dream to find that her grandmother has died, this doesn’t feel like a weakness in the storytelling.

    Two puzzles.  The film is sometimes referred to by its English rather than its Chinese title, A One and a Two (IMDb actually lists it as Yi Yi: A One and a Two).  I don’t understand either what the English phrase means in this context or Wikipedia’s ‘explanation’:  ‘The title in Chinese means “one by one” (meaning “one after another”).   When written in vertical alignment, the two strokes resemble the character for “two” …’.  When more than a couple of people are on screen together Yang nearly always avoids close-ups.  It’s a refreshing change to see a director allow the viewer to take in several characters at once and decide independently what to notice, which may well include the characters’ relation to their physical environment.  At the grandmother’s funeral, however, the camera is so far from the mourners that I couldn’t make out which one of them broke down in loud sobs.  I can only guess it was A-Di.

    Yi Yi‘s music is credited to Kaili Peng (who was married to Yang).  I assume this means that, as well as playing Bach and Beethoven piano and cello pieces (so says Wikipedia), Peng wrote the original music for the film.  The score is conventional and generic at the start but so sparingly used that, when it returns, it seems to mean more.  Yi Yi, having started with a wedding, ends with a funeral at which a child has the film’s last words.  Now that his grandmother is dead, Yang-Yang is less concerned about her not hearing him.  He recites a poem in front of her shrine then addresses her.  He says he misses her:

    ‘… especially when I see my newborn cousin who still doesn’t have a name.  He reminds me that you always said you felt old.  I want to tell him that I feel I’m old, too.’

    22 January 2023

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