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 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
