EDDIE YANG's FILM REVIEW--- YI YI 5/06/08

NOTHING’S CHANGED HERE by Eddie Yang

Yi Yi **** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Edward Yang

I can remember distinctly the fireworks in the air, just before the clock struck midnight, somehow synthesizing with the optimism, fear (of the Y2K bug), and triumph of mankind surviving to another century, the 21st century. Eight years have passed since that marvelous episode, and it would have been inscrutable, then; to expect that America would go through the evil of what happened in 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and would currently be involved in two wars; costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Not just America is being affected by the waking reality that the future did not hold as many promises as expected; through climate change, millions of lives were lost in the ravaging tsunamis of ’05, the citizens of Tibet being shot down by their neighbors, the Chinese; and the ghastly horrors of hunger in Darfur. Alas, it would be fitting that the late Edward Yang’s masterpiece: Yi Yi, came at the year of 2000; given that it unknowingly perceived with such a concise vision the disillusionment which the world is facing, post-2000.
This three hour cinematic marvel is the greatest film, in my opinion, in dealing with modern times; and it has made Edward Yang my personal favorite director. In fact, Yi Yi is the only film I have watched of his (I also have not seen any of his Taiwanese peers film’s: Hou Hsaio Hsien and Tsai-Ming Liang); but it left me with such an understanding of the world at present, that I could not shake off, without describing in detail: this film changed my life. Set in Taipei, it objectively focuses on the Jiang family, made up of: NJ, Min-Min ---his wife, Ting-ting and Yang Yang --- daughter and younger son respectively. But from this intimate portrait of a family comes the greatest millennial statement of the world in which we live in at present; which cannot be said of in words but in the film itself.
To one approaching Edward Yang’s cinema for the first time (like I did last September), one will discern his always gazing camera; still without a shudder, but with a meekness, that people come across when a family member watches his or her own actions, objectively. In interviews, he always wanted to make one way or another an “intimate cinema”; where the artist speaks with his audience like a friend-to-friend conversation. Thus, his camera is relatively kept far aback, and he rarely uses any close-ups in Yi Yi, yet instead of detaching the audience from his empathetic characters, on the contrary it does the opposite and still keeps it objectivity which I find enthralling in post-millennia cinema. For one of the major reasons why artists express through the art of cinema is to expose the world bare-naked with an unblinking eye, I find this in Yi Yi and the works of Kiarostami.
Yang’s style, though, is not so idiosyncratic (not a flaw at all) as other Third World Cinema artist. Think of Kiarostami, Sembene, and the Dardennes. After a few viewings one can see the Western influence (Yang studied in the U.S.) of doing homage to the greats in their films. There is a typical Bressonian shot when the daughter reaches for the hand of the comatose grandmother, and on the mirror in the grandmother’s room lies a postcard picture of Cary Grant. He probably might be the most atypical cinephile working in Third World Cinema.
“Is there anything real anymore?” replies NJ as he is forced by his business partners to underhand a Japanese video game designer. After my fourth viewing, I am astounded by the use of language in Yi Yi. Words have become inadequate, fallible and futile in the cramped corners and open cityscapes of Yi Yi. The family, wanting to bring grandmother out of her coma, make an effort, at the doctor’s suggestion, to speak to her. But, without the chance of a reply, and the lack of anything new to say to grandmother the family decide to let the nurse read the newspapers (a source of lies) to her instead. It is through a misunderstanding that a baby bash is comically destroyed in the middle of the film. And the meetings between NJ and the Japanese video game designer are spoken in English; and one gets the impression that true words or expressions are not being said to the fullest between them; despite the veneration NJ gives to Ota. And in turn, through the weakness of words their relatives: actions similarly have also become foible. Actions cannot be trusted without the support of a true word. Trying to express oneself will always be insufficient, for then again all of one’s doing is uncalculated. The only thing that may be true, as the film proposes, are the back of people’s heads, the back which we cannot see ourselves, which Yang-Yang and director Yang are trying to illustrate to us, what Yang captures is the essence of an individual, which is the fact of what the character’s are, what they are striving to be, and what they cannot be, their existence. What a person cannot put across is shown in Yang’s camera; and it harks back to Jean-Luc Godard’s statement that cinema is “Truth twenty-four times a second”.
Yang’s mistrust on words and actions prophesy the travesty of the infamous “Mission Accomplished” sign during the first few weeks of war with Iraq. How could one put up a sign that was a such a lie that it became the symbol of Republican disillusionment? Were George Bush’s rhetoric in tune with his intentions? Or can one ever synthesize words and actions? This question which Yi Yi posits is remarkable, for subjects this intense, and philosophically precarious, can mostly be found in the great works of literature, particularly Flaubert. It is one of the original gems in Yi Yi: its novelty; that will make this masterpiece, forevermore timeless.
The master directors never want one scene to be great; of course the entirety of a film needs to live up to the greatness started off by that scene. 21st century directors seem to disregard this maxim on movie-making. In contrast, Yi Yi cannot be taken piecemeal. The syntax of the film derives from its effortless sequencing of scenes, it was as if a scene took a minute longer or shorter the film’s effect would be diminished. A scene like NJ’s first meeting with Ota, is a great scene in itself with the humor and sentiment in it, but when watching the film full the scene takes on a melancholic and somber tone. Scenes are built upon other scenes, no scenes stand out from others, thus an unequaled cinematic balance.
Another surprise is Yang’s use of sounds. From the underhanded sentimental piece opening Yi Yi (which expresses the external qualities of the Jiang family in the wedding sequence and not the amazing humanity as the film progresses, it is somehow underhanded and posits that the film is far from being sentimental), the Moonlight Sonata, the bird-call bell at the Jiang’s apartment room, and the sound of distant thunder, Yang uses his soundtrack meticulously and for different functions. There is a scene where NJ’s best friend tells him about his speaking with Sherry on the phone, NJ who met Sherry for the first time in thirty years on an exiting elevator, becomes punctuated as the next scene starts off with the apartment’s elevator’s din when reaching the top floor and out comes Ting-ting. The sound serves as much of a remembrance of scenes past and less of just background noise, implying that Yang was a master of polyphonic aspect to cinema as well as the visual. It is as much a film to be heard as well as being seen.
And yet, I have only scratched the surface of the film’s novelistic narrative. Yang shoots on-location and the spontaneity of towers reflected on café windows attain poignancy as this can happen anywhere and anyplace. The tumult of events that happen to the Jiangs are actually very parallel to our own lives, these are not episodes only related to geographical spectrum they have happened to one of us. This is what makes Yang’s “intimate cinema” successful here, for we are reminded of ourselves in place of the characters. We have been cheated, lied, loved, betrayed like the Jiangs, like humans. With places and characters reminiscent of right here, right now it is not far out that the world the Jiangs live in is our world to and that we have to discover this universe (which there is so much to) and also to rethink the ways of living in the world. If Yang sets out to depict the world in an epic 173 minutes, he accomplished. Yi Yi is rich with all things present. It touches on the idealism, technology, birth, the losing of one’s virginity, death, futility of medical advancements, murder, juvenile delinquency, the media; where Edward Yang puts up a powerful criticism late in the film against its veneration for all things sickly and its pedophilic inquiries into privacy. The film has the wonder of live being lived, and it is all because Edward Yang’s cinema which bravely states a world in disillusionment, our world.
I admit I am more of a cinephile than a film critic, and it shows in this essay since Yi Yi transcends reproach, it touched me so deeply that I selfishly thought I was the only one in the world hit this hard by Edward Yang’s film. Some viewers may be put off by what they view as pessimism, I see it as tragedy. As long as the days keep coming like they are now, with the war going on and sh*t like that Yang’s vision becomes more and more prophetic. The separation and alienation that the family experience reflects the human race as it is now. We are more and more alienated by geographical borders, by religion, and by failed optimism, the one we held on New Year’s Day 2000. For pessimism is just a brash hypothesis of what is to come and tragedy is what is happening now. “Nothing’s changed here,” says NJ in the final act of the film, after all the episodes that had just happened it is a sharp reminder about the things which we cannot see, as the days become alike even with the attempts which we make to change standards. And the more we cannot see, the more separated mankind becomes. It is the purpose of cinema to make us perceive what is happening right now in the world in which we share, the-half truths to become whole, and the late Edward Yang has achieved this. By the end of the film, I realize that no matter how hard this world tries to change it around, it cannot happen without making half-truths whole, and with this 21st century man ends back at square one.

Do I dare disturb the universe? --- T.S. Eliot