"People adore fences, but Nature doesn't give a hoot. Solitude is a human presumption." - Barbara Kingslover
Like all of Edward Yang's pictures, "Yi Yi" is set in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Framed by a wedding and a funeral, and so union and separation, the film charts the trials and tribulations of at least four generations of Taiwanese men, women and children. Translated into English, Yang's title means "one one", or "each one".
The film itself is preoccupied with "ones". Though Yang immerses us in a tapestry of relationships, each of his characters remain irrevocably alone. There's a dying grandmother, two schoolgirls, several men, women, husbands, wives, co-workers, past lovers...a smörgåsbord of interpersonal but impersonal drama. Everyone's oblivious to everyone else, forever trapped in their own private boxes.
"We haven't yet surpassed fighting and killing games because we haven't fully understood ourselves," a character says. "Yi Yi" itself posits human suffering as a failure of both perception and self-reflexivity. Our characters don't know what they want, why they hurt, act, how others see them or why and how others feel. Rectifying this is a character called Yang Yang, a precious eight year old who delights in taking photographs of "hidden" and "invisible things", including the backs of the heads of others. "You can't see it," he says, "I'm helping you."
It is through Yang Yang that Edward Yang develops the film's autobiographical subplot. He turns the film's eight year old into a miniature version of himself, a budding sage who explores the catacombs of Taiwan and stumbles upon profundities which everyone else ignores. "Can we only know half the truth?" the kid asks, and resolves to become a photographer, determined to push the limits of human perspective.
More than Yang's previous films – most of which are essentially Antonioni with rice - "Yi Yi" portrays contemporary capitalism as alienating, isolating and conducive of depression. "I'm never happy," one character mourns. "How can we be happy when we don't love what we do?" comes the reply. The World Health Organisation itself estimates that depression will be the second largest contributor to global death/disease by 2020, but such rates in urban Japan and China are already exorbitantly high; the very conditions capitalism requires negatively impacts children and workers.
But if Antonioni is noxious and suffocating, "Yi Yi" portrays a more beautiful form of alienation. Yang's film is filled with boxes, squares, human beings immaculately framed by walls, windows, doorways or lost in the aural cocoons afforded by headphones. Lovers meet under bridges, humans pass one another in hallways, brush anonymous shoulders in elevators or hang suspended above highways in their pressure-cooker apartments. Yang's urban spaces are harsh, but beautiful, with sprinkles of green and patches of warm blacks and red. With Yang, characters and environment seem inseparable. Often his static shots of places and spaces seem more interesting, and thrilling, than the human beings who mope before them. Elsewhere his images evoke Edward Hopper ("Night on the El Train", "The Wine Shop", "Automat", "Night Windows", "House at Dusk", "New York Movie"), with their obsessions with layered windows and frames within frames.
Like Robert Altman's "Short Cuts", Yang has scenes bleed into or foreshadow others. Unlike Altman, these connections are obvious: the laughter of one sequence morphs into the cries heard in the next, a husband's recounting of his romantic past is inter-cut with his daughter's baby steps into first love, and the sound of a thunderstorm on a school presentation becomes the literal raindrops which assault a street corner.
"Overfeeding may not improve growth. It may hamper reproductive drives. Some of you can't bloom," a teacher says, a speech with speaks to the ills of Yang's cast, but also bleeds into the very next sequence. Here a child is gestating, the baby's ultrasound image echoing the teacher's words: "It begins to acquire signs of human life."
"Yi Yi" ends with the death of a grandmother, a moment of mysticism borrowed from Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu Monogatari". The woman's death, which corresponds to the birth of the aforementioned child, shatters everyone, but also, for the first time in the film, unifies Yang's cast in their suffering. Private, differing anguishes then become one singular anguish, at which point Yang Yang delivers a little metaphorical monologue in which he urges people to "listen", "discover where others went", "tell everyone" and "bring others to visit". The film then ends on a note of irony. If opening scenes portray alienation amidst a social gathering, Yang's climax portrays hugs and kisses at an event in which humans are brought to be torn apart. Twos become ones, divisions become erased, though only in a fanciful sense. Taipei is Taipei and nothing's changed. "I feel old," Yang Yang says. Edward Yang died of cancer in 2007. "Yi Yi" was his last picture.
8.5/10 – Overlong but exquisitely shot. See "The Devil Probably" and "La Chinoise".
Like all of Edward Yang's pictures, "Yi Yi" is set in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Framed by a wedding and a funeral, and so union and separation, the film charts the trials and tribulations of at least four generations of Taiwanese men, women and children. Translated into English, Yang's title means "one one", or "each one".
The film itself is preoccupied with "ones". Though Yang immerses us in a tapestry of relationships, each of his characters remain irrevocably alone. There's a dying grandmother, two schoolgirls, several men, women, husbands, wives, co-workers, past lovers...a smörgåsbord of interpersonal but impersonal drama. Everyone's oblivious to everyone else, forever trapped in their own private boxes.
"We haven't yet surpassed fighting and killing games because we haven't fully understood ourselves," a character says. "Yi Yi" itself posits human suffering as a failure of both perception and self-reflexivity. Our characters don't know what they want, why they hurt, act, how others see them or why and how others feel. Rectifying this is a character called Yang Yang, a precious eight year old who delights in taking photographs of "hidden" and "invisible things", including the backs of the heads of others. "You can't see it," he says, "I'm helping you."
It is through Yang Yang that Edward Yang develops the film's autobiographical subplot. He turns the film's eight year old into a miniature version of himself, a budding sage who explores the catacombs of Taiwan and stumbles upon profundities which everyone else ignores. "Can we only know half the truth?" the kid asks, and resolves to become a photographer, determined to push the limits of human perspective.
More than Yang's previous films – most of which are essentially Antonioni with rice - "Yi Yi" portrays contemporary capitalism as alienating, isolating and conducive of depression. "I'm never happy," one character mourns. "How can we be happy when we don't love what we do?" comes the reply. The World Health Organisation itself estimates that depression will be the second largest contributor to global death/disease by 2020, but such rates in urban Japan and China are already exorbitantly high; the very conditions capitalism requires negatively impacts children and workers.
But if Antonioni is noxious and suffocating, "Yi Yi" portrays a more beautiful form of alienation. Yang's film is filled with boxes, squares, human beings immaculately framed by walls, windows, doorways or lost in the aural cocoons afforded by headphones. Lovers meet under bridges, humans pass one another in hallways, brush anonymous shoulders in elevators or hang suspended above highways in their pressure-cooker apartments. Yang's urban spaces are harsh, but beautiful, with sprinkles of green and patches of warm blacks and red. With Yang, characters and environment seem inseparable. Often his static shots of places and spaces seem more interesting, and thrilling, than the human beings who mope before them. Elsewhere his images evoke Edward Hopper ("Night on the El Train", "The Wine Shop", "Automat", "Night Windows", "House at Dusk", "New York Movie"), with their obsessions with layered windows and frames within frames.
Like Robert Altman's "Short Cuts", Yang has scenes bleed into or foreshadow others. Unlike Altman, these connections are obvious: the laughter of one sequence morphs into the cries heard in the next, a husband's recounting of his romantic past is inter-cut with his daughter's baby steps into first love, and the sound of a thunderstorm on a school presentation becomes the literal raindrops which assault a street corner.
"Overfeeding may not improve growth. It may hamper reproductive drives. Some of you can't bloom," a teacher says, a speech with speaks to the ills of Yang's cast, but also bleeds into the very next sequence. Here a child is gestating, the baby's ultrasound image echoing the teacher's words: "It begins to acquire signs of human life."
"Yi Yi" ends with the death of a grandmother, a moment of mysticism borrowed from Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu Monogatari". The woman's death, which corresponds to the birth of the aforementioned child, shatters everyone, but also, for the first time in the film, unifies Yang's cast in their suffering. Private, differing anguishes then become one singular anguish, at which point Yang Yang delivers a little metaphorical monologue in which he urges people to "listen", "discover where others went", "tell everyone" and "bring others to visit". The film then ends on a note of irony. If opening scenes portray alienation amidst a social gathering, Yang's climax portrays hugs and kisses at an event in which humans are brought to be torn apart. Twos become ones, divisions become erased, though only in a fanciful sense. Taipei is Taipei and nothing's changed. "I feel old," Yang Yang says. Edward Yang died of cancer in 2007. "Yi Yi" was his last picture.
8.5/10 – Overlong but exquisitely shot. See "The Devil Probably" and "La Chinoise".