Taiwan, Japan, 2000
Directed by Edward Yang
With Wu Nien-Ju (NJ), Elaine Jin (Min-Min), Kelly Lee (Ting-Ting), Jonathan Lee (Yang-Yang), Chen Hsi-Sheng (A-Di), Hsiao Shu-Shen (Xiao-Yan), Tang Ru-Yen (Grandma), Lin Meng-Chin “Adriene” (Lili), Ko Su-Yun (Sherry Chang-Breitner), Chang Yu-Pang (Fatty), Ogata Issei (Mr. Ota)
Titles as an exercise of calligraphy: one stroke is made, this is the character “yi”, a basic element of the Chinese language that could mean “one”; then just below comes another stroke, the same kind of line, the same character. So the film’s title seems to be “one, one”; but if the two characters are read together, from top to bottom as it should be in Chinese, they mean actually “two”. So one and one or two, given that one plus one is two? The visual repetition suggest a double meaning and thus an ambiguous and complex work.
Summed up in broad, rough terms, “Yi yi”’s story is rather straightforward and not so unwieldy. This is the chronicle of a family from the upper-class in Taipei in the late 1990s, bookmarked by ceremonies marking key moments in a family’s life, a wedding and a funeral. The link between the two events is the group’s discreet matriarch, the grandma. She is shot first hosting the guests of the wedding banquet of her youngest child, and only son, A-Di, but feeling unwell she is brought back to her home, which is in fact the apartment where her eldest child, and only daughter, Min-Min, lives with her own family, husband NJ, teenage daughter Ting-Ting, and 8-year old son Yang-Yang. Later the old woman collapses and it turns out it is a stroke; she would spend the rest of the film on her bed unconscious and sick, unable to recover, and she eventually dies, leading to the final, poignant ceremony.
As she lies on her sickbed her relatives grapple with a host of challenges befitting their age, temperament, and situation. Min-Min, a nice but insecure career woman, feels unable to take care of her mum and would go away on a spiritual retreat. NJ, a jaded and dissatisfied manager, attempts to negotiate a contract that would save the company he co-founded. Ting-Ting, a reserved but sensible girl, finds out what a love affair really looks like. Yang-Yang, a natural-born prankster and blunderer, explores the world and tries to give it a sense. Bumbling and buoyant A-Di strives to be a good husband for his wife Xiao-Yan, then a good father for their son, and a good businessman too. The narrative manages to segue from one strand into another in a fluid manner; even as the details grow richer, the editing does not end up delivering a rambling and meandering film but keeps a remarkable degree of clarity, perhaps because the feelings of the characters are so strong and relatable, and perhaps because director Edward Yang takes his time to flush out those characters and situations, seeing to it that they are quietly developed and linked.
But success may come from the fact this 173 minutes film is cleverly built around its peculiar title. It could be argued that all those stories are just one: the struggle to know who one is and what on wants, how one can reach out to another one, learning to be two, and then more.
The wedding banquet lays down a motif in this regard. Unexpectedly, a dark-dressed and angry woman enters a hotel’s hall as others get the room ready for the event; she rushes to meet the grandma and gives her hysterical apologies about her inability to marry A-Di; she is the one he loved before meeting Xiao-Yan and fathering a baby. The incident is echoed later in the evening: coming back from a McDonald’s outlet with his son, NJ runs into a woman he used to know; their talk is awkward and she leaves him to meet other persons; but then she walks back briskly and asks him tough questions about a rendezvous he missed even as she was yearning for him; it is the surprise appearance of a NJ’s business partner that puts the unseemly quarrel to an end while shedding some light on the incident: the lady is Sherry Chang-Breitner, the woman NJ used to love before marrying Min-Min, and now married to a successful American businessman.
Past love affairs come back to haunt the men; more broadly, the characters must face the question whether they have made the right choice in their personal life, and not only as far as love is concerned. How love can be kindled? Could it be rekindled? Could it last? What choices are possible to get happy, as death is lurking around, as much as despair and financial struggle?
The questions ignore differences and any gap between generations. The most emotional moments spring from a complex cross-cutting montage connecting what NJ tells Sherry Chang-Breitner as they walk around the Japanese city where they are making a day trip and the tentative moves of Ting-Ting and Fatty to become lovers. A business travel to Japan prodded NJ to try to bond again with a former lover even as his wife is away while his daughter is seduced by the young man who was the lover of Lili, the daughter of the businesswoman living next door to NJ’s family, but was rejected, it seems. The growing harmony between what the adults remember about their teenage years and what is going on at the same time down the West China Sea, the way NJ’s words seem actually to comment what is his daughter and her date are doing, which is readily followed up by images of the young couple behaving like their elders even before the memories come to the surface, a troubling second-guessing of sort, are a stunning and riveting kind of repetition that examines the raw power of love and the strength of its rituals. It is even more moving as in both cases, the meetings lead nowhere and cause more pain. Sherry does not give a new chance to NJ while Fatty goes back to Lili; worse, Sherry vanishes forever from NJ’s life while Fatty commits a gory crime (killing an English teacher who slept with Lili and her mother).
That struggle to find common ground with another, to reach out to the other sex sweeps the narrative from the very first images, when Yang-Yang is ceaselessly teased by a bunch of girls before getting engrossed by the tough attitudes of a schoolmate, till the bloody coda of Ting-Ting’s affair, and including the mishaps and antics of A-Di or the tragic romances of Lili’s mother. But even as they try to cope with others, individuals must face their own failures, failings, flaws. They must acknowledge that to be one is a challenge too hard to handle, their identity buckling under difficulties and uncertainties. One cannot find a proper place in the composition then: other poignant moments comes when the image dissolve the being, through a camera perfectly placed to capture the night and the shadows, the windows’ reflections and the superimposition of the outside world – suspended and depressing moments engulfing Min-Min as she breaks down and then decides to run away, or Sherry as she wonders in that Japanese city where her father was born what to do with the expectant NJ. The man both love, NJ, even when he is caught in the full swing of business life, is alone, aloof, away, cutting off the noise of the world by playing endlessly his Walkman. But he does not vanish; on the contrary he often stays front and center of the shots as he is left grappling with the nettle.
It is not only sentiments that trouble NJ. Meeting Mr. Ota, a soft-spoken, slightly eccentric, and meditative Japanese computer scientist whose creativity is supposed to breathe new life in NJ’s company, begins a long, unusual conversation driving NJ to reconsider his whole life. It goes beyond reassessing his memories and sentiments about Sherry: when his business partners choose not to sign any contract with Ota’s company, instead striking a deal with a dubious copycat Taiwanese business, NJ is so shocked that he stops showing up at his office. Sherry’s rejection of his offer to start all over again obviously bolsters the growing malaise the narrative has first suggested and then fully developed: that is that NJ has wasted his life. Yet he chooses, in the wake of his mother-in-law’s death, to stick with his family and his company: this leads to a remarkably low-key, tranquil talk with his wife, a calm yet emotional scene where he recognizes that it would be better to carry on with life, as reinventing it is elusive and illusory. One and one: there are two people in the shot and they must deal with the reality, both chosen and imposed; one has only one life and should handle it the best way to be still with others. The long examination of feelings and doubts, relationships and crises ends up on a deeply melancholy note, a resigned but courageous embrace of life as it is, in the shadow of death. An admirable sense of observation and restrained but sincere performances make the narrative and the analysis deeply compelling. Here is a film that delves deep in human conscience.
But this powerful study of individual identities trying to exist and to open up has even more to say and to show than melancholy. It is expressed by that lead character who opens up the story and ends it, that other central character next to NJ, the lovely boy named Yang-Yang. The film arguably shares his view of the world even as the kid learns to cope with family rituals (the wedding) and tragedies (the difficulties to look after a dying grandparent), awakens to the mysteries of the fair sex, and above all tries to find a point of view and a tool to grasp better that odd, hectic world around him. The talk he has with his father about getting half the picture, or not, of what is going on around, his embrace of photography to help folks find what they look like from the back, his simple and heartbreaking speech at his grandma’s funeral, including his promise to get the best pictures of life: these elements grow organically and increasingly make sense. Yang-Yang definitely looks like a surrogate of the director, pointing to the importance of examining people through all the angles, to make the most comprehensive and detailed accounts, and to view the world as freshly and honestly as possible. Youth’s candid attitudes and focused behaviors stand for a celebration of cinema, emphasizing how useful and precious it is to reflect on the human experience. This does make “Yi yi” even greater and more wonderful to watch (but also even more saddening as the film was to be the last feature to be shot by Yang, who died a few years later).