 |
|
|
|
|
By John Demetry
But, he even forgot its astonishing elongated revenge fantasy sequence when he declared the uniqueness of the fantasy sequence that climaxes one of the narrative strands in Yi Yi. Point being: I think those, like myself, who are fresh to the Yang style will be equally enlightened to a major film artist and to the world he wants to address by Yi Yi. Perhaps, this will encourage distribution of his earlier films, so that audiences can develop their own relationship to and understanding of the Yang oeuvre, which heretofore has been filtered through the critical community. Yi Yi, Yang's first to gain distribution in the United States, reveals a much-needed new way of seeing our modern world. Yang explicitly offers the striking counter-point to what is seen on television news (lurid violence and sex scandals) and in video games (more violence; martial-arts-style) with the mechanisms of urban and capitalistic isolation that play out in daily existence. Jonathan Chang, the youngest member of the Jian family at the center of Yi Yi, takes photographs of the backs of people's heads so that they can see what they can't otherwise see. His teacher, who enjoys his power by being cruel to vulnerable students and scarily close to a female one, mocks the photographs as "avant-garde" art. Some people might as easily dismiss Yang in the same way. Yang shows us what the media-industrial complex doesn't want us to see.
I stress this so people won't be disappointed or even enraged, so people won't miss that the very qualities the entertainment industry's marketing machine wants you to ignore are exactly the elements that make Yi Yi a film worth treasuring. Like Hong Kong maestro Wong Kar-Wai, the Taiwanese Yang achieves Godardian freshness in his presentation of urban living. (However, Yang's vision of city life as inherently dehumanizing, in the two films I've seen, lacks the complicated love-hate vigor that makes Wong and Godard richer artists). Yang's images strike chords that reverberate for anyone who has been lonely in the city. He gets to the way we shut things out. When the father Jiang, played by stone-faced Wu Nien-jen, closes the window blinds on the domestic violence in the neighboring apartment, the window reflects the lights and traffic of the city. His wife seems spiritually drained by the systematic flashes of a xerox machine that turn her face Wicked-Witch green--she doesn't even blink. At night at work looking out of a window, the reflections on which seem to place her in a celestial cityscape. At which point, she decides to go on a spiritual quest that will force her to leave her family in the throes of a meltdown she thinks she alone is suffering. Her brother, so self-absorbed with his financial troubles, can't think of anything to say that might rouse his stroke-inflicted mother, Yang's camera unflinchingly examining his emptiness. That camera then underscores the spiritual void when it leaves his new wife to discover his attempted suicide. It pans across their apartment's décor, culminating with their gaudy, oversized wedding photograph. Wu's daughter (Kelly Lee) watches longingly from the apartment at the new neighbor girl and her boyfriend kissing under a highway. Later, under that same highway, Lee and the boy are talking as two passersby stop to ogle at them (perhaps ogling at the camera filming them?) and then continue on their way. Like the reflections of the city on windows through which entire scenes are often seen, the relationship of figures to city architecture and to other people are major visual motifs. The city also shuts us in. Wu's character works for an ailing computer company that seeks to contract a Japanese designer of popular violent video games. The designer seduces Nien-jen with his idea of a new type of non-violent video game - increasing the stakes but with moral purpose. Nien-jen--and Yang--glimpses the potential humanistic virtues of a benevolent economic system, an alternative to business as usual that depreciates consumer consciousness whatever the human cost. That's what makes Yang's shocking non-diegetic cut to a bloody martial arts video game rise above the usual "Time"-magazine-style editorials blaming (insert your favorite pop scapegoat here) for these outbreaks of school shootings. Yang gets to the economic core of our social schizophrenia, delineating human waste as a necessary casualty of consumer capitalism that then can be transformed into product by a commercial media. Yang's didacticism isn't off-putting or ponderous; he also gets to the human core.
As the older two recall the nervous details of their own first date, we see those moments replayed with the younger two: a sweaty hand reaching out for another, an excruciating moment of inaction in a motel room punctuated by escape. It might be gloriously romantic - and a gesture of the connection that evades the characters. But as the older two's rendezvous devolves into the re-opening of old wounds and a shockingly empty confession ("You were the only one I ever loved"), the foreshadowing of doom for the younger couple has been--with tragic inadequacy!--set. It ties together the other members of the family, as well, in the most troubling web. The parallel sequences are bookended by the eight-year-old Chang's crush on a girl at school, signaled by the awesome moment when she is silhouetted against a projection of a storm with a narrator's voice booming about the beginning of life. The absent mother on a religious pilgrimage leaves her children to fend for themselves. And the comatose grandmother remains ignored--being a constant reminder of mortality, which is, consequently, a sign of the reality that the family--and society-- ignores. Thus the significance of Yang's fantasy sequences in his two films is made terrifyingly clear. In The Terrorists, it's a fantasy that takes dehumanization to its homicidal end. In Yi Yi, however, it's a dream of death defeated and familial comfort achieved. But both lead to the same diagnosis of our ailing modern world where reality--and therefore life--is no longer valued. |
Jonathan Chang stars as Yang-Yang in Edward Yang's Yi Yi
Ke Suyun plays Sherry Chang-Breitner in Yi Yi
© 1997-2002 BEI