Week #2, 2020: Yi Yi
I’ve already accepted that one day I will be punched. You’ve probably made the same decision yourself, but it’s likely you haven’t realised it yet.
I’m not a confrontational person, and I don’t like to offer my opinion to people I don’t know (on the other hand, friends – and you, reading this – groan under the weight of my views). I don’t Tweet about politics and I usually kick myself later for not intervening when someone is imposing in public. But there’s one situation where I find that I have no problems stepping up to the plate, ready to take my lumps: telling people off in the cinema. An occasional infraction – a swipe to see if the babysitter hasn’t burned the child down, or a time check on an experimental film where one can feel one’s toenails growing – I begrudge no one. Languorous Instagram scrolling or constant chatting, I’m going to give you a polite reminder. If it didn’t alienate me from those around me even more, I would print up a small card to hand out:
Cinema is a house of dreams and revelations, all built upon the sturdy foundation of shared concentration.
Please help contribute to that.
All this means, at some point, probably in the future, I’m going to get punched. I don’t worry about the size of the person or their entourage when I step in. Breaking the contract of cinema happens everywhere and I am an equal opportunities protector of it. I have told people off from the Cannes Palais (at a screening of Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night) and I have tapped someone on the shoulder at Peckhamplex during Scarlett Johannsen’s Ghost in the Shell (both were very gracious). I’ve shushed bizarre, acontextual laughter during Mike Leigh’s Naked (‘a shush like a gunshot’ as my companion told me later), asked teens in Vue to stop Snapchatting the ‘best bits’ of Brightburn and I’ve threatened physical violence on someone who smashed their beer can into my girlfriend’s head during Die Hard (Prince Charles audience, please do better).
I know the cinema is not a church and it isn’t a crypt. And I also know that hushed concentration is a fairly recent innovation in cinema (and in theatre). I celebrate anyone’s genuine reaction if they are engaging with the work itself. I don’t want to paint myself as a vinegary beadle of cinema, enforcing a certain way of behaving, but occasionally you’re confronted with something as simultaneously as forceful yet evanescent as Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (...And a One, And a Two; 2000) and I can’t help myself. I watched the film for the first time in Shoreditch’s Close-Up. Their audience exists at a weird nexus between people who feel they should be watching independent films, yet who are totally frustrated with what that actually means. As a result, you find people needing to intermittently bask in more assured pleasures of the phone screen. It was about ninety minutes into the film’s runtime and ten minutes into the use of phone time that I felt it legitimate to reach across two rows to tap the person. Phone put away, the fragile beauty could continue.
Because Yi Yi isn’t a film with a lot of fireworks. You have to let both individual shots and long arcs slip into you. Yang’s in no rush (it’s nearly 3 hours long), but by the time you get there it’s built to the point where a small boy jumping into a swimming pool seems to contain all that life is. It’s a film in that most curséd of genres: the ‘everything is connected mannnnnnn’ ensemble piece. More often than not (Birdman, Magnolia) it’s less of a hearty meal than a series of half-baked dishes taken away before you’ve had two bites. Most of these films hook up a hose and spackle you with every emotion, hoping you’ll at least be soaked by the end of it. Yi Yi is more like the slow composition of a pointillist painting, every pin point a very clear image of the universe in miniature.
The characters would be a catalogue of typologies if they all weren’t eventually given their due and depth. The spine of the story is that of a Taiwanese businessman trying to land a Japanese software developer, while also wondering whether to connect with a lost love. Meanwhile, his son... but it really doesn’t play out as a series of clearly sequential events and I'd be given you a false account of the film if I pretended that's why it's a pleasure. Its brand of realism extends to not signposting its story. At first, we are hovering over strangers’ lives (initially confusedly), then increasingly comprehendingly, then finally devastatingly intimately. A little boy getting teased by a gaggle of girls, a buffoonish newlywed, a teenage Cyrano… it’s a bit like if The Canterbury Tales were told with the sensitivity of Éric Rohmer.
Too often, ensemble films exist to flatten varied lives and tie a trite knot around them, a lot of undernourished posies with a moral bow holding them together. In Yi Yi, Yang focuses on differences, showing how closely radically different experiences of life are co-existing. There are intersecting details and pleasing contrasts, but these are the same we would notice in life itself, if we could take a moment, breathe and concentrate. Art lets us do that, and I’m sorry if I tell you off if you’re spoiling that.
Other things I've been enjoying...
Daddy Longlegs: As the very good Uncut Gems hits cinemas (also recommended!), I watched this early film by the Safdie Brothers, which takes their grimy, white knuckle stories of terrible choices to a domestic setting.
'The Lotion Song' by Pan Amsterdam.
Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time: colourful co-op game space shooting game that will stress you out in a good way.
Remembering when very worthwhile film Six Degrees of Separation predicted the coming of Cats back in the 1990s.