Content provided in partnership with

Family Circle. - Review - movie review

ArtForum, Oct, 2000 by Kent Jones

KENT JONES ON EDWARD YANG'S YI YI

DESPITE SOME RECENT, heartening development--stateside distribution for two Tsai Ming-liang movies (Vive I'amour [1994] and The Hole [1998]) and Winstar's acquisition of an assortment of Hou Hsiao-hisens (including The Puppetmaster [1993] and Flowers of Shanghai [19981])--Taiwanese cinema is still an unknown quantity in America. It takes time for horizons of cinematic "difficulty" to broaden. Unfortunately, that's the kind of time that few distributors or exhibitors can afford, especially now that the once-flourishing network of independent art houses, the kind that gave an Antonioni semi-popular status, is a distant memory.

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

It's unlikely that any of Taiwan's three greatest filmmakers--Hou, Tsai, and Edward Yang--will ever make it far enough up the ladder to be dismissed as a poseur in the pages of the New Yorker, as Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was in August. They've never seemed remotely interested in making their movies America-friendly by sweetening them with a "universal" appeal. Instead, they have stayed stubbornly rooted in the particulars of their nation and its history: fifty years of Japanese occupation, a split with the mainland, the White Terror of the '50s, unregulated capitalist expansion. Unlike the Nouvelle Vague, which was famously a response to the staid conventions of French commercial filmmaking, the Taiwanese New Wave was not just an aesthetic rebellion but a passionate form of historical and cultural inquiry as well. The Young Turks who made up Taiwan's New Wave arrived in the early '80s, just before forty years of martial law came to an end. They fashioned an aesthetic of what you might call defiant contemplation and posed a question that had never been addressed by their country's blandly commercial, genre-oriented cinema: What does it mean to be Taiwanese? If Taiwanese cinema had a 400 Blows and a Breathless, they were Hou's A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) and City of Sadness (1989), two films that went right to the heart of that elusive, oddly fractured thing called Taiwanese identity.

If Hou has chosen to examine Taiwanese identity largely through the filter of the past, Edward Yang has tended to stay fixed in the present, his 1991 masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day being a notable exception. Yang has often been lazily tagged as a lesser Hou, but if their paths have crossed more than once (they were great friends during the early days of the New Wave but are no more, and Hou starred in one of Yang's finest films, the 1985 Taipei Story), they're nevertheless quite different as artists. Unlike Hou, Yang has always foregrounded his actors (Yang produced his first play in the early '90s and runs an ongoing acting workshop), concocting knotty narrative thickets from which his characters try to disentangle themselves. Where Hou often sets his work in the countryside or in small towns, the action in Yang's films is almost always keyed to the sleek, uninviting surfaces of modern Taipei. There's a singular form of tension that runs through his oeuvre, from the early explorations of urban anomie (Th at Day, on the Beach [1983], The Terrorizer [1986]) to the epic tragedy of A Brighter Summer Day to his nervy mid-'90s experiments in comedy (A Confucian Confusion [1994], Mahjong [1996]). Yang always carefully splits his focus among an array of disappointed characters, and as they drive past Taipei's soulless skyline or measure their dreams against their realities while they sit in their functional modern apartments, a contemporary brand of fatalism starts to sink in: How can I ever get in sync with the rushing world around me? Mahjong may have its shortcomings, but it also contains one of the most piercing moments in '90s cinema--a sudden, surprising cut to the Taipei cityscape at night, accompanied by the sound of a humiliated teenage boy quietly weeping.

Yi Yi (A One and a Two), Yang's newest film--which earned him the Best Director award at Cannes in May--opens this month at Film Forum in New York, following its American premiere at the New York Film Festival. For anyone who knows Yang's earlier work, Yi Yi might seem a trifle becalmed, a grand statement about Life from a middle-aged director who has given up his youthful hubris and anger. But even though the content comes alarmingly close to Movie of the Week material--there are births and deaths, there are disappointments and realizations, there's a wedding at the beginning and a funeral at the end--Yi Yi never loses its delicate balance between common middle-class experience and the individual perceptions of its six principal characters. It's also one of the most sheerly beautiful portraits of a city ever put on film, all the more wondrous for being so apparently offhanded. You may not even notice the exquisite timing of a first kiss on a desolate street corner: As adolescent lovers tentatively embrace, the traffic light overhead goes from green to red, in one long, achingly poignant take.

Family Circle. - Review - movie review

ArtForum, Oct, 2000 by Kent Jones

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts