- I would like to use this document to dedicate this document to "Yiyi" and its present, future and past life
articles/caesarphoenix
(I once sent a film review about "Yiyi", and later I was invited to re-edit it, so I deleted it . Today I remembered to post the rewritten here, and referenced some other comments on "Yiyi" when rewriting)
"Life is much harder than movies." This is a famous line in "Paradise Cinema".
But there are always some movies that truly express our lives. They shake our hearts, wake us up from our insensitive life, and diffuse the tragedy of life itself in plain narratives. They are not deliberately sensational, but attractive Philosophy, makes me sad. Ozu Yasujiro's "Tokyo Story" is a typical representative, of course, Yang Dechang's "One One" is undoubtedly such a leader. The difference from the former is that it looks better.
When I just watched this movie, I wanted to recommend it to my friends and wrote this sentence: From this movie, I saw the present, future and past life of me or the people I am familiar with.
Everyday ordinary and trivial, those chaotic emotions that people from childhood to the elderly will experience, are recorded by the camera lens, interspersed and played, suddenly no longer ordinary, and even start to produce a warm and sour feeling in your chest until it is wet your eyes.
You start to care about those figures swaying on the screen, you guess some but not all. You've read it all but you can't extricate yourself from it for a long time.
In "Guling Street Teenage Murder Case", HONEY talks about life in Tainan, but among the countless martial arts he has read, the only thing he remembers is "War and Peace" ("There is an old bag, everyone thinks he eats it Wrong medicine. I remember... It seems that people in the whole city turned their heads and set fires everywhere. He was going to block Napoleon by himself. Later, it was still cut by a sliver - "War and Peace". Other martial arts books I don’t even remember the name, only this one.”). Yang Dechang replaced the novelist's pen with a camera. The sound and light film contains abundant emotions like life itself. I think that, like Tolstoy's classic literary narrative, Yang Dechang's film will also be immortal.
When the movie exceeds two and a half hours, but it is still full of flesh and blood and the plot is moving, it has a certain epic in a sense, whether it is the 237-minute "Guling Street Teenage Murder" or the 173-minute "One Piece" One", three or four hours of time were filled to the brim, and human nature, life, love, ideals, society, history, institutions, and even feelings were all written incisively and vividly at some level. So I chose a few sections, let's take a peek or a shallow view.
1. Is it a midlife crisis or a perpetual confusion in life?
NJ, played by Wu Nianzhen, is my favorite in the whole film. He is a typical Taiwanese middle-class, a good guy in the company. He is in the mundane world without losing his heart. A little more, and I don't care so much about money."
If Jian Yangyang's existence has added another perspective to the observation and care of life, and made the whole film alive, then NJ's "boring" and "truth" are the most important narrative strategies of "Yiyi".
In family life and company work, NJ is undoubtedly tolerant and modest, kind to others, and even sometimes seems dull, which is particularly prominent at the wedding of Uncle and Brother at the beginning of the movie. This kind of forbearance is not only a compromise of life, but also a responsibility for a middle-aged man (especially a middle-aged man with a wife and two children, who has organized a family and needs to take responsibility for his social relations).
When such a "boring" person talks about life sincerely, it is particularly moving, even "thrilling". I really like the passages where NJ went to Japan to talk business with Daejeon and date with his first love, Ari. It seems that the innocence and beauty in life are all re-displayed in front of you: old men meet each other, talk with each other, touch the heart, like a confidant. Appearance; NJ and the first love walked on the stairs and the road holding hands according to the old appearance in memory, with warm and sweet smiles. NJ excitedly explained to Ari why he left without saying goodbye, the pain of the person he loves forcing him to do things he doesn't want to do, and now he lives according to the path that Ari and his family chose for him, but the people who stay by his side are not Not her. They kept walking, smiling, talking, staying, walking on a road that seemed to have no end.
But this kind of beauty is only in the mirror after all. You hear NJ screaming "I've never loved another person" to Ari outside the door, you can't tell if this sentence is true or false, at this moment you are only questioning yourself.
The business with Daejeon finally blew up because of the company's speculation, and NJ roared at Taipei on the other end of the phone: "You can pretend to be sincere, you can pretend to be honest, you can pretend to make friends, you can pretend to do business, then what else is true in this world. What?" What kind of anger and helplessness was that. All the "truths" are becoming more and more false in the polishing of the years, so is forbearance a connivance? Time goes by, and years are gone. Where can I find the sincerity and sincerity of the past?
Ari's subsequent departure without saying goodbye made NJ really sad, but he finally realized something. He cleared his mind and returned to Taipei to meet his wife Minmin, who came back from meditation on the mountain. NJ said, "I have a chance when you are not here. I've been there for a while when I was young. I thought that if I lived again, maybe there would be something different. The result... It's still the same, no difference. I just suddenly felt that if I live again, it seems... It's really not like that. It's necessary, it's really not necessary."
Similar to NJ, his wife Minmin's monotonous homework, back-and-forth life in the modern city, enduring pressure, taking responsibility, and being insensitive because of habit, but after her mother-in-law (Minmin's mother) fell into a coma During the daily routine speeches, Minmin found that she was repeating every day, she had only so little, so little, she felt that she was living like a fool, crying, unable to find the meaning of life. So she went up the mountain to seek spiritual solace from religion, but when she met her husband who came back from Japan after going down the mountain, she said that going up the mountain was just a change of position, and the things she did every day were the same, no different.
Linking NJ's and Minmin's words together is: We only have so little, so little, if we live again, there is really no need for that, it's no different.
2. Tingting's love, fat man's murder, hurt from the adult world
Tingting's love for Fatty is as pure and beautiful as Ari and NJ's love when they were young. This is Tingting's first love. She leads Fatty's hand across the road and stands behind Fatty's bicycle. She doesn't care that Fatty used to be Lily. boyfriend. Without Lily's mom and English teacher, this is just a teenage love story, or at best a love triangle. But the "teacher is also a human" behavior by the English teacher and Lily's mother deeply stimulated Lily, and eventually caused the fat man to kill the English teacher. Just like Xiao Si's love for Xiao Ming in "Guling Street Teenage Murder Incident", Fatty's love for Lily makes him willing to do everything for her. the uncertainty of life. Fatty still liked Tingting very much, so when he was waiting downstairs for the English teacher to kill her, he told Tingting to go away and said he never wanted to see her again.
Those hidden feelings and heart palpitations when she was young are difficult to express in words, Lily regained Fatty from Tingting and let him kill the English teacher, and Xiaosi didn't want others to look down on Xiaoming (actually, his heart was strong. Hope to keep Xiao Ming's good image) and the process of killing Xiao Ming is somewhat similar. In Yang Dechang's films, boys always break their hearts for girls. The intricate relationship between Adi's uncle and the two women, Lily's mother's affair with her English teacher, will undoubtedly have a great impact on Tingting, Lily and other boys and girls' views on marriage, love and life.
Harm from the adult world can even be directly inflicted on younger children, as reflected in Yangyang's experience at school: the ambiguous relationship between the director and the "little wife", the "misreading" of balloons and condoms, the irony of performance art . This series of things will undoubtedly make Yang Yang, who is in the stage of sexual enlightenment and the formation of his outlook on life, bewildered.
3. "Useless use" is the "big use" of life. The
following is a conversation between Da Tian and NJ, who had known each other not long in Taipei. Just as Mr. Keating said to his students in "Dead Poets Society", music, poetry, literature , art This is the reason we are born.
Daejeon: why are we afraid of the first time? Everyday in life is a first time. Every morning is new. We never live the same day twice. We never afraid of getting up every morning. Why?
NJ: My father listen to music everyday, but I hate his music. When I was 15, I fell in love. Suddenly all of his music means something. Then she left, but the music stayed with me.
Daejeon: She didn`t like music?
NJ: Many people think music is useless. We cannot get any money from listening to music. She also thinks so.
Daejeon: So she left you?
NJ: No, I decided to left her.
There will be someone like that to make all the music start to have something for you Meaning, she may be gone, but the music will stay. Even if no one cares about these useless things in the era of materialization, once you have such a heart, you will never give up.
4. The cycle of life and self-made great words
Yang Dechang tells the story of life through a family in Taipei. The joys and sorrows of the NJ family show the birth (little cousin), childhood (Jian Yangyang), youth (Jian Tingting), adulthood (uncle), and middle age. (NJ and Minmin), old age and death (mother-in-law), from being ignorant, being teased to the beginning of love, confusion, confusion, and confusion, until old age and enlightenment, the passage of time imprints certain traces on people's bodies, it is true. Clarity has a certain texture.
Fatty said to Jian Tingting: "Since the invention of the movie, human life has been extended at least three times." "Yiyi" is such a life-extending work. The pain of old age, reviewing the ignorance of youth, and deepening the understanding of the current state. People of other age groups will also benefit from it.
"One One" is Yang Dechang's pinnacle work, and also his swan song (Director Yang died in 2007). In terms of narrative, there are six people in the NJ family alone, and there are more than ten other important characters combined. The complexity of the narrative is breathtaking. The lens design is also ingenious. Take the scene of Minmin and Nancy talking in the office as an example. You can see street lights and traffic outside the window, and Minmin's blurred figure is reflected on the glass. Nancy called Minmin, Minmin responded, and left. When Nancy said "I have nowhere to go" with choked words, the two figures seemed to be suspended above the Taipei night scene through the glass, a kind of loneliness and fear in the night. Sound recording is said to be rare in Taiwanese movies. Others, such as Tingting and Lily, are the four main characters in "Mahjong" when they are in the cafe.
Jian Yangyang, who has learned to take pictures, takes pictures of mosquitoes, corners, and the backs of people's heads. He is determined to let others see things they can't. This is also what "Yiyi" is doing. It allows us to jump out of the repeated homework every day, see the current situation of our own life, and find some kind of possibility of breaking through.
Just as "Rashomon" reveals the despicableness of human nature with erratic and uncertain truth, "Yiyi" uses such a real life to show the powerlessness of "individuals" under the grand narrative of "life".
A total of five Chinese films were selected in the Sight & Sound 2002 Combined List Top 225, and "Yi Yi" was among them. This is Yang Dechang's last work before his death. It may be a bit too much to say that it paints the whole life, but it should be done with the words. no problem.
The English name of "One One and a Two" is called "A One and a Two". Like the Chinese name, it reveals the mystery and deep meaning, which is very similar to the real and even cruel life.
View more about Yi Yi: A One and a Two... reviews
