Have any of you seen the 2000 movie “Yi Yi”? It was from by Edward Yang, another filmmaker who died this summer.
“Yi Yi” is his only film I’ve seen, and I was very impressed. This movie shows a fine mastery of the “long-shot, long-take” form and uses frequent framing that is well matched to that style: many scenes with reflections through glass. Yang has outstanding casting including a couple of kids in their first film. By gracefully maintaining parallel perspectives, he gives a portrait of a family. And he provides everything you would ever need out of flashbacks without ever leaving the present. In fact, it is better than flashback because it preserves the crucial feature that memory is of the past and not the present. Very cool.
Unfortunately, this is the only Yang film that Criterion has released. I haven’t yet looked to see if any of his earlier work is available elsewhere.
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12 comments:
I watched it just a few weeks ago (it was recommended on another blog). I liked it, but it didn't blow me away. My husband got bored and gave up about an hour in.
I did think the acting and direction was great. The story was too melodramatic for my tastes, though.
Kim and I saw "1408" this summer, a horror movie that will probably not be the best I've seen all summer, but was pretty entertaining. (Do you agree, kc?) But it put several scenes through the reflection of a big hotel mirror that contributed a lot to the terror/god-what-next suspense of the movie. I never thought about that as a framing device for a horror film -- it was highly effective.
The more I think of it, it must have been challenge to set 80-90 percent of a film in a relatively small hotel suite set, then throw down the added gauntlet of having some of the action visible via mirror.
Yang was interviewed on the commentary track for “Yi Yi”. He said that he didn’t go in to the film with the expectation that he was going to use a lot of reflection. But he has noticed that urban buildings are more and more made of glass. In earlier work he was frequently changing his set up for interior shots because equipment or crew kept showing up in reflections. So for this film, he tried a few shots were he set the camera up out on the street and just looked in through the window instead of doing an interior. He liked the dailies, so he decided to use the technique deliberately. The windows end up being half-mirrors that superimpose images of the city on the characters inside during daytime shots. And he gets the reverse in nighttime shots by aiming the camera out a darkened window.
Cl, I’m not a fan of horror movies and certainly not of the gross-out kind. But I have seen a few that could maybe be called “creepy films” instead of “horror”. What would you think of a calm-but-relentless pace to a movie that made use of these half-reflections where something really creepy was happening imposed on attractive pastoral scenes? Existential dread?
Sara, “Yi Yi” is a contemplative film, and long, so some people certainly would get bored. I found your comment interesting because I thought Yang avoided the temptation towards melodrama that most filmmakers would fall for. Several times Yang didn’t show something that most other films would. We could talk about what you found melodramatic, but we should probably warn off anybody who hasn’t seen it but might want to.
No, I haven't seen "Yi Yi." I'd like to.
Cl, I thought "1408" was very entertaining. And it's definitely in the CREEPY genre (the sort of creepy where the usual rules of nature don't apply - like you unplug a radio and it keeps playing). It also dealt with memory to some extent, as well as reflection. The ending was rather trite, but I enjoyed it overall. And remember the reflection in the window across the way? That was incredibly, immensely, heart-stoppingly creepy.
I read a review of “1408” that was favorable. Perhaps it is the kind that I would like, but I would have to be in a particular mood to want to see it. Does any one have the experience of being creeped out by an effective bit of one of those movies and then kind of resenting the film for being able to do that?
DW, are you describing what to expect in "Yi Yi"? It sounds fantastic.
Though it had a few jump-in-your-seat moments, I thought "The Ring" (American version) was a great example of how effective a horror film can be through general creepiness ... a menacing landscape, the closeup of a horse's eyes, inexplicable lingering shots of a well ... peculiar things that kept me riveted but scared.
KC, that reflection scene was the scariest part of the movie. It's best when it's a surprise, isn't it? Though they were good moments, scenes with the woman jumping out the window and the paintings coming alive were mechanisms I expected. The phantom reflection was not.
Cl, no. We seem to have two topics going here, and I was talking about horror films not “Yi Yi”. The question was what would you think of a horror movie made that way. I’ve never seen such. “Yi Yi” is an extended careful look at some characters and not much about plot, which is rather different from what horror movies do. This could be the only thread in the blogosphere that talks about both “Yi Yi” and horror movies
I agree with you about “The Ring”. They made some great choices about style, so the movie is far creepier than a description would suggest. That might be what is great about “Alien”, as well. The movie certainly went for some gross out effects, but I think what is most effective about it is that it created a really creepy haunted house in a completely unexpected style.
Without giving too much of the movie's plot away, what I meant about melodrama was that some of the characters seemed more like caricatures than real people.
While the dad, mom, daughter and son of the main family were all very realistic and believable (sorry, I don't remember their names), the more periphery characters, such as the next-door neighbors, the brother and his new wife, etc., weren't people I'd ever expect to come across in real life, and some of their bits caused me to roll my eyes.
Sara, that’s an interesting and astute observation. I hadn’t thought about the distinction between the characters the movie is about and the characters they interact with. But are any of those other characters that unbelievable in themselves or are there just a suspiciously large number of them? I listened to the commentary track on the disk which was an interview with Yang. It had some informative bits, but the interviewer could have asked some more probing questions. I would like to have heard Yang respond to your comment.
The interviewer did a few times comment that Yang was spoofing this or that. Yang didn’t respond very directly, but did seem to accept the idea that he was doing some comic exaggeration.
Does considering some of those bits as spoof change your reaction at all? Is it ineffective spoof?
Hm. Spoof. That definitely would change things. The problem, though, is that I didn't even think to consider any of the bits might be spoof. That makes me think it was ineffective. Then again, I'm not a very sophisticated film viewer, so it's probably not the director's fault that I didn't see it. Also, something might have been lost in translation. With foreign films I'm much more likely to take everything very seriously.
It just occurred to me that the characters I considered unbelievable might seem over-the-top because they were not the main characters and thus we didn't see enough of them to flesh them out. With main characters, you get a lot of background and motivation, which makes them more real no matter how outlandish their stories. The others might have felt just as real had their treatment been given more depth. The movie was already around three hours, though, so I don't know that it would be feasible to spend even more time with tertiary characters. Therefore, your comment about there being just too many of those characters is spot on.
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