Yi Yi at 20: Family, grief and finding the right words
At the end of Edward Yang’s final film Yi Yi a small boy — Yang-Yang — who has been bullied and teased throughout, stands close to the coffin of his grandmother during her funeral.
I’ve had that moment in my head since I first watched it, especially as I myself have recently been visited by the grief of losing one’s grandparent.
Yang-Yang has spent much of the previous three hours with a mischievous glint in his eye.
His one moment of genuine fragility before now is near the beginning of the film when he is encouraged to talk to his severely-ill grandmother who has suffered a stroke.
An inquisitive and intelligent young boy, he cannot find any words and is ushered out the room.
Now, at the end of the film, he is faced with her death and has written down what he intends to say. He carefully reads them:
I’m sorry, Grandma. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to you. I think all the stuff I could tell you… You must already know. Otherwise, you wouldn’t always tell me to ‘Listen!’ They all say you’ve gone away. But you didn’t tell me where you went. I guess it’s someplace you think I should know. But, Grandma, I know so little. Do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell people things they don’t know. Show them stuff they haven’t seen. It’ll be so much fun. Perhaps one day… I’ll find out where you’ve gone. If I do, can I tell everyone, and bring them to visit you? Grandma, I miss you. Especially when I see my newborn cousin who still doesn’t have a name. He reminds me that you always said you felt old. I want to tell him that I feel I am old, too.
Yi Yi — widely heralded as a masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema — premiered 20 years ago this week at the Cannes Film Festival where Edward Yang took home Best Director.
He may have taken the award home, but he did not take the film.
Despite the acclaim Yi Yi — which translates as A One and a Two — was never given a wide release in Taiwan.
However the film remains adored in the Western world, thanks in no small part to a masterful edition released by the Criterion Collection.
A few short weeks after losing my granddad to coronavirus I finally set aside time to watch the film which The Guardian ranked as the 26th best of the 21st century.
I have not been able to shake it from my lockdown-addled mind since — the ending especially.
Yang, who died in 2007 at the age of just 59, crafted an intimate epic with Yi Yi.
It’s a film grounded in reality that plays out in long, uninterrupted takes with very few close-ups.
In an interview with Cineaste shortly after the film aired to acclaim at Cannes he said:
Every event has one best position to observe from. Sometimes you have so many things happening at one time in a scene that your attention is diverted in many ways, so sometimes you want to be in a neutral position, and it’s better to look from a distance. You also have to be aware of the risk of using close-ups. You might lose important information if you restrict the viewer’s attention to a very focused spot. We better have enough reason not to need to see the body language, the way the character interacts with the space he’s in.
We are the silent observer of family drama that never devolves into melodrama as missed connections are revisited, business opportunities present themselves and financial hardships are brought home.
I know nothing of Taiwan or the struggles of the Taiwanese middle class — but this family of four feels so real to me. I have been that picked-on young son, I feel the burden of those missed connections.
Cinematographer Harris Savides — who worked with David Fincher on The Game and Zodiac — spoke about Yi Yi on a visit to the Criterion Collection closet.
He said: “It was a movie about so much and yet about so little at the same time.
“After watching it for 2 hours, three hours, I… it was a movie about nothing and a movie about everything and when I finished watching that movie first thing I did was call home and tell everybody that I love that I loved them.”
Savides, born in Cyprus, died six months after his visit to the collection. He was 55.
And it is interesting that Savides should pick out Yi Yi from the hundreds of films surrounding him given Fincher’s own aversion to close ups. He once said: “Every time you go to a close-up, the audience knows, ‘Look at this, this is important.’
“You have to be very, very cautious and careful about when you chose to do it.”
There is no close up at the end of Yi Yi.
The audience know how important the moment is without Yang having to demonstrate it. He has taken the viewer this far.
Yi Yi, and Yang-Yang’s ending speech in particular, made me wish I had the chance to tell my granddad that I loved him, as Savides did with his family after seeing it.
Alec Davidson had a few short days in the hospital once the presumed diagnosis of Covid-19 was made.
Travelling from London to Newcastle to see him was impractical and unwise.
I could not even have been at his bedside due to the risk of infection.
The last time I saw him I struggled for words just as Yang-Yang did with his grandmother.
It was Christmas Day 2019, my sister and I were visiting his nursing home.
He struggled to grasp that it was in fact Christmas Day and the conversation was sparse.
In reality the last constructive conversation we had together was before his move to the nursing home — when he told me he regretted voting for Brexit.
A relationship that had once been so close; picking me up from nursery, bouncing me on his knee, teaching me to lick my wounds (both literally and figuratively), was reduced, in those final visits, to explaining slowly that yes, I was doing okay, up visiting the family for a few days over the festive period.
As the credits on Yi Yi rolled I wondered what I should have said then, even if he couldn’t understand me.
Or what I will say at a family gathering to be held for his memory at an as-yet undetermined date.
That I feel old, that I know so little.
