The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Edward Yang · a film · 2000 · 173 minutes · in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese and English
Mode
Family ensemble drama of the modern city; five strands run in parallel across one year, none privileged
Mythos
The ages of a life set side by side as persons; the first love returned in middle age and played again by the daughter; an oracle who cannot speak
Phase
About a year in Taipei, from A-Di’s wedding to the grandmother’s funeral, with a one-month banquet for a newborn between; days in Japan at the centre
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 35 mm, 173 minutes; chiefly Mandarin, with Taiwanese, Japanese and English; three generations, five principal strands
Register
From a boy’s water balloon to a killing; the camera held at a distance, through doorways, outside windows and in the night glass of offices and hotels
Scale
One family, one apartment block, one year standing for a life
Governing Proposition
A Taipei family loses its grandmother to a coma on the day of a wedding and spends a year finding that it has nothing to say to her. The father meets his first love again, the daughter lives through her own, and the son photographs the backs of people’s heads. The wager of the film is that a life repeats across generations without its owners seeing it, that a second chance would change nothing because the one who chooses is the same, and that only a form which sets lives side by side can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a wedding portrait. A-Di, Min-Min’s younger brother, played by Chen Hsi-sheng, is marrying, and the family of NJ Jian has come to the wedding: NJ, played by Wu Nien-jen, a partner in a computer firm that is failing; his wife Min-Min, played by Elaine Jin; their daughter Ting-Ting, sixteen, played by Kelly Lee; their son Yang-Yang, eight, played by Jonathan Chang; and Min-Min’s mother, played by Tang Ru-yun, who lives with them in a Taipei apartment block. The day holds the whole film in small. At the wedding NJ meets Sherry, played by Ko Su-yun, his first love, whom he has not seen in some thirty years.
The same day the grandmother has a stroke and falls, and she lies at home in a coma. Ting-Ting forgot to take down the garbage, and she blames herself for the fall. A celebration and a catastrophe arrive together, and the camera watches both from the same distance. The garbage is planted here, small and early, and the film will come back to it. A first love and a last illness enter the family on one day, and each member will meet one or the other alone.
Edward Yang wrote and directed the film. Yang Wei-han photographed it, Chen Bo-wen edited it, and Peng Kai-li wrote the music. It is a Taiwanese and Japanese co-production, made with Japanese finance, first shown at Cannes in May 2000, where Yang won the prize for direction. It runs 173 minutes, in colour, chiefly in Mandarin, with Taiwanese, Japanese, and the English that NJ and a Japanese designer speak to each other. Its Chinese title is 一一; its English title is A One and a Two. The year it covers is framed by three rites: the wedding at the opening, a one-month banquet for A-Di’s newborn son late in the film, and a funeral at the close.
Movement II
The doctor tells the family to talk to the grandmother. They take turns at the bedside, and each finds that he or she has nothing to say, or too much. Min-Min breaks down when she finds that she has nothing to say. The silent woman on the bed makes each of them hear how little their lives contain. She cannot answer, and the film keeps her at its centre without ever letting her speak, an oracle to whom everyone must come and who gives nothing back.
Min-Min leaves for a Buddhist retreat in the mountains. NJ goes on at the firm, where the partners need a deal with Ota, a Japanese game designer played by Issey Ogata, an inventor of unusual gentleness. NJ is sent to negotiate. Behind his back his partners weigh a cheaper imitator, and the film sets honest invention against copying without raising its voice: the meetings are plainly shot, and the betrayal is a matter of arithmetic. At night NJ sits in his office, and his face lies in the glass over the traffic of the city below, the first of the film’s reflections.
Yang-Yang is given a camera by his uncle. He photographs mosquitoes, and then the backs of people’s heads, which show people what they cannot see of themselves. At school he is bullied, and when he drops a water balloon on a teacher it falls on the wrong head. He likes a girl in his class. He is the one person in the film who asks what he cannot see, and his photographs state the film’s method in a child’s terms: each person sees only a part, and the rest must be shown from behind.
Movement III
NJ goes to Japan to talk with Ota, and Sherry comes to meet him there. For some days they retrace the first romance they once had. Wu Nien-jen plays NJ as a tired and decent man who listens more than he speaks, and the reunion is given no swelling: it is two people of fifty finding out how much of what they were remains. The film does not say what they might have become, and it does not need to. It is about to show the same story from the other end.
In Taipei Ting-Ting is drawn into the affairs of Lili, the girl next door, and goes out with Lili’s boyfriend, Fatty. The film cuts between the two romances as they happen. NJ and Sherry stand at a railway crossing in Tokyo; Ting-Ting and Fatty stand at a crossing in Taipei; the cuts go back and forth until a man of fifty and a girl of sixteen seem to stand inside one moment, father and daughter at the same stage of the same story thirty years apart. Neither knows of the other’s evening. Only the form knows, and it is the film’s central device: the knowledge exists nowhere but in the cut.
What the sequence shows is the film’s first truth. NJ, given his first love back, finds that he would choose as he chose. The chance to live part of a life again changes nothing, because the self that would choose is the same. Ting-Ting, at sixteen, has lived through her father’s romance without knowing it. NJ comes home, and the film lets the days in Japan close as quietly as they opened, leaving one man back in his office with his reflection, and one girl back in her room.
Movement IV
In a hotel in Japan Ota sits at a piano and plays Beethoven for no one. He is the film’s honest man, and NJ’s partners will betray him for the cheaper imitator. To NJ he says, in substance, that there is no reason to fear a first time, since every day is one. The line is the film’s answer to its own first truth. If a second chance changes nothing, it is because no day is ever a second chance: each comes once, and its owner meets it for the first time. Issey Ogata plays him gently, and the scene is one of the film’s quiet heights.
In Taipei the other strands run on. A-Di is in debt, an old girlfriend he jilted troubles him, and he comes close to death from gas, a near death that answers the grandmother’s coma in a broader key. His son is born, and the family gathers for the one-month banquet, the second of the three rites. At school Yang-Yang watches a film of storm clouds and lightning, and the girl he likes stands in silhouette against the screen. The sequence is wordless, and in it a boy of eight finds, before an image of a storm, something he has no name for yet.
Fatty’s story ends in a killing. The film stages it at a distance, and it reaches dread rather than height; it brings a crime film’s logic into a film whose physics is otherwise ordinary life, and it is the one place where the film’s even law strains. Then, in a dream, she sees her grandmother awake in the room, folding paper cranes. The guilt she has carried since the wedding is answered, if at all, by an image and not by a word: the old woman who could not speak to anyone appears to the one who blamed herself.
Movement V
Min-Min comes back from the mountain and finds that the emptiness she fled came with her. NJ is home. The marriage resumes, and the film leaves open whether that is wisdom or resignation: each has been offered an escape, a retreat or a first love, and each has found that the escape changed nothing because the one who escaped was the same. The grandmother dies. The year that began with a wedding ends with a funeral, and the birth between them completes the cycle. Three rites have stood for a life, and three generations have walked through them side by side.
At the funeral Yang-Yang reads a letter to his grandmother. He says, in substance, that he will show people what they cannot see, and that he too feels old. Jonathan Chang’s stillness carries the film’s last scene. The boy who photographed the backs of heads has made himself the film’s spokesman, and whether his letter is consolation or the sharpest charge the film lays against the adults, it is the last word, given to the one person who looked at what the others could not.
Yang made no film after Yi Yi; he died in 2007. The film has since grown in standing steadily rather than by argument, from John Anderson’s study of Yang (2005) to the essays that accompany its restorations, and it is held as a touchstone of the family ensemble. Its presence in its own country was long limited, and it has never been widely popular. Taiwanese New Cinema, which Yang helped found, had made its discoveries in the films before it; this one gathered them and warmed them. What has lasted is a shape: five lives set side by side for a year, one story played at two ages, and a boy with a camera showing people the part of themselves they cannot see.
Act III · The Twelve
Three hours are compelled by the design. The argument is that five lives run the same course at different stages, and that can be shown only by letting each run. Remove NJ’s days with Sherry and Ting-Ting’s romance loses its rhyme; remove Yang-Yang and the film loses the one eye that looks at what others cannot see; remove the coma and no one is forced to speak. Ota is required, the honest man the partners betray. What gives is weighed. A-Di’s debts, his old girlfriend and the gas leak repeat the family’s concerns more broadly than they need; the partners’ meetings make one point several times; the machinery of the killing is thicker than its function. Perhaps a fifth of the length is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A second chance would change nothing, because the self that would choose is the same; and those closest to us see only part of us, as we see only part of them. NJ, given his first love back, finds that he would choose as he chose. Min-Min goes to the mountain and finds that the emptiness she fled came with her. Yang-Yang states the second truth in photographs of the backs of heads. The grandmother, to whom everyone must speak, makes the family hear how little it has to say. Held below Tokyo Story, at 9.1, because part of the force is a mood, the loneliness of a comfortable city at night, and the city itself is shown more than opened.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The elevation is quiet, and it recurs. NJ’s face laid over the night traffic in the glass of his office; Ota at a hotel piano, playing for no one; the girl Yang-Yang likes, in silhouette against a school film of storm clouds and lightning; NJ and Sherry at a railway crossing in Tokyo, cut against Ting-Ting and Fatty at a crossing in Taipei, so that a man of fifty and a girl of sixteen stand inside one moment; Ting-Ting’s dream of her grandmother folding paper cranes; Yang-Yang’s letter at the funeral. The heights come by restraint. Held below the top by frequency over three hours: the business strand and the Fatty plot are level, and the killing, staged at a distance, reaches dread more than height.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The myth is built and bears load. A family’s rites frame the year, a wedding, a birth and a death, so that one year stands for the cycle of a life. The ages are set side by side as three persons: a boy who asks what he cannot see, a girl in her first love, a man in middle age offered his youth again. At the centre lies an old woman who cannot speak and to whom everyone must, an oracle who answers nothing. The return of the first love, the oldest temptation of middle age, is built as a double, the father’s story played again by the daughter. Held at the gate because the archetypes are kept at the depth of the ordinary, felt rather than raised, and the killing borrows a melodramatic shape.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is Taiwanese New Cinema, which Yang helped to found, and his own films above all: The Terrorizers (1986), A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Mahjong (1996); behind them, Ozu’s family drama and Antonioni’s modern city. The ensemble of strands, the distant camera, the reflections in glass and the long takes were Yang’s proven means by 2000, and the film is their summation and their gentlest use, not a turn. What is new is the reconciliation of his cold city with warmth, and cutting across generations at full scale. The stake was real but bounded: three hours, financed from Japan. What holds the axis lowest is that a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and this is a master’s most assured film.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that lives repeat across generations without their owners seeing it. The parallel cut of father and daughter retracing a first love at the same hour is the knowledge itself; neither knows of the other’s evening, and only the form can set them side by side. The ensemble is the instrument of the second truth, that each sees a part: no strand is privileged, and the camera stands back, outside a window or behind glass, as if it too saw only the backs of heads. Yang-Yang’s method is made the film’s. The frame of three rites makes a year stand for a life. Held off the top where the form contains rather than shapes: the business strand and the Fatty plot keep a conventional dramatic grammar.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Twenty-six years of return are some evidence, not yet much. Criticism has grown steadily rather than argued fiercely, from John Anderson’s study of Yang (2005) to the essays that accompany the film’s restorations. The questions it keeps open are real but gentle: whether NJ’s return to his marriage is wisdom or resignation, whether Yang-Yang’s letter is consolation or the film’s sharpest charge against the adults, what the grandmother’s silence holds. The form yields more on return than the meanings do: the rhymes between strands, the reflections that set characters in one another’s spaces, the forgotten garbage planted early. Held a step down by span and by agreement: a film admired more than disputed has shown less depth than one that has survived opposed readings.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Released in 2000, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of its decade. The intrinsic force is a summation rather than a reorganisation: the film gathered what Taiwanese New Cinema had found, the ensemble family, the city as a set of glass boxes, the long take at a distance, and gave it its fullest and warmest statement as that movement closed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film became a touchstone of the family ensemble and of the new century’s art cinema, but heirs that took its method rather than its standing are hard to name, Yang made no film after it before his death in 2007, and in Taiwan its presence was long limited. Much of the formal force belongs to his earlier films.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric over twenty-six years. The form survives whole: there is one version, 173 minutes, nothing is lost, and restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous in festivals, revival houses, home video and teaching, though for years it was limited in its own country, and the film has never had wide popular circulation. The fabric is a well-made 35 mm colour film of its year. The surface fixed to its moment, Taipei at the turn of the century, the computer-game business, the mobile phones and the lifts, ages as record rather than as fashion, since the film is about how such a life feels. Mulholland Drive, a year younger, stands at the same figure.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The command bears weight throughout. Yang Wei-han’s photography and Yang’s staging set figures in deep space, through doorways, in reflections and at a distance that keeps every person in a room with others; the night glass of office and hotel is the film’s signature. Chen Bo-wen’s cutting holds five strands in balance across three hours without signposts, and the parallel sequence in Tokyo and Taipei is exact. Wu Nien-jen’s tired decency, Issey Ogata’s gentle Ota, Elaine Jin’s collapse and Jonathan Chang’s stillness in the last scene are of a high order. Sound is placed with care, from Beethoven at the piano to traffic below a window. The costs: Kelly Lee and the actors of the Fatty strand are less sure, the killing is staged against the film’s method, and the business scenes are plainly shot.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Yang-Yang dropping a water balloon on a teacher, and the killing in the Fatty strand. One law is meant to govern both: every person acts from a part of the truth and cannot see the rest, and others bear the consequences. The balloon falls on the wrong head; the killing comes from a boy who cannot see what he is in. NJ’s honest dealing and his partners’ imitation, Min-Min’s retreat and Ting-Ting’s guilt over the garbage obey the same law, and the even distance of the camera treats each alike. The range is wide, from a child’s comedy to a birth, a death and a murder. The strain is in the murder, which brings a crime film’s logic into a physics of ordinary life, and in A-Di’s broader tone.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: three generations in one apartment; consciousness, in NJ’s reckoning with his past, Min-Min’s emptiness and Ting-Ting’s guilt; labour and the market, in a computer firm, honest invention against cheap imitation, and the commerce between Taiwan and Japan; childhood and school, in Yang-Yang’s teachers and the boys who bully him; love at three ages; the sacred, in a Buddhist retreat and the rites of birth and death; death itself; art, in Ota’s games and music and Yang-Yang’s camera; crime, in the killing. They are integrated through one family and one year, not listed. What holds the axis is absence: the state and Taiwan’s politics barely appear, history enters only through the grandmother’s unspoken generation, and nature is a mountain retreat and a beach.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9, then The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 8.8. A form whose parallel cut of father and daughter is the film’s knowledge itself, a making in which staging, photography, cutting and performance hold five strands in balance across three hours, a disclosure that a second chance changes nothing because the chooser is the same, and one law, that each acts from a part of the truth, from a child’s water balloon to a death.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 8.0: the ensemble, the distant camera, the reflections and the long takes were Yang’s proven means by 2000, and the film is their summation rather than a turn, its stake real but bounded. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, a summation whose heirs in method are hard to name and much of whose force belongs to the films before it. Then The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 8.3: A-Di’s strand, the repeated meetings and the machinery of the killing are permitted rather than compelled, and the state and history barely appear.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep and The Imperishable meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.0, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. The work is held below the summit by two conditions, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition against the 8.5 the Epochal Gate requires, and by its aggregate, 8.5 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Yi Yi (一一; in English A One and a Two) as released in 2000, the one version, 173 minutes, colour, 35 mm, from the wedding portrait to Yang-Yang’s letter at the funeral: written and directed by Edward Yang, photographed by Yang Wei-han, edited by Chen Bo-wen, with music by Peng Kai-li; a Taiwanese and Japanese co-production with Japanese finance, first shown at Cannes in May 2000. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the original film, chiefly in Mandarin, with Taiwanese, Japanese and English; English renderings are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No dialogue is quoted, since no line’s exact words could be certified, and speech is given in substance. Particulars of the Fatty and Lili strand and of the killing, the names of NJ’s partners and of the rival firm, the town in Japan and the order of some middle scenes are not used as evidence. Figures and facts that could not be verified, among them the shot counts, the take lengths, the share of each strand, the producers and backers and the film’s first release in Taiwan, are not given.