This week I watched Yi Yi, the Taiwanese movie directed by Edward Yang that in 2000 had the rare ability to beat out Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for Best Foreign Film in several key US film awards, even in the year that Crouching Tiger was supposed to be the foreign movie that made it ok to like foreign movies. There's a lot to love about Yi Yi, and there's a lot that I did love, but there's one very brief scene I want to talk about.
In the scene, Ting-Ting, a thoughtful, quiet teenage girl who has not slept since her grandmother had a stroke prepares for a date. The teenage boy she's seeing was dating her friend, but since turned his affections towards Ting-Ting. She holds up a khaki skirt and a blue button down shirt in a mirror and contemplates them briefly. We then cut to her date, with Ting-Ting looking stately and beautiful in the same skirt and shirt. The topic of her outfit doesn't come up on the date, and perhaps Yang, who also wrote the movie, thought in his mind about Ting-Ting meeting Fatty, her date, and him saying "you look pretty" and that was the end of it. Perhaps he said nothing at all. One of the great accomplishments of Yi Yi is the ability to look at two characters ostensibly doing nothing and to envision a probable wealth of experiences before or after the moment we're witnessing that occurred between the characters were seeing. They are complex, but fully visible. As Fatty tells Ting-Ting during their date, all people's decisions and actions are beautiful, and movies help us live the lives of others in order to see this.
The truth is the actions of that scene in which Ting-Ting picks out her outfit are related to that view of people as beautiful regardless of their decisions, and actually I immediately thought of three other movies and works that had a similar scene - a character in private determining what he/she would wear, and that outfit showing up later with little consequence. Still, every time I've seen this scene, it makes me realize that what I'm watching has been written with an eye of what people go through to convince others that we're ok, by coming up with details that conceal themselves. A writer and director going through the trouble of contemplating what their characters do when we're not looking, because we all do it, go through motions to make our insecurities concealed.
Here are the other scenes and what they meant. In The Sopranos season 5 episode "Sentimental Education," Carmela prepares for a date with AJ's principal while she and Tony are separated. We don't quite know yet that he and Carmela quite have feelings for each other, but we do see Carmela analayzing her looks in the mirror and are drawn, perhaps for the first time in The Sopranos, to the sight of Carmela's cleavage. Yet when we see Carmela at dinner, she looks beautiful, composed. Robert, the principal, compliments her on how natural she is. We know he's not wrong, but of course, even a sense of being natural requires effort.
Another. In the superb Swedish movie Show Me Love, directed by master humanist Lukas Moodyson, we're shown, like no American movie has truly captured, the behavior of teenagers who are as fully irrational, insecure, and who have not developed into full adults yet. Show Me Love has so much love for its characters, and you share that love with them. The movie is about two young girls who develop feelings for one another, but the moment I knew how much I loved it was in the observation of Johan, who becomes, briefly, the boyfriend of Elin, the gorgeous blonde protagonist. Johan, in a mirror before meeting up with his friends, obsessively fixes his hat so that it sits at the exact right angle on his head. This simple observation, to me, defines the life of teenage boys - so much effort into the presentation of who they are.
Finally, the most notable example - Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton. Swinton won an Oscar for her work, and I think so much of it comes back to the contrasting scene in which we're introduced to her character, Karen Crowder. In it, we see her being introduced to her company, speaking regally, keeping her act together, cross-cut with her at home, trying on her clothing, practicing her speech in the mirror, working out her professional gesturing, stumbling over her words.
When speaking to Swinton on the red carpet at the Oscars, critic Richard Roeper described this scene as showing Karen's "vulnerability." I don't think that gets at the scene exactly correctly - it doesn't show us her "other side," it shows us the mask Karen's corporate guise is hiding. It shows a person barely keeping a lid on her anxiety and panic. It shows her terrified of being "found out." This scene is, of course, longer and more intricate than the others, but it shows the same sense of consciousness. When an actor and writer combine to truly understand a scene in which a character gets changed - it understands the secrets we all keep just to do things described as "every day," the pressure to appear ordinary. Maybe as this scene becomes more recognized, it'll start to appear in works I find artificial, but for now, this scene is an indicator that I'm seeing a true work of art.
Pictured: Ting-Ting's lovely white dress in Yi Yi, Carmela's date in The Sopranos, the young women of Show Me Love, Swinton in Clayton
