Yi yi (A one and a two…)

It was somewhere around the point where this film finished its second hour and headed into its third that I fully realized it is, essentially, everything I love in cinema. When we watch films, one character explains, we live three times as long: films give us a chance to live many experiences, feel many emotions, we would not ordinarily. We love films precisely because they are so lifelike. At least this is the case for me. “Life is men and women,” John Cassavetes said. “I’m never going to make any other pictures except about men and women.” This film is about men and women. We repress, we lash out, we cheat one another, we dream and give up on dreams, we cry out in pain, we kill ourselves, we love, we settle, we go on; we don’t know one another, we don’t know ourselves, we don’t know life, we go on… And ultimately we find some peace in all that. “If I had a second chance, I wouldn’t need it,” another character realizes: under different circumstances, even after a lifetime to think and rethink, we remain the people we are and our lives are what we always made them. That is both depressing and affirming, but that is life. This film is life.