Through a Screen Darkly
bonus chapter:
The Whole
Wide World
A consideration of Crash, Gosford Park, and
Yi-Yi
“How can I know what you see?”
– Eight-year-old Yang-Yang,
in the film Yi Yi (A One and a Two)
"When
there's all kinds of chaos
And everyone is walking lame
You don't even blink now do you
Don't even look away
So I try to be like you
Try to feel it like you do..."
- U2, "When I Look at the World"
A
Crash-Course in Cultural Prejudice
When writer-director Paul Haggis’s film Crash
won Best Picture at the 75th Academy Awards in 2006, some
dismissed the event as a disgrace. They claimed that
Hollywood was just too afraid to hand the
award to Ang Lee’s movie about distraught homosexuals, Brokeback
Mountain.
Homosexuality has become such a headline-grabbing
issue in our society that anything less than a
dramatic victory for Brokeback Mountain was sure
to be interpreted by many as a failure of
compassion and conviction.
But I sincerely doubt that
Crash won the big award because Hollywood
liberals are liberal enough or audacious enough. Crash meant a
great deal to a lot of moviegoers. The movie explores the many and
varied forms of racism and prejudice thoroughly, and
that probably inspired many to celebrate Haggis's vision.
And Crash does more
than that. It also addresses the contemporary reality
that even as we develop more and more ways to stay in touch, we are
distancing ourselves from one another.
In a capitalist society, people indulge their
personal freedoms in the pursuit of happiness, and become focused on
consumption rather than communication. They install guards to filter out
people they’d rather not engage. Their talk turns cheaper, quicker, more
efficient, and less communicative. They buy things that they think will
earn them status, respect, and personal advantages. When this doesn’t
satisfy them, they need someone to blame, so they reach for the most
available targets —
other kinds of people.
Prejudice spreads like a virus in Crash, so
that all of Los Angeles seems to be infected with it. Everyone’s
miserable, and any exchange can transform people into raving bigots. It
feels like watching 28 Days Later, the zombie-movie in which people
turned ravenous and wrathful due to a highly contagious virus.
Raw with post-9/11 rage, a gun store owner judges a
customer based on his appearance. An African American’s resentment towards
prejudice leads him to behavior that reinforces negative stereotypes
— holding up two white folks and stealing
their car. A wealthy Caucasian woman distrusts her Hispanic handyman. A
white cop uses his status to take humiliate an African American man by
abusing his wife during a traffic stop.
In each case, Haggis makes one person out to be a
monster, and then, later, he surprises us by attempting to humanize them
with revelations that are designed to challenge our assumptions.
Haggis had won the previous year as well, for writing
Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, which focused on three
complex characters and challenging ethical dilemmas. Haggis
is a writer preoccupied with ethics, portraying our day-to-day
interactions as complicated and taxing. Both films exhaust the viewer. But
Crash is doubly exhausting, simply because of its large host of
characters.
You could call it a movie with a
“God’s-eye” view. We move through a vast, complex
community, listening in on the private lives of numerous individuals in
strikingly different circumstances. We get the whole picture, and everyone
gets a fair treatment.
It’s a method of moviemaking that few directors can
pull off. Some who try only end up creating an overstuffed drama, in which
many stories play out shallowly, without giving us enough time to grow
attached to the characters.
But when this "God's-eye" method
works, it can elevate cinema to another
level, reminding us that our choices have far-reaching influence on the
lives of others, and no one is too small to make a significant difference.
Further, in films that allow us to observe these
complicated webs of relationships, the storyteller has a chance to
encourage compassion for a wide variety of people. In order to do that, he
must efficiently develop three-dimensional characters and avoid turning
anyone into a scapegoat.
Even though he won the Oscar, director Sam Mendes and
writer Alan Bell failed with American Beauty. They gave us many
characters and multiple threads of story, but they played their game
unfairly, excusing one incredibly smug and rebellious hero, while painting
a gross caricature of a conservative Republican to be a target of our
contempt.
Haggis succeeds somewhat with Crash. He avoids
making a scapegoat of anyone in particular. We see evidence of
discrimination all the time, recognizing it in certain forms that frequent
news headlines. Under Haggis’s microscope, the tumors of this cancer show
up in people of all races, economic strata, and occupations, even in
everyday business transactions. Many viewers will come away with a greater
awareness of racism’s complexity and the folly of believing that the
government or the cops can fix the problem.
But In my opinion, Haggis's
stories are too simplistic. Beyond their
rage and their problems at home, his characters don’t come to life in
convincing ways. Their stories seem calculated to pile irony upon irony,
shocking reversal upon shocking reversal, and the ideas in the film are
anything but subtle. Insights are spelled out
for us: “In L.A., nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and
glass,” muses Graham (Don Cheadle) in the opening scene. Lines like that
go too far into telling, leaving less and less for us to
think about on our own.
Further, nothing in the film suggests that we have
anything more than ourselves as resources to amend the situation.
Similarly, Lawrence Kasdan found some profound
moments in the sprawling drama Grand Canyon. But
his characters were prone to preachy, obvious dialogue and moments of
sentiment that could only take place in a Hollywood movie. 13
Conversations about One Thing is a rewarding collection of short
narratives characterized by strong performances and meditative
examinations of ordinary relationships and ethical challenges. But, like
Crash, the film was so burdened with purpose that
it staggered under the weight of its own solemn
purpose.
Other directors have demonstrated more restraint,
letting us discover for ourselves what the story was about.
And they've woven in enough humor and detail to make us
believe in the world they bring to life.
I’ve discussed my favorite “God’s-eye view” movie,
Code Unknown, elsewhere in this book. Here are two more films that
offer profound journeys that encompass many different life experiences. As
they introducing myriad characters for us to compare and contrast, they
both give us profound reminders that small moments of love and grace can
send shock waves through a whole community.
Playing in
Gosford Park
Robert Altman, who died in late
2006, may be the most celebrated director of “God’s-eye” films.
Most of his movies move us through a large community of characters. And he
gave his actors a great deal of freedom to
improvise and surprise him with their characters’ personalities. In doing
so, he discovered ways to surprise us with
inspired moments and unexpected avenues of connection between characters.
His maverick style has
earned praise, and many credit him as a master of deconstructing
conventional stories. But close examination of his whole repertoire
reveals that his strongest films (arguably Nashville, The Player,
Gosford Park, Short Cuts) are those in which the improvisation and
experimentation wind like ivy around a iron frame, a concealed narrative
so strong that even if his characters dance around it, you can see its
outline, and that outline brings coherence and focus to a wild and
glorious display.
Those that lack a strong central story (Ready to
Wear, Dr. T and the Women, Cookie’s Fortune, A Prairie Home Companion)
are still entertaining and comprised of memorable moments, but they
may not be as rewarding when you revisit them.
2001’s Gosford Park is a classic period piece
and one of Altman’s masterpieces. It guides us through a complicated,
bygone world — a marvelous, labyrinthine, 1930s manor in the English
countryside, the camera gliding ghost-like from room to room with such
elaborate grace that it can make you gasp. And yet, it feels as though
we’re observing this controlled chaos through tinted glass. The sensation
is akin to looking at old oil paintings in a dark room. Altman paints with
a palette of dark brown and gold, similar to Francis Ford Coppola’s
Godfather films; the scenes resonate with the integrity of antique
hardwood furniture, lacking the plastic sheen of contemporary films.
Screenwriter Julian Fellowes
knows this world upstairs and downstairs. As he
reveals in his enthralling DVD commentary, he grew up in it. Every word of
his script contributes to a complex weave of storytelling that teaches us
volumes about the class and culture of the period.
It sounds, in sketchy summary, like an Agatha
Christie mystery, or a party game like Clue. Sir William McCordle
(Michael Gambon), a wealthy aristrocrat, finds his manor filled with
family and friends for a weekend of socializing and not-so-concealed
verbal sparring.
His imperious wife, Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott
Thomas), is a vain and cruel woman who takes the credit for the phenomenal
efforts put forth by her head cook Mrs. Croft (Eileen Atkins) and chief
housekeeper Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren).
Those who hope to gain from his fortune include
Constance (Harry Potter’s Maggie Smith), a pompous countess who
engages in Herculean feats of condescension and snobbery. She seems to
live for the sole purpose of nonchalantly gouging those about her with
searing prejudice and contempt. In private, she dazzles her longsuffering
maid, meek and mild young Mary Maceachran (Kelly MacDonald), with stories
of family scandal. Maggie Smith has always been a fantastic actress, but
here she finds a role to match the brilliance of her beloved turn as
Charlotte in A Room with a View.
The film’s most hilarious moment comes when Constance
cannot contain her glee over another’s humiliation.
Sylvia’s two sisters (Geraldine Somerville, Natasha
Wightman) bring their husbands (Charles Dance and Tom Hollander), who are
either sullenly obedient or hopeful to gain from the gathering. Sir
William and Sylvia’s son Freddie Nesbitt has a
sweet but vulnerable wife
Mabel (Claudie Blakley) who is doomed to suffer because she’s
upstairs but she can’t afford her own maid. Sir William and Sylvia's
daughter Isobel (Camilla Rutherford) has a face
smudged with makeup and a life smudged with trouble. In fact, it’s clear
that Sir William and Sylvia’s grown children have inherited their capacity
for sexual recklessness.
Making this remarkable, miserable lot even more
miserable are three “ugly American” houseguests
— a famous American actor of the period Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam) who
makes his living by pretending to be British; a homosexual Hollywood film
producer (Bob Balaban) whose brazen arrogance and ignorance is a hoot; and
his vain “assistant” (Ryan Phillipe). These three bring their own
distinctly American poison to the punch, the producer asking Norvello,
“How do you put up with these people?''
The story emphasizes that they’re all addicted to
William’s money, but it’s certainly not making them happy. The aristocrats
are at least as unhappy as the servants, in spite of their excessive
resources. And whenever weakness is exposed or a formality botched, it’s
blood in the water, and teeth flash in the dim lamplight.
The servants live in a shadowy world beneath the
house, bustling about to meet the preposterous needs of their “superiors,”
and getting very little thanks for it. ''I'm the perfect servant,” one of
them boasts. “I have no life.'' They find their pleasures in fleeting
escapes, sexual liaisons, and moments when they can pause and daydream
while music from the upper levels filters through almost-closed doors and
down the dusty stairwells. One moment like this achieves a painterly
quality, as the faint light falls upon one servant’s face who seems caught
up in a sort of religious ecstasy.
Each and every character is interesting enough to
carry a story all their own. Among the servants, we wouldn’t think twice
if the story suddenly focused on Jennings the head manservant (Alan
Bates), George the footman
(Richard E. Grant), or the valets (Derek Jacobi, Clive Owen).
But ultimately, it is Mary, Constance’s maid, whose
childlike eyes give us the fullest perspective on these proceedings. As
the outsider, she wins our sympathy, responding with the quiet
bewilderment and horror that we feel as we watch this circus of cruel and
unusual punishments. Since Constance is versed only in manners and how to
break them, it is up to another housemaid, the thick-skinned but
tender-hearted Elsie (Emily Watson), to teach her. And the more we attend
to Elsie’s teaching, the more we see that her heart is a large and
battlescarred territory. By the end of the film, while we see through
Mary’s eyes, it is Elsie whose patience breaks our heart.
You’ll note I didn’t even get to Dorothy, whose
bravery I mentioned in Chapter Six. This place is full of characters
capable of demonstrating both virtue and venom. What we come away
understanding is that the world is not a place of good folks and bad
folks, but of currents of love and hate, through which we clumsily splash.
Those seeking their own advantage turns into beasts. Those who muster the
strength to show mercy and care give up their worldly advantage and become
fools… saints.
We also learn that even the stoniest hearts might
conceal deep, deep love. In fact, sometimes that tough exterior was formed
out of necessity, to protect one’s broken heart from the harsh conditions
outside. At the conclusion of the film, when the mystery is finally solved
— don’t worry, the solution is too complex for me to spoil — it doesn’t
just resolve the story, but breaks open a concealed drama that many won’t
see coming.
It’s the kind of conclusion that demands we revisit
the film a second time, to observe theses events with the benefit of the
secrets we have learned. That second viewing, and a third, becomes a
process of peeling back one layer after another, until we see just how
lost and lovely these human beings truly are.
The film has been condemned by some Christians
because it ends on a cynical note, as the young innocent takes her first
step toward a life of moral compromise and situational ethics. But what
burns brighter and brighter with each viewing is the beauty of those
moments when someone sticks to their conviction and acts out of selfless
love, no matter what the consequences. Love is a costly choice, but it
cuts through the class barriers, the divisions between servant and master,
man and woman, contemptuous elders and disillusioned youngsters.
A second viewing also helps us catch the
conversations, and a dozen other storylines, that we missed the first time
— Gosford Park demands a good sound system because all of the
characters seem to be talking at once. There are so many people dancing
through these corridors that it’s just a matter of time before a bunch of
them collide and go crashing from the lavish bedrooms to the mouse
droppings in the pantry. And when the proud fall, and
the humble rise, it's a beautiful thing to behold.
Yi Yi Shows Us
the Backs of Our Heads
Grandma’s in a coma.
Mom’s having a mid-life crisis.
Dad’s pondering the possibility of an affair, even as
his co-workers coax him toward a questionable business deal.
Big sister is thinking about sleeping with her
best-friend’s boyfriend.
What’s an eight-year-old boy to do?
The Jian family form a small solar system in the vast
galaxy of lives in director Edward Yang’s Taipei drama Yi-Yi (A One and
a Two.) The film, which won Yang a best director award at Cannes, Best
Foreign Film of 2000 by the New York Critics Circle, and Best Film by the
National Society of Film Critics, is still relatively unknown to the
average American moviegoer. And, year after year, Hollywood celebrates
family dramas that pale by comparison to this rich, mysterious, funny,
heartbreaking web of stories.
Each character in the film plays their own sad,
searching solo. Perhaps that is why Yang named it Yi Yi, which
translates as “one one.” Even when these characters pair up, they remain
solitary souls in need of intimacy and understanding. Each couple plays a
countermelody to the other, achieving exquisite moments of dissonance and
harmony across generations. Together, they’re as disconnected as their
sour-faced wedding and funeral photographs imply. And yet, when you think
back on them, these varying melodies seem to fuse into a simultaneous,
harmonious roar.
The Jian family lives, like the characters in
Kieslowski’s Decalogue, in a massive high-rise full of isolated
lives, vacuum-sealed troubles. Over the course of the film, we’ll watch
them drawn toward others’ lives in hopes of making meaningful connections.
But again and again, this will expose their betrayals and neglect of the
relationships they already have.
And, once again, the one who can lead them is a
child.
*
* *
Yang-Yang, the eight-year old, is played by Jonathan
Chang in one of the most charming performances by a child I have ever
seen. Yang-Yang wanders through the family dramas wide-eyed. His endearing
curiosity sets him part from everyone else. Sitting quietly in the car
with his father, he’s like Damiel the angel in Wings of Desire,
consumed by the mystery of his existence. In great distress, he quietly
asks his father, “How can I know what you see?” and there is such
innocence, longing, and humility in the question that it breaks your
heart.
While everyone is intensely focused upon their own
problems and desires, he sees a larger picture, and becomes intrigued by
the pieces that others don’t see. Given a camera, he starts taking odd,
seemingly arbitrary photographs, claiming that he’s shooting “mosquitos.”
This evolves into a preoccupation with photographing the backs of people’s
heads — the parts of their world that they never see, that they forget,
that they might never know is there if someone else doesn’t show them.
Like many great artists, he’s intent on one thing, but his pictures reveal
more than he knows.
Yang-Yang’s curiosity is so healthy, it seems
nonsensical and even threatening to those who are proud and self-absorbed.
When the schoolteacher discovers Yang-Yang’s remarkable photographs, he
rashly condemns them as useless and ridicules the boy.
And thus, the film’s director becomes, like little
Yang-Yang, someone who shows us what no one else can see. Each scene is
like another snapshot of people caught in revealing behavior.
There are many memorably poetic images. But once in a
while, an artist happens upon a moment he couldn’t have choreographed, and
you wonder just who he might have inadvertently gained as a collaborator.
One of these moments in Yi-Yi stands out to
me. Yang-Yang’s mother, the daughter of the comatose grandmother, Min-Min,
is a career woman who suffers a breakdown at work
— part mid-life crisis, part spiritual
despair. She stands at the window of an office in a high tower at night,
and she turns out the light so she can stare into the vast constellations
of moving cars on the interweaving network of freeways. We can see her
silhouetted in the window, and the river of tiny lights winds through her
body, a pulsing red light of an emergency vehicle throbbing where her
heart should be — one
of those happy accidents that seem to bless artists of superior vision.
It’s a moment of such potent poetry that it can give you chills when you
see it. (The moment is echoed in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation
to similar effect.)
Thus, the call of the film is specifically this
— look closer. Look deeper. Do not
turn away from what has been given to you and decide that it is
insufficient or wrong. Be patient. Turn it in your hands and consider it
from other angles. Look at things through different eyes. While out on
their date, Ting-Ting listens adoringly to her
boyfriend, who is enthusiastic about the power of cinema. “Movies
are lifelike,” he explains. “That is why we like them." And he goes on to
describe that movies compress life into such fierce, concentrated
revelation that we walk away having lived life more than once.
And Yi-Yi proves it, offering us many lives,
and a world of truth and discovery. It overwhelms me.
The more you look, the more sadness you discover, and
the more possibility for growth you find. These characters seem compelled
to pursue happiness along the wrong paths. Desiring pleasures that seem
“even better than the real thing,” they slide down the surface of things
and fail to ever make a connection.
* * *
The central event of Yi Yi
is the collapse of Yang-Yang’s grandmother into a coma on the night
of his uncle’s wedding. The old woman is deeply distressed by the wedding,
since the groom, Ah-Di (Hsi-Sheng Chen), is marrying a woman he has
already made pregnant. In her perspective, this is a humiliation to the
family. (It’s also a humiliation to Ah-Di’s ex, who shows up to the
wedding drunk and furious.)
Thus, the doctor orders the Jians to take turns
talking to the comatose woman in order to try and lure her back to the
land of the living. Their obligatory monologues quickly turn from
uncomfortable rambling to heartfelt confessions that reveal what they’ve
been hiding from everyone else.
It’s remarkable just how powerfully spiritual the
experience is, even though few of the characters address spiritual
matters.
One by one, they begin their vigils. Each comforter
talks to her in soul-searching confessions and questions. She becomes the
common element, the unifier, like the song in Magnolia, or the
mysterious stranger in The Decalogue. In these scenes, it becomes
clear that these people are normal, marvelous, broken individuals seeking
forgiveness, wisdom, love, and grace. Grandmother just lies there, perhaps
listening, perhaps absent . . . provoking in her
visitors the same doubts that every honest man or woman encounters at some
point during prayer.
Min-Min weeps to her husband, “I have nothing to say
to Mother. I tell her the same things every day. I have so little. How can
it be so little? I live a blank.” N.J. observes that talking to a comatose
person is not unlike prayer—you’re not sure someone’s listening, and
you’re not sure you mean what you say.
Ah-Di boasts in his financial success, but he
eventually implodes into his heart’s vacuous core. After celebrating his
wedding in the opening scenes, he quickly finds himself in bed with his
former lover, and there is no passion there either. He ends up watching
pornography, and it’s clear that he’s done this a thousand times before
— it has no more effect on him than an
infomercial. In his irresponsibility and self-centeredness, he has let
anything that could possibly be meaningful shrivel up into nothing. He’s a
dead soul.
Yang-Yang resists addressing his grandmother until
the film’s culminating moments, and then we wonder if he’s been holding
back because it has taken him days to find words that express the enormity
of his pained questions.
It would take pages to chronicle all of the similar
stories of unfulfillmed lives, weaving in and
out. But it’s most important to note the film’s central character — N.J. (Nien-Jen
Wu, a formidable filmmaker and screenwriter in his own right.)
N.J. is a businessman fighting to maintain his
integrity in the midst of his coworkers' dishonest business practices, and
wrestling with regrets about an old flame. And when Sherry (Ke Suyun), his
former girlfriend, shows up from her married life in America, and berates
him for having walked away from a potential rendezvous, the door swings
wide open for him to have an affair. He hesitates on the threshold, and
the whole movie seems to teeter on the brink of disaster.
At the same time, in a mirroring that resembles
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s technique for having one storyline mimic another,
N.J.’s daughter Ting-Ting opens the door to a sexual liaison with her best
friend’s boyfriend. For weeks, her loneliness has been accentuated by the
way she’s told to carry messages back and forth during a falling out
between another couple. Eventually, while she’s handing over folded
messages, she’s sending some messages of her own. This isn’t motivated by
wickedness and betrayal. It’s an act of desperation and desire, a painful
gesture that turns even more painful when you see what happens as a result
of it.
Their pain is all the more palpable in contrast to
the one spiritually enlightened character who walks into the fray.
*
* *
N.J. works for a troubled computer company whose
coworkers seem content to produce bad imitations of truly innovative
programs. This doesn’t sit well with N.J.’s conscience. He doesn’t want to
settle for a flashy imitation. He wants the real thing, and that goes for
his life decisions as well.
Hope is personified by a most unlikely outsider
— Mr. Ota (the great Issey Ogata, star of
Tony Takitani), a successful game designer whom N.J. seeks to lure
into a business agreement.
Like Yang-Yang, whose work is his play, whose
play is his work, Ota does not distinguish between business and
pleasure—he works as he lives, with passion, curiosity, and enthusiasm.
While they’re supposed to be discussing business, N.J. falls into a sort
of jealous awe for Ota’s way of seeing the world. Just as Yang-Yang wants
to understand how his father sees the world, N.J. wants nothing more than
to see how the world looks to an adult who walks through the world
enthralled with a sort of childlike glee. They end up discussing life, the
universe, and everything. N.J. envies Ota’s joie de vivre and love of of
art, which seems so impractical, so contrary to the rat race and family
politics of N.J.’s existence.
Ota turns out to be the film's most surprising and
fascinating character, a Japanese businessman more interested in integrity
than business. Like Peter Falk guiding the detached Damiel into renewed
wonder, Ota saves N.J. from his malaise and reminds him of the meaning of
life. He’s like the the ghost of Christmas past, present, and future…
revealing what could have happened, what’s missing, what yet might be,
merely by manifesting all that is missing. And while Ota’s weakness is a
“seize the day” philosophy that would coax N.J. to indulge in an
extramarital affair, N.J.’s hunger for authenticity rather than cheap
imitation may be what saves him in the end.
In one moment, Mr. Ota stands in the light of a
window and suddenly reveals an affinity with birds that makes me think of
St. Francis of Assissi, a saint whose kinship with creation set him apart
as an example to us all.
* * *
Some Christian viewers will
probably steer clear of Yi Yi if they hear that one of the
characters turns to a Buddhist guru for spiritual guidance, or that there
is a suggestion of a character’s appearance from beyond the grave.
But these inclusions make sense, considering Yang’s
cultural background, and we can see in them flickers of the truth
— that we can restore our perspective by
getting away from the busyness of our lives and meditating, just as Christ
did; and that even when our loved ones have passed from this life, their
lives continue to influence our own.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that Min-Min’s time
on the mountain with the guru does not ultimately satisfy her. She is
looking for satisfaction from a religious teacher, while she misses out on
the love available to her in her own home.
But the thing that impresses me most about Yang’s
storytelling is his relentless compassion for these characters. He looks
so intently at each of them that we’re never given a scapegoat. No one can
be held primarily responsible for the troubles in this world. They’re all
guilty, and they’re all capable of offering grace. Whether he knows it or
not, this perspective is powerfully “Christian” in nature.
And he concludes allowing one of these characters to
call out in a lament for all that is broken, in hopes that someone is
listening beyond the grave, voicing answering that call from beyond the
grave. We long for connection, and none of the connections we find on this
earth is enough to satisfy. What are we longing for?
*
* *
When such a small family can reveal to us a web of
stories this complex, this
revealing, it’s almost too much for a viewer to take in.
We feel
the weight of the burdens that the children carry, so we want to
shout at the screen when Min-Min returns home and asks her husband about
the kids. He replies, “Nothing's changed here.
The kids are both fine.” Are these parents
blind?
It’s enough to make us wonder what the world must
look like to its creator, who sees us all —
the pieces we understand, the things we choose to deny, and the
pieces we miss entirely. No wonder his heart breaks. How vast his love
must be, to commit himself to us in spite of so much blindness and
foolishness.
It is nothing short of wondrous to me that I would
come to encounter God’s view of the world so profoundly through the work
of a non-Christian artist. Jonathan Rosenbaum compares Yang’s work to his
favorite artists. And he says, “[Those
great artists would] likely recognize a filmmaker who thinks that the
highest ambition he can aspire to is to be absolutely clear-eyed about the
people he puts in front of his camera, and still love them.”
What could be more “Christian” than that
— learning to intimately love everyone we
can see?
I’m hearing from other cinephiles that Yang’s
previous film, A Brighter Summer Day, might be even better. I can’t
wait to see it.
