views of love

today, i watched two movies on love- truffaut's love on the run and edward yang's yi-yi. the first is a slightly soppy final episode of the antoine doinel series starting with the unforgettable the 400 blows. the latter is less a conventional love story than a peep (ok a prolonged stare lasting 3 hours) into the life of a taiwanese family comprising of the grumpy looking nj who is in a floundering computer firm, his wife who is on the edge, his adorable 8-year old son yang-yang who is forever harassed by older girls, his cute adolescent doll of a daughter ting-ting who is just discovering love and loss and most importantly his wife's mother who is in a coma after falling in her apartment on the day when her son a-di (nj's chubby brother-in-law) gets married to a girl who is very pregnant much to his mother's disapproval. all the family members (except yang-tang) take turns speaking to her and that is the only way their emotions are expressed, an interesting artifice. the contrast between truffaut's flamboyant, at times adolescent antoine doinel whose impulsive quirks and neurotic pace and nj's repressed emotions and outwardly calm demeanour are striking. there is something about not expressing things explicitly that is at once the bane and beauty of asian culture. nj runs into his childhood sweetheart after 30 years and there is a possibility of romance (and adultery, as both of them are married albeit not in intimate terms with their spouses) when she visits him in tokyo where he is on business. they embrace warmly, recollect their first dates and even hold hands but nothing more is said. the inevitable kiss and the bedroom sequence never happens. never shown, a western critic might argue, missing the point. the deft handling is very reminiscent of in the mood for love although lacking the texture and tone of wong kar-wai. antoine on the other hand is living a carefree life, only occasionally living in the past recollecting his loves and upsetting his current lover sabine, whom he first meets in a situation that can only happen in a french movie- unknown angry man (lover?) rips a photo of his wife(lover?) into bits in a phone booth, our hero finds it, puts it together, roams all over paris and finds her and of course he has already fallen in love with her. voila !. antoine is believably passionate and lives in the moment as much as nj is sadly passive and resigned. love on the run makes use of wonderful flashbacks from 400 blows, colette, and stolen kisses- previous doinel movies. yi-yi is firmly grounded in the present and is an unsparing portrait of every one in the flat and their violent neighbours and their quotidian problems.

there is also a nice buddhism connection in yi-yi. nj's wife is advised by her friend nancy to take refuge in a mountain (chin?) temple and told that the master would find a solution to all her problems (sounds familiar eh?). both nj (and his wife who only says so later) are skeptical of talking to the gods and asking for solutions. i will ask the gods to help only for my major troubles, quips nj when the master visits his and ask him to come to the temple. they all spoke to me like we spoke to my mother, says nj's wife after the funeral. here is an example where buddhists are shown praying rather than meditating. this is probably the norm in asia for laypeople. meditating laypeople is a very american thing albeit not necessarily a bad thing. in fact it might be the unique thing about the american flavour of buddhism.