Yi yi

Yi Yi (2000)

Losing director Edward Lang recently (he died in 2007) was hard on the film world in general, as well as on Chinese language films with an international reach. And "Yi Yi" is a great, offbeat and yet accessible, likable film. What happens is very simple--an extended family is portrayed over several months as they enter relationships and life takes its usual tragic-comic toll. In a way, nothing in particular happens. There is no grand focus to the film in the usual sense (a murder, a love affair, a business deal gone wrong) but instead all of these things happen and overlap.

Some viewers will surely find it too dull and slow to withstand, but most viewers (the majority) once you give it a chance, will find the humanity bracing, the honesty of the acting and the writing (also by Lang) alive and well. It is filmed with straight forward storytelling expertise, but it is paced and edited with a higher order of intelligence. The sequence of disparate events, as young and old people fall in love and have close calls with death, is meshed together with intuitive brilliance.

It might somehow not be a great film. It might lack the larger turning point drama to make it stand out and make a viewer stand up. But it's a quiet, almost magical film with terrific acting. Maybe the largest thing I took away from it is how universal people's activities are. True, this is Taiwan and not mainland China, so things are more Westernized, but we can identify with everything so acutely it's quite amazing. A gem of a film, too long, but still a gem.

This insightful, beautifully written and directed film contemplates on many things concerning the modern individual. The focus is a family in Taipei, the feelings, struggles, conflicts of family members at different life stages. The architecture is used as a part of the story, the surroundings the characters are in, always seem to tell us something about that particular situation. The effects of modernity and capitalism on the individual and traditional values are aptly analyzed and basic human emotions like love, loneliness, commitment and frustration are contemplated with a hard to match observation and tenderness. The little boy seems to verbalize the director's approach to film making: "We only understand half of everything because we can only see what's in front of us." and Yang's camera aptly shows us "the other side" of every situation. As a character says "with films, we experience many more lives than we actually can in one lifetime" and this film is a whole life experience in 3 hours.

This movie is a beautiful piece of art. Every shot of the movie is like a painting in its own right. Hats off to cinematographer Wei-han Yang for getting so many splendid images on film. From his serene reflective shots against a city nocturnal background, to innovative bird eye-view shots, to neat mirror shots, to the perspective of the bedridden grandmother in a coma, to cars passing by in front of the actors, to gorgeous corporate buildings... everything on camera was meticulously thought out.

Director Edward Yang uses this visual candy diligently and incorporates it nicely into his narrative. His script is very poetic and allows for a lot of reflective pause... which is, you've guessed it, supported by silent stunning images. The characters feel very real and their problems and concerns move us. The little boy is simply adorable and his perspective on life is quite refreshing. The dialogue is rich and intelligent and if you listen carefully you'll understand why this movie is so long... But the length does not drag the movie. Rather it allows us to think and to appreciate. There is enough material in this movie (both words and images) to have anyone musing for days if he so desires.

The ending of the movie is very well done and you don't really know if you feel like laughing or crying at that point, but you certainly know that you have just witnessed an amazing movie, a movie without proper description. Because like Yang chose to do, I should just be silent and let you enjoy.

This is without a doubt the best film of 2000, a masterpiece of sublety and understatement. It is long--just under three hours--but during that three hours, the entire range of human experience is covered. It is about life--that's it. But, to make a statement about life, you have to illustrate it with lives, and this Yang does exquisitely. There is a tragic undercurrent running through this film, and while I was watching it I thought of Thoreau's observation that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Yet, in spite of the travails the film's characters undergo, it is ultimately a work of affirmation. This is about as good as the art of cinema can get.

The action takes place in Taipei like it could take place in any other modern town of this world because the dramas that occur in our urban bourgeois society are the same everywhere. In fact we see here a very westernized society in terms of values and living standards both material and moral. The movie develops itself in a succession of apparently incoherent sequences which nevertheless are bound by a conducting wire that has much to do with life in itself concerning a chain of different generations, from the dying grandmother to the small boy who is not the less important character here. This succession reminds us of Godard's movies though this one and the sequences themselves are full of meaning. Even the silences they contain are very eloquent sometimes. The scenery is usually very neat, clear and quiet in terms of furniture, urban views and people and camera movements which doesn't make the story less dramatic at all. Particularly interesting and very well shown is the counterpoint between the love meetings of teenagers and the meeting of the fourtyish couple of the former lovers who meet for the first time again 30 years after their courtship had been broken in dramatic circumstances. Problems concerning the meaning of life and the real nature of love are shown mainly through the very incisive dialogues making us thinking once more that love is a much more complicated thing than romanticism depicts. It has features and ups and downs that remain unexplained sometimes. This movie is one of the most significant ones I have seen in which concerns human nature and its conflict with the values of modern bourgeois society on the one hand and also universal values of all times on the other. We watch here problems of children and teenagers but also of adults either marital, professional or spiritual. And all this told in a smooth and quiet way portraying normal people leading normal lives. This movie presents itself indeed like a kaleidoscope of real nowadays life.