As Coisas Simples da Vida

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.

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.

Films like American Beauty give rise to a huge amount of hype, they are hailed as being intelligent and having things to say. The reason that they stand out so much is that in the multiplexes in which they are shown, the cause of their difference to the family comedies and juvenile violence, is by actually having something called 'Character Development'.

This would appear to be a foreign issue to the majority of film makes. But luckily for some cinema goers, it is not a foreign area for people like Edward Yang. 'Yi Yi' is an exquisite observation of a family in which all the ages are represented at varying stages of life. From the father struggling to retain his sense of thinking that work is still important, his wife struggling with the illness of her mother. And his children learning in their own ways about what life has to offer, both of which like everyone else in the film are superbly acted.

Life rolls through every one of these characters and the annoying stereotypes that to a certain extent ruined American Beauty, for me anyway, are not here. Every character is superbly drawn and fantastically beautiful. For some people no doubt this film would be hell. Three hours of dialogue and a story which purports to show nothing more than life being lived. It is a great example of the art of writing however, that the characters remain with us long after the film has finished.

Although the entire cast was terrific one performance, for me, rose above the norm. It was Issey Ogata in the role of the cutting edge games designer Ota. His speech of our fear of newness when surely every day is unique really did take my breath away. It is a superbly shot film but the editing is excellent. So many times there were cross-fertilisation of ideas and story strands. When we could see the same relationship being played out in three very different stages amongst the members of the same family.

People may complain that maybe not a lot happens, that people don't really go anywhere and nothing is resolved. To me, however, this is a slice of life. Of all of our lives as we try to make sense not only of those around us but of ourselves. The closest recent film that i have seen to this is 'Magnolia' and while i would certainly recommend that whole-heartedly, there have been very few films that i have felt so accurately portrayed people as being people as 'Yi Yi'.

This is a film that reminds me of how good films can be. It also reminds me of how lucky I am to be able to enjoy and appreciate being moved by three hours of skill and effort. Simply breathtaking.

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.

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.