vierevee

Perhaps I am the only person to have seen this film, but seek it out you must. It's a Kiarostami slapstick (I think), which involves two schoolkids breaking each other's stuff and getting in a fight because they didn't cooperate (the second solution is much less entertaining because they both learn to get along). I'm not sure if it's meant to be funny, though Kiarostami is, I guess, pretty amusing as arthouse directors go, but it's the ritualised aspect of Iranian society that comes out, unconsciously perhaps, in this film and it's what gives it a comic turn as one kid tears up the other's exercise book and the other stares on impassively and breaks the other's ruler in half. But it's all in the expressions, man! The deadpan voiceover is pretty cool, too. Overall, as Jonathan Rosenbaum might say, 'dude, this rocks!'.

I disagree with bleepnbooster. Yi-Yi isn't a film that upsets conventions overtly, but I think that the close up along with the quick edit and lots of movement (to indicate emotion and excitement) is part of the lingua franca of television and commercial Hollywood pictures which Yang does seek to overturn. Of course the Hollywood way often works. Perhaps it could even have worked here. But I sometimes find it a bit of a shortcut for inexperienced directors. But Yi-Yi is an understated work. That doesn't mean that it's all English and emotionless, just that it doesn't deal in false pathos. It doesn't need to. To say that wide angle shots are alienating is not true (in this film at least - it can be a lot of the time, see Songs from the Second Floor). Indeed, in this film I thought the photography was incredibly beautiful, like a Balthus painting. Nor did I think that the proliferation of these sort of shots amounted to voyeurism. In fact isn't a close-up even more voyeuristic? I don't think Yi-Yi is a film that allows detachment: a Brechtian alienating effect would do nothing to add to it. It really is a masterpiece. Did the framing affect your involvement? I hope not.

Things as they are in themselves is what this film sets out to show. Yang shows this in the plainest way he can and lets his script speak rather than through crafty directorial tropes. Does this make Yang less of a pure 'cinema' director like Kieslowski or Bresson? Perhaps. But isn't he also preaching a 'new cinema' - part Rohmer (his tableaux remind me of Yang's) and part Wenders (the lead character reminds me most of the protagonist in Alice in the Cities)? But, in the end, all of this shoegazing cinema namedropping ceases to mean anything and perhaps we should just say, 'isn't this a truly great film?'.