Yi Yi was director Edward Yang's final film before his passing in 2007, at only 59 years old. Yang was one of a small group of young, ambitious filmmakers who emerged from Taiwan in the early 1980s collectively dubbed by critics the Taiwanese New Wave. With the loosening of censorship in Taiwan around that time, artists could finally explore the history and identity of their country with honesty. Yang and his peers made formally radical, ethically serious movies that were a reckoning with Taiwan's turbulent past and uncertain present.Directed by Edward YangTaiwan, 2000
If Hou Hsiao-Hsien is the Taiwanese New Wave's poet, Edward Yang is its novelist. His 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day is an intimately-scaled epic set among the youth of 1960s Taipei, who have formed street gangs to give them a sense of security and identity that their country, politically insecure and culturally stuck between China, Japan, and America, doesn't offer. A Brighter Summer Day has the richness of character and theme - and, at four hours long, the sheer size - of a great novel. Yang's 1986 film The Terrorizers is an unusually literate, clever exploration of modern urban living's dark side. It's the type of story that would become popular several decades later with the likes of Crash and Babel, a multi-stranded ensemble narrative about how contemporary life can make individuals simultaneously more interconnected and more alienated than ever before.
Yang's films are densely novelistic in their writing, but simple and precise in their visual storytelling. Before becoming a filmmaker, Yang had studied engineering and was fascinated by architecture. His films display the mind of an architect - his images are cleanly composed and aware of how space and shape can inform a scene's mood and meaning. He is always careful to situate characters within their surroundings, mostly in long shots that contextualize the characters and their behavior within the environments that shape them. Close-up images are rare in Yang's work, and always deliberately used. Yang also loved comic books and animation - his planned, tragically unfinished follow-up to Yi Yi was going to be an animated martial arts saga. Even his live-action films display the sensibility of a cartoonist, who tell their stories through single panels and express character and emotion with simplified pen-and-ink sketches. Lone images of Yi Yi tell mini-stories of their own, which gain broader meaning in dialogue with the surrounding images; characters' simple gestures express depths of comedy or tragedy. In other words, Edward Yang was a true craftsman - nothing in his films feel accidental.
Despite all the acclaim he's received, Edward Yang's movies are frustratingly difficult to find. Yi Yi was his only film to receive a theatrical release in the United States - sad, but perhaps not surprising. It might be his most easily accessible film, as it is less specifically tied to Taiwan in its meaning than Yang's previous works, and tells a universally relatable story. Yi Yi begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral, and between shows the stages of life - birth, childhood, adolesence, adulthood, old age - through three generations of the ordinary Jian family.
Between the family gatherings that bookend the film, the Jians are almost always shown separately. Like many modern families, the Jians may share a roof but live mostly in isolation from each other - not because there's a lack of love or open dysfunction between them, but because they each have their own burdens to quietly grapple with amid the many distractions of 21st century city life.
Immediately after her son A-Di's wedding, the Jian grandmother, the beloved backbone of the family, falls into a coma. Doctors are not optimistic about her recovery, but encourage the family to take turns talking to her - as she might still hear them and it could help her return to consciousness. Their one-sided conversations with her become like confessions, revealing their innermost questions and longings.
NJ, her son-in-law, is a melancholy and distracted but gentle man. He notes while talking to grandma that it feels like prayer - "I'm not sure if the other party is listening, and I'm not sure if I'm sincere enough." What NJ really craves is sincerity. He doesn't find it in his work - a dull career in the video game industry, surrounded by co-workers who lack any ambition or integrity beyond the pursuit of profit. His marriage has become a benign but lukewarm partnership lacking in romance or friendship. Two figures enter NJ's static life and shake him out of complacency. He runs into an ex-girlfriend, Sherry, the first love of his life, now a successful businesswoman married to an American. From this abrupt, awkward encounter it's clear that strong bittersweet feelings still exist between them. He meets up with Sherry again in Tokyo and they reminisce on their past together and the possibilities of their future. At the same time NJ meets Ota - a Japanese businessman who also works in video games, but does so with a creative spirit that does not segregate business from morals, or art from commerce. He lives with the kind of passionate, engaged authenticity that NJ desires in his own life. Their friendship, which develops over the course of business meetings that turn into philosophical discussions, is surprising and endearing.
NJ's wife, Min-Min, takes the duty of talking to her mother seriously, and every night talks about what she'd done that day. But this leads to an unexpected personal crisis - Min-Min realizes that every day of her life seems exactly the same, and that she has very little of interest to talk about. "How can there be so little?" she asks, disconsalate at the realization of her life's lack of purpose. Hoping to find meaning again, she retreats to a monastery for an extended stay. Both NJ and Min-Min have reached mid-life crises, regretting either the choices they've made or their lack of intention in life, and realizing with frightening clarity: this is it, and perhaps all it ever will be.
Min-Min's brother, A-Di, is a mess. He's newly married, but immediately rekindles a relationship with his equally damaged ex-girlfriend. He's deep in debt, getting scammed by his scummy friends, and generally in denial about the disaster he's made of his life. He brags to his comatose mother about his various accomplishments and all the money he's making, as if trying to convince her and above all himself that it's true, but falters and falls silent. Perhaps her nonresponsiveness makes the hollowness of his own words harder to ignore. A-Di is a pathetic but poignant illustration of a certain, and particularly male, type of insecurity and despair.
NJ and Min-Min's teenage daughter, Ting-Ting, feels personally responsible for her beloved grandma's condition. Her grandmother was discovered unconscious by the garbage bins outside, and Ting-Ting realizes that she had forgotten to take out the trash earlier that day. She sneaks into her grandmother's room at night and tearfully asks her to wake up, because then she will feel forgiven. Her guilty feelings are compounded when she innocently becomes involved in a romantic triangle with troubled neighbor girl Lili and a moody boy nicknamed Fatty, and witnesses glimpses of the sordid lives of her next-door neighbors. Her first steps into adulthood are fraught with danger and confusion. "Why is the world so different from what we thought it was?"
Ting-Ting's younger brother, Yang-Yang, is a curious and watchful little kid with the conscience of a budding artist. He does not initially talk to grandma - she cannot see what he does and cannot respond, so he fails to see the point. This gets him thinking, in his own childish but nonetheless serious and thoughtful way, about the reality of different perspectives. He asks his dad: since we cannot see out the back of our heads but only what's in front of us, do we only see half the truth? His dad gifts him with a camera, which Yang-Yang uses to explore the world around him. He especially likes photographing the back of people's heads. This confuses NJ until he hears Yang-Yang's simple explanation - "you can't see it, so I've shown you."
Yi Yi is three hours of a family's everyday doubts and struggles, which may sound heavy, but Edward Yang has created a film with a beautiful lightness of touch. It's long but uses that length well, to envelop the viewer in its world so it can become vividly detailed and alive. Yi Yi is meditative and never melodramatic, emotionally expressive but never manipulative. It's also threaded through with sly visual jokes. In one memorable scene, NJ is visited by Min-Min's spiritual guru. We see Yang-Yang playing in the bath with his tub toys while we hear the adults talking in the next room, the conversation dominated by the monk's didactic evangelizing about the superiority of monastic life. Yang-Yang sneaks past the grown-ups into the kitchen to find a funnel for his bathtub experiments, and his towel unceremoniously falls off at the same moment as the monk finally reach his point - his whole highfaulting speech has been a pretext for asking NJ for money. Yang-Yang's sudden nudity humorously coincides with the reveal of the monk's pretension. Yi Yi is full of similarly lovely, witty grace notes.
Yi Yi's subtitle for its American release was "A One and a Two", which is an attempt to translate the title's meaning in Chinese. The title is a Chinese character made of two slashes stacked on top of each other, each signifying the number 1 on their own but 2 when put together. This must have been deliberate wordplay on Edward Yang's part, as every character in Yi Yi is alone but simultaneously connected to the others, in more ways than they perceive. Take as an example the scene that cuts between NJ and Sherry swapping memories of their first date decades ago, and Ting-Ting embarking on a first date with Fatty. We hear NJ and Sherry talking about nervously holding hands for the first time, while we see Ting-Ting and Fatty doing exactly the same thing. The two couples become a mirror of each other, though one date is unfolding in Tokyo and one in Taipei, with hundreds of miles and decades in age separating them. They are united by the shared nervousness and excitement of their experiences, the scary romantic thrill of finding a private space with another person in the middle of a busy world. Yang finds similar connections between all the characters, their hopes and fears are somehow both unique and universally shared.
The beauty of Yi Yi lies in how it captures the patterns that tie the Jians to each other, though they often do not notice, being too perplexed by the disappointments and tragedies of life. But in the film's last act, the Jians begin to see themselves, and each other, more clearly. Min-Min and NJ realize that their attempts to escape did not bring them any more fulfillment - that the problem was not the reality of their lives, but how they perceived them. Ting-Ting experiences life's cruelty and unfairness, but also encounters grace in a climatic scene that could be a miracle. Considering that Yi Yi is entirely realistic up to that point, the break with everyday reality should be jarring, but it isn't. Yi Yi may be mundane on its surface but has a spiritual undercurrent that gives even the most everyday events a luminous quality. The miracle is portrayed as matter-of-factly as everything else, and is astonishing in its quiet, cathartic power.
Yang-Yang gets the final word in Yi Yi, as he finally decides to speak to grandma. Despite coming from the naive perspective of a little kid, his words carry great weight. "Do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell people things they don't know. Show them stuff they haven't seen. It'll be so much fun." That could be Edward Yang's mission statement. He achieved just that with Yi Yi - he looks at ordinary lives and discovers wonder and mystery there.
The BBC Top 10:
- Mulholland Drive
- In the Mood for Love (previously reviewed)
- There Will Be Blood
- Spirited Away
- Boyhood
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- The Tree of Life
- Yi Yi
- A Separation
- No Country for Old Men
