Everyday Life Woven Into a Richly Detailed Tapestry
In 2002, a Sight & Sound magazine critics' poll ranked Yi Yi (2000) among the ten best films of the preceding 25 years. It's a humanistic Mandarin-language movie featuring great visual beauty, narrative complexity and convincing ensemble acting. Set in Taipei, the largest city in Taiwan, Yi Yi chronicles the emotional struggles of a middle-aged, middle-class businessman and his extended family over a period of a few months in 1999. Despite its intimacy and unity of time and place, the film's length of nearly three hours and its large number of speaking roles give it some of the feel of a sprawling epic.
The creative force behind Yi Yi was writer-director Edward Yang (born 1947), a leading figure in the movement known as the New Taiwan Cinema. Although Yang has resided in Taiwan most of his life, he has spent considerable time studying and working in the United States, and this undoubtedly partially accounts for Western audiences finding Yi Yi so readily accessible.
A Businessman With Personal and Professional Problems
One of the pleasures of Yi Yi is Yang's masterful handling of a large cast of characters, and foremost among these is NJ (Nianzhen Wu). He lives in a Taipei apartment with his wife, their two school-age children and his wife's mother. But NJ's mother-in-law suffers a stroke that leaves her in a coma, and his wife goes off to a retreat run by some kind of spiritual guru. Then NJ takes a business trip to Japan, where he spends time with Sherry, his first love, and together they must sort through what happened to them in the past and decide what they want to do about the future.
NJ is a partner in an electronics business faced with changing conditions that threaten the firm's solvency, and it must move into some new arena. As part of this effort, NJ entertains a Japanese expert in computer gaming, Mr. Ota (comedian Issey Ogata). In a memorable scene, NJ takes the likable Ota to a Taipei karaoke bar, where the Japanese man first leads customers in a spirited sing-along of "Sukiyaki," then plays a somber version of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." But NJ's partners strongly prefer a local copycat over Ota, and they have tasked NJ with stringing the Japanese man along to keep him available as a backup in case the preferred plan falls through. The treatment of Mr. Ota is dishonorable and leaves NJ feeling debased.
Two Children Struggling to Grow Up
A second important character in Yi Yi is NJ's daughter Ting-Ting, who is about 14. Her attempt to be friends with a girl who moves in next door gets her involved with a skinny, intense guy nicknamed Fatty. This in turn leads Ting-Ting to a love hotel and later to a police station.
The third major character is NJ's eight-year-old son Yang-Yang, who gets the film's most humorous scenes. When it occurs to him that a person can't see the back of his own head, little Yang-Yang takes snapshots of the backs of people's heads, then later "helps" the person in each picture by giving him the photo.
An Excellent Audio Commentary by the Filmmaker
The Criterion Collection DVD provides an English-language feature-length commentary by writer-director Edward Yang that greatly enhanced my appreciation of Yi Yi. Yang's remarks are prompted by questions from Asian-cinema expert Tony Rayns as the two men watch the film together. They cover nearly every aspect of the movie, including casting and where the story ideas came from. For example, Yang acknowledges that his real life and NJ's fictional life have much in common, and in fact NJ is a projection of what Yang would probably have become if he had not gotten out of engineering and gone into filmmaking. Also, Rayns gets the writer-director to admit that the philosophy expressed in the movie by Mr. Ota is "very Edward Yang."
Yang and Rayns also elucidate the occasional cultural differences. Rayns asks if the wedding reception in the film is a parody, but the filmmaker responds he intended an accurate depiction of a real-life one. Also, Yang says he has NJ and his former lover Sherry go to the resort city of Atami because it feels outdated and evokes nostalgia. And those strange birdcalls heard inside NJ's apartment? They come from the doorbell.
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