Highly Overrated But Still Good

best movie i've ever seen.

A Disappointing Continuation

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

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.

The passing of a great filmmaker is always greeted with sadness. Edward Yang was no exception. One of the most influential of Taiwanese filmmakers, Yang belonged to a class of film directors whose films resonated strongly with the society he lived in. He made a number of pictures during the 1990s, but his most lasting legacy was Yi Yi, a film released at the turn of the century (or millennium if you will), which, through the perspective of a single, but extended, middle-class Taiwanese family, provided viewers with an honest and insightful reflection of living in a modern, technological age.Structured around three very important cultural ceremonies, namely the wedding, the baby shower, and the funeral, the film brings as many characters as possible to the fore, and then breaks them up into smaller "units" for an in-depth study of their lives. This congregation and dissection of characters is the reason Yang's film is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to see a slice of themselves on screen, portrayed to a very realistic effect.Expertly developed, the elaborative narrative may seem deceptively complex but it is really just a series of simple observations of daily occurrences spliced together on film. Shot with honest objectivity, Yang's film sometimes also spotlights on the subjective emotions of certain characters, most notably that of Yang Yang (a somewhat reserved boy with a camera), his school-going sister (who discovers the fleeting emotion of love for the first time), and their morally-guided father (a mid-level boss of a corporation who meets an old flame).Of course, in a film like Yi Yi, which spans nearly three hours, these characters are multi-dimensionally developed. So much occur in their lives that their ups and downs captured in Yang's film are merely a "cross-sectional" view of their current circumstance. Apart from the above-mentioned cultural ceremonies, another common point that ties all the three main characters together is the grandmother, who suffers a nasty fall and enters into a coma. Interestingly, the unresponsive grandmother becomes sort of a "human mechanism" for catharsis, especially for the father and the daughter.Yang Yang, on the other hand, refuses to talk to his grandmother. He reasons that she is old and would probably know everything he would say, so why bother telling her things that she already understands. His relationship, or the seemingly lack of one, with her would become immensely meaningful towards the end of the film, cumulating in Yi Yi's most touching and thought-provoking moment – the recitation of a piece of self-written text by Yang Yang to his dead grandmother during her funeral.In quite a number of scenes, director Yang employs long shots to keep viewers a certain distance away from the characters. Although we could hear the (slightly fainter) dialogue, we are unable to observe the subtle facial reactions that would help us to register the feelings of these characters. In other instances, Yang uses mediated images, like that of a security camera, to capture the movements of the characters, highlighting the increase in surveillance in today's society.Yang also makes use of glass panels (of windows, doors, and walls) to create a "double-screen" effect. These glass panels give an added screen to the lens of the camera, further separating the viewer from the actors, forcing upon us the role of a "contemplative observer" as opposed to being a "willing participant" in the lives of these characters. The dual reflection of objects within and outside these glass panels sometimes produce naturally superimposed images; this is most beautiful during scenes shot in the night.I feel that Yi Yi's most important message comes from Yang Yang's camera, which is given to him by his father. He takes pictures of the back of people's heads, reasoning that these are images that people could never see, and explaining that a person's view of the world is always halved (i.e. never complete) because of this. This change in social perspective from an innocent boy after receiving the camera parallels that of the director's use of the film medium to reveal that life is often treated with so much subjectivity that an objective worldview is sometimes difficult for us to fathom. In three hours, Yang conveys that message very convincingly. But three hours is never enough for something that often takes us a lifetime to recognize. There is a word for it – it's called wisdom.SCORE: 9/10 (www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com) All rights reserved!

China produced at least three masterpieces in 2000: Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", Wong Kar-Wai's "In The Mood for Love", and Edward Yang's "Yi Yi"."Yi Yi" is a contemplative mosaic about a family in Taipei and other people linked to them, as they have to deal with loss, loneliness, death, guilt, jealousy, broken hearts, spiritual crises... Like a Chinese Robert Altman or Paul Thomas Anderson, Yang makes a sensitive, poignant and, at times, funny ensemble with a very peculiar pace and extraordinary tenderness. It's definitely a film to see more than once in order to fully appreciate its beauty and subtle, brilliant moments (like when Adriene Lin sings, or "mumbles", to herself Shostakovich's "Jazz Suite 2", the classical piece also wonderfully used in Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut"). The final eulogy, given by the little boy, is one of the most human, honest, low-key poetic scenes you'll ever see. Yang died last year, at the age of 59, with "Yi Yi" being his last work. I haven't had the chance to see his other films yet, but this emotional epic would be enough to seal his name as one of China's most remarkable filmmakers. R.I.P., Edward Yang. 10/10.

"Yi yi" is a lovely film, pulsing with warmth and humanity. It tells the story of a Taiwanese family coping with the everyday fears and anxieties of which life is made. In the end, the movie suggests, there are no trivial moments in our lives, even if they seem so at the time -- any one person's life is an accumulation of both the trivial and the significant. What makes it worth getting out of bed every day is the fact that we will never live a day exactly like the one before it.The structure of "Yi yi" mirrors its theme -- the film is a gradual accumulation of quiet moments that build toward something deeply moving. We watch the father of the household reconnect with an old flame, only to see his disappointment when the realities of his past don't match his idealized memories of them. We watch the mother battle depression and the overwhelming sense that she lives day to day doing nothing with herself or her life. She seeks meaning by leaving her family to spend time at a religious commune, but she learns that the answers she's looking for aren't to be found there. We watch the adolescent daughter timidly flirt with sex and dating, a young girl only beginning to unearth the complexities of what it means to become an adult. But my favorite character is the 8-year-old son, who takes pictures with his camera because he wants to show other people what they're not able to see for themselves. He's a little boy who is old enough to understand that there are things he can tell people that they don't already know, but he's too young yet to know how to communicate those things. One has to wonder if this character is the young alter-ego of the film's writer and director, Edward Yang."Yi yi" isn't flashy. It doesn't intertwine all of these characters' story lines with clever narrative sleight of hand; it doesn't pile coincidences on top of coincidences like these multi-narrative ensemble films frequently do. It's not histrionic, and it doesn't build to some overheated climax. It's not interested in doing any of those things. It unfolds the way life unfolds, and it makes us deeply care about these people, and even makes us love them in a way, flaws and all. It reminded me very much of an Ozu film, with its static camera that chooses to sit back and observe rather than tell us how to feel."Yi yi" feels like a modest work of art while you're watching it, but it lingers in the head and its power builds the longer you have to muse over it. It's the kind of movie I have a feeling we'll look back on in twenty years and recognize as a masterpiece.Grade: A+