In an early scene of Edward Yang’s remaining movie Yi Yi, Wu Nien-jen’s jaded businessman NJ and Issey Ogata’s enigmatic recreation designer Ota sit throughout from each other in an opulent Chinese language restaurant. The programmer, after taking a shot of huangjiu, places down his chopsticks and pensively asks NJ, “Unusual, why are we afraid of the primary time?” Although this remark appears to be aimed on the risk-averse nature of a stagnant video video games trade, additionally it is the central query that lies on the core of Yang’s practically three-hour city story. A metropolis symphony and household melodrama of deceptively epic proportions, Yi Yi isn’t solely the fruits of Yang’s Taipei-centric filmography, it additionally stands as a defining entry into flip of the century world cinema. Maybe eclipsed by the legacies of two different Chinese language-language successes of 2000 – Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Wong Kar Wai’s In The Temper for Love – Yang’s remaining work is nonetheless unparalleled in its sprawling, but tightly woven, story of outdated worlds falling aside and new realities rising.
Set in late Nineteen Nineties Taipei, Yi Yi primarily observes the center class Jians, who at first look like a typical trendy Taiwanese household. Each NJ and his spouse Min-Min are working professionals; their eldest Ting-Ting attends a first-rate women’ highschool, and their youngest Yang-Yang is a reserved, however endlessly curious, shutterbug. It’s on the eve of Min-Min’s brother A-Di’s chaotic wedding ceremony that this fragile veneer of a cheerful household begins to crack. Min-Min’s mom falls right into a coma, NJ’s childhood lover Sherry re-enters his life, and Ting-Ting will quickly discover herself entangled in a love triangle together with her neighbor Lili and her boyfriend Fatty. All of those parallel storylines play exterior by aspect, seamlessly ebbing and flowing into each other, tied collectively by the movie’s poetic enhancing model and its soothing orchestral rating – composed by the late filmmaker’s spouse Kai Li-peng.
Usually the perfect household dramas are extra than simply intimate portraits of oldsters and kids. Movies like Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Ozū Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story are as a lot about epochal currents of historical past as they’re complicated home politics. In each instances, comparatively banal familial crises are positioned on the heart of revolutionary moments, the previous within the throes of Italian unification and the latter in postwar Tokyo.
On the floor, these movies appear to primarily deal with customary themes normally discovered within the style: adolescent need, filial duty and contentious marriages. But, these tales additionally spotlight the lyrical poetry of disruptive shifts; that even the fates of various generations – diametrically opposed in values and outlook – tragically rhyme. A brand new age has arrived however the identical classes have to be repeated. As Alain Delon’s Prince Tancredi famously put it, “for issues to stay the identical, all the things should change.”
Whereas Yang’s interval drama A Brighter Summer time Day captures a misplaced episode of mid-century Taiwanese historical past, Yang’s modern set works like Yi Yi crystallized an unsure current. In an introduction Kai gave to the movie in New York’s Lincoln Heart final yr, she revealed that the unique working title of the movie was “Y2K Venture” – named after the notorious laptop bug that threatened to upend the digital world within the new millennium. Yang, a former laptop engineer himself, attracts on this apocalyptic technological anxiousness and imbues it into the mundane cloth of life.
Within the aftermath of the Asian Monetary Crash, on the verge of the dot com bubble popping, Yang’s Taipei denizens discover themselves free-falling into the void of worldwide capitalism. Particularly in NJ’s software program improvement firm, a cynical angle of cost-cutting effectivity and copycat capitalism prevails amongst his enterprise companions, making him surprise: “Is something actual left?” The adults in Yi Yi are completely shattered by the cascading onslaught of delicate cruelties of their lives. That is very true for Min-Min, who suffers an emotional breakdown from her mom’s sickness and the mounting pressures of her personal place because the households’ incumbent matriarch.
Not like Yang-Yang – nonetheless stuffed with youthful zeal – the adults, and even Ting-Ting, are continuously confronted with disappointment. There appears to be no scarcity of remorse and failure. NJ embodies an archetypical trendy Chinese language father determine, a quiet, disaffected man continuously reconciling foregone wishes and his dissatisfaction with the current. Viewers may acknowledge this sort from Yang’s different movies – Ah Lung in Taipei Story or Winston Chen in Mahjong – or maybe as characters in their very own lives.
Although not Taiwanese myself, having grown up in Manila’s Chinese language group, Yang’s characters really feel intimately acquainted to me. Within the aforementioned introduction Kai gave for the movie just lately, she describes the expertise of rewatching Yi Yi as much like having “a buddy you’ll be able to at all times go to and have a really intimate speak with.” Through the years, I spotted the movie’s enduring efficiency might need much less to do with an intrinsic “Chinese language-ness,” however moderately its depiction of an intensely globalized cosmopolitan expertise. Yang understood that within the new century a way of displacement was not restricted to the Taiwanese, or different ethnic diasporas, however moderately an more and more common expertise shared by metropolis dwellers worldwide.
A few of Yang’s most impactful imagery within the movie might be present in moments of silent reflection. All through Yi Yi, there are prolonged photographs of high-rise home windows that linger within the thoughts lengthy after they’ve elapsed. His characters’ faces are faintly mirrored on the panes as columns of vehicles zip previous Taipei’s huge networks of roads and flyovers. Yang’s work navigates an endemic city alienation, one engendered by a nonstop world of development charts and laptop algorithms. Herein lies the movie’s biggest achievement – its honest documentation of on a regular basis life on this very second of time.
Yi Yi doesn’t seize the blazing firework shows of the worldwide millennium celebrations, the emergence of latest political leaders or sensationalized protection of bloodshed. As an alternative, very like Yang-Yang, the Taipei filmmaker attentively observes along with his digicam in hand, at all times in pursuit of the unseen and ignored “half-truths.” For him, the richest tales should not these present in blown up headlines and the 24/7 broadcasts, however moderately within the mundane. In common moments of ecstasy, common moments of disappointment and the all too common situations of heartbreak. Yi Yi strays away from photos of the 2000s’ crashing epochal tides, as an alternative selecting to reside within the light undercurrents of change.
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