Yi Yi

It is a critical cliché to wax lyrical about cities in cinema, ascribing them the role of active players in the drama, or implying that the director has, by assembling a film within its municipal borders, penned a love letter to the place. Yet in the case of Edward Yang, the role of urban life in Taipei, both his home and that of his protagonists, is a core aspect of his work. He was the preeminent filmmaker of Taipei and its environs; no other director is so closely associated with that city, or perhaps with any single city. [1] All seven of Yang’s features are set in the Taiwanese capital, documenting its post-war growing pains during the years of the military dictatorship (A Brighter Summer Day) through to its transformation during the country’s economic miracle (Taipei Story, A Confucian Confusion). Amidst and confronting the economic uncertainty of the last years of the millennium, Yi Yi (2000) would be Yang’s final work before his life was cut short seven years later, at 59, by bowel cancer.

“Built by the Japanese”, as Yang himself has said, during the colonial era, and shaped dramatically by varied influences from its neighbours, Taipei is a highly specific urban environment, but also a transient one. This mirrors, with no coincidence, what Edward Yang’s films are about: the inexorability of the passing of time, the inevitable transformations within families and social circles, the role of work and business in forming social identity, the allure of foreign influence in personal and professional matters.

No other film in Yang’s career is quite as perfect an expression of these interests as Yi Yi, an enduring work with the unmistakable but unintended quality of a career summation—unintended because Yang did not know he was sick while he was making it; after Yi Yi he was at work on an animated film starring and co-produced by Jackie Chan when his illness fatally incapacitated him. The title is a visual pun in Chinese writing, literally meaning “one by one”, but, when the brushstokes lie one above the other, suggesting also “one by two”. This is a film about a family grappling with life mostly as individuals, about the “ones” living parallel lives in shared domestic spaces, whose actions intersect but do not exactly drive one another. A Y2K film funded between Taiwan and Japan, Yi Yi is one of the last masterpieces of the previous century, and hints in its form at the social atomisation engendered by globalisation in the End of History era. In Yang, we see the way that immense social transformations play out in families, in friendship groups, in the way people approach longstanding communal rituals that are in the process of erosion. One storyline moves the action briefly to Tokyo, thus radically altering the characters’ relationship to their space; unlike in Taipei, they can move differently, with the freedom of anonymity, and remove, reminiscing about the past when faced with similar versions of places in Tokyo they recognise from their adolescence in Taipei.

Novelistic in scope, Yi Yi covers the emotional upheavals that roil a middle-class family in Taipei after its matriarch—the grandmother—slips into a coma after a fall. The father unwittingly rekindles a long-dormant passion when he runs into his teenage sweetheart; the mother becomes perilously depressed and heads to a mountain retreat under the guidance of a dubious guru; the uncle’s business fortunes slip away at the precise moment his wife gives birth to a child; the teenage daughter, wracked with misplaced guilt over her grandmother’s injury, gets a first taste of the frightening intensity of romantic relationships; and the young son—Yang Yang—develops a nascent creative impulse, documenting with his camera the parts of the world we cannot see, whether mosquitoes buzzing in the corner of a room or the backs of our heads.

Starting with a wedding and ending with a funeral, a simple description of Yi Yi’s plot might sound like soapy melodrama, but in the film it plays out—transcendently—as pointillist emotional portraiture. Like few other filmmakers, Yang had an extraordinary suggestive ability, even with a visual style this stripped back. He could stage sequences in such a way that time seems to flow through his images. By this point, Yang had shifted almost entirely to master shots, forgoing the elaborate camera movements of his earlier films, as if distilling an already impassive style down to its essence, while introducing the expressive use of reflections—for instance, in the windows opening out onto the city from the Jians’ apartment. Yang combines the impulses of both novelist and visual stylist: even the smallest side characters, like the quarrelling neighbours down the hall from the family, develop and deepen through repetition and gesture, as peripheral figures in a dense and elaborate narrative flow.

The Jian family is a Taipei family in every respect, but it’s this realist specificity that, maybe paradoxically, frees us to drift back to similar moments of rupture and revelation from our own lives. After Yi Yi’s three hours are over, it is easy to believe we’ve shared in a lifetime of memories with the Jian family. As one character puts it, no doubt speaking for the author himself, “We live three times as long since man invented movies… It’s movies that give us twice what we get from daily life.”

[1] Indeed, for Taipei-bound cinephiles—this author included—the hunt for Yang locations around the city is a pleasing way to orient oneself in that amazing city.