MOBIUS STRIP: Edward Yang's YI YI (2000, wri & dir by Edward Yang, 173mns, Taiwan)
Edward Yang's YI YI is an elusive movie. In the best possible way.
Like a pond you go to swim in only to realize its depth is much deeper than anticipated. Maybe you're even swimming in something oceanic. So far below your treading feet as to evoke a kind of cosmic fear.
Yang, along with Hou Hsiou Hsien and others, formed the Taiwanese new wave that produced a host of complex masterpieces in the 1980's-2000's.
YI YI tells the story of the modern-day Jian family who live in Taiwan's capital, Taipei. We specifically see how the stories of NJ, the soft-spoken father, Ting-Ting, the good hearted elder sister, and Yang-Yang, the curious, mischievous youngest son weave in strange ways that imply an abstraction or transcendence.
The movie often seems like it's going to be a humanist observant comedy only to introduce dark emotional themes and scenes which then are suddenly leavened by something quite funny. Then a narrative seems to echo or rhyme with another and the movie expands into something indescribable and novelistic.
Like Yang's other universally acknowledged masterpiece, the 1950's Taiwanese period piece A BRIGHT SUMMER DAY (1991), YI YI is intimate and epic. Tender and suddenly bracing. The two movies also share a rhyme we won't give away here that feels like it makes them siblings.
So much about this masterpiece is so cinematic. But cinematic in a way few western moviemakers have the patience and temperament for.
This isn't a movie where the camera swoops and swoons in a flashy 10 minute "oner". Yet it does hold shots (or "oners") for quite a long time, often shot through a window or hallway or door frame. And if you really are present, many cinematic grace notes happen that are rewarding.
One shot in the middle of the movie finds NJ, the father, returning to his business office. Over the course of 2-3 minutes, you learn that NJ's ex-lover from his youth is calling him, that his business partner is ignoring his advice, that his secretary has a lover who calls her at work.
It's a pretty dense and impressive moment. But it's not spoon fed to you. It's so refined and unobtrusive you might miss it.
Like THE GODFATHER, THE DEER HUNTER, FANNY & ALEXANDER and other epics of family and community of which YI YI deserves to be classed, the movie opens with a fascinating extended wedding sequence. When the family's grandmother slips into a coma at the end of it, her sudden crisis plunges the family itself into a year of unexpected revelations and personal upheaval.
The movie gets more mysterious as it moves, revealing itself to be a kind of Ozu-like epic of the transcendent profoundness of the human psyche.
This is a deeply emotional movie with an extended sequence in which NJ reunites with his first love for a vacation in Japan while NJ's wife is suffering a crisis of faith that has lead her to leave the family for a spiritual retreat.
NJ and Sherry aren't exactly having an affair. And yet you have no idea what might happen. Even stranger, the trip together seems deeper than an affair. It isn't about just a sexual attraction. It's about a real interrogation of what their lives might be or have been together.
Ting-Ting ventures out into her first relationship with a strange and moody teenage boy who seems not to know how to be with women. And Yang-Yang, in the most comedic storyline, pursues interests and makes observations that stun the adults with their incisiveness.
The movie flirts with outright melodrama but manages to avoid that genre's traps. Though several monunmental things DO happen, it all feels well earned and observed.
It's hard to call YI YI a feel good movie or a tragedy as it feels like both and neither. This may be Yang's great accomplishment.
YI YI is a humanist masterpiece that pulses with the unpredictable blood of existence itself.
And we the audience are gifted with a bounty of ineffable powerful observations that ballast our own unpredictable lives.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club
