In an early scene of Edward Yang’s final film Yi Yi, Wu Nien-jen’s jaded businessman NJ and Issey Ogata’s enigmatic game designer Ota sit across from one another in an opulent Chinese restaurant. The programmer, after taking a shot of huangjiu, puts down his chopsticks and pensively asks NJ, “Strange, why are we afraid of the first time?” Though this comment seems to be aimed at the risk-averse nature of a stagnant video games industry, it is also the central question that lies at the core of Yang’s nearly three-hour urban tale. A city symphony and family melodrama of deceptively epic proportions, Yi Yi is not only the culmination of Yang’s Taipei-centric filmography, it also stands as a defining entry into turn of the century world cinema. Perhaps eclipsed by the legacies of two other Chinese-language successes of 2000 – Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love – Yang’s final work is nonetheless unparalleled in its sprawling, yet tightly woven, tale of old worlds falling apart and new realities emerging.
Set in late 1990s Taipei, Yi Yi mainly observes the middle class Jians, who at first appear to be a typical modern Taiwanese family. Both NJ and his wife Min-Min are working professionals; their eldest Ting-Ting attends a first-rate girls’ high school, and their youngest Yang-Yang is a reserved, but endlessly curious, shutterbug. It is on the eve of Min-Min’s brother A‑Di’s chaotic wedding that this fragile veneer of a happy family begins to crack. Min-Min’s mother falls into a coma, NJ’s childhood lover Sherry re-enters his life, and Ting-Ting will soon find herself entangled in a love triangle with her neighbor Lili and her boyfriend Fatty. All of these parallel storylines play outside by side, seamlessly ebbing and flowing into one another, tied together by the film’s poetic editing style and its soothing orchestral score – composed by the late filmmaker’s wife Kai Li-peng.
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Often the best family dramas are more than just intimate portraits of parents and children. Films like Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Ozū Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story are as much about epochal currents of history as they are complex domestic politics. In both cases, relatively banal familial crises are placed at the center of revolutionary moments, the former in the throes of Italian unification and the latter in postwar Tokyo.
On the surface, these films seem to mainly address standard themes usually found in the genre: adolescent desire, filial responsibility and contentious marriages. Yet, these stories also highlight the lyrical poetry of disruptive shifts; that even the fates of different generations – diametrically opposed in values and outlook – tragically rhyme. A new age has arrived but the same lessons must be repeated. As Alain Delon’s Prince Tancredi famously put it, “for things to remain the same, everything must change.”
While Yang’s period drama A Brighter Summer Day captures a lost episode of mid-century Taiwanese history, Yang’s contemporary set works like Yi Yi crystallized an uncertain present. In an introduction Kai gave to the film in New York’s Lincoln Center last year, she revealed that the original working title of the film was “Y2K Project” – named after the infamous computer bug that threatened to upend the digital world in the new millennium. Yang, a former computer engineer himself, draws on this apocalyptic technological anxiety and imbues it into the mundane fabric of life.
In the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crash, on the verge of the dot com bubble popping, Yang’s Taipei denizens find themselves free-falling into the void of global capitalism. Especially in NJ’s software development company, a cynical attitude of cost-cutting efficiency and copycat capitalism prevails among his business partners, making him wonder: “Is anything real left?” The adults in Yi Yi are totally shattered by the cascading onslaught of subtle cruelties in their lives. This is especially true for Min-Min, who suffers an emotional breakdown from her mother’s illness and the mounting pressures of her own position as the families’ incumbent matriarch.
Unlike Yang-Yang – still filled with youthful zeal – the adults, and even Ting-Ting, are constantly confronted with disappointment. There seems to be no shortage of regret and failure. NJ embodies an archetypical modern Chinese father figure, a quiet, disaffected man constantly reconciling foregone desires and his dissatisfaction with the present. Viewers might recognize this type from Yang’s other films – Ah Lung in Taipei Story or Winston Chen in Mahjong – or perhaps as characters in their own lives.
Though not Taiwanese myself, having grown up in Manila’s Chinese community, Yang’s characters feel intimately familiar to me. In the aforementioned introduction Kai gave for the film recently, she describes the experience of rewatching Yi Yi as similar to having “a friend you can always visit and have a very intimate talk with.” Over the years, I realized the film’s enduring potency might have less to do with an intrinsic “Chinese-ness,” but rather its depiction of an intensely globalized cosmopolitan experience. Yang understood that in the new century a sense of displacement was not limited to the Taiwanese, or other ethnic diasporas, but rather an increasingly universal experience shared by city dwellers worldwide.
Some of Yang’s most impactful imagery in the film can be found in moments of silent reflection. Throughout Yi Yi, there are extended shots of high-rise windows that linger in the mind long after they have elapsed. His characters’ faces are faintly reflected on the panes as columns of automobiles zip past Taipei’s vast networks of roads and flyovers. Yang’s work navigates an endemic urban alienation, one engendered by a nonstop world of growth charts and computer algorithms. Herein lies the film’s greatest achievement – its sincere documentation of everyday life in this very moment of time.
Yi Yi doesn’t capture the blazing firework displays of the global millennium celebrations, the emergence of new political leaders or sensationalized coverage of bloodshed. Instead, much like Yang-Yang, the Taipei filmmaker attentively observes with his camera in hand, always in pursuit of the unseen and overlooked “half-truths.” For him, the richest stories are not those found in blown up headlines and the 24⁄7 broadcasts, but rather in the mundane. In regular moments of ecstasy, regular moments of disappointment and the all too regular instances of heartbreak. Yi Yi strays away from images of the 2000s’ crashing epochal tides, instead choosing to reside in the gentle undercurrents of change.
