Edward Yang’s 2000 film for which he won Best Director at Cannes is witty and deeply heartfelt – the menial problems of everyday life are brought before the camera with overwhelming love and care. Over this quarantine, I decided I would watch as many films as I could (which ended up being well over a hundred) and in the process discovered this film. The almost-three-hour drama deals with the life of an ordinary Taiwanese family at the turn of the millennium. Yang brilliantly demonstrates different stages of life, and while his style might feel quite reserved, there is nothing reserved about his commentary on the half-truths of life. Warning: spoilers ahead.
An ambitious task to any creator, Yang encapsulates the different stages of life all at once. Life is a circle. First love hits Yang-Yang, Ting-Ting, and NJ all at the same time but with different perspectives and wisdom that can only come with age and experience. The pang of first love that hits Ting-ting echoes the lost love that haunts NJ. Regret is inescapable and even physically comes back to him – but even then, he doesn’t seem to believe anything would’ve changed with a time machine. NJ is a father above all, stoic and trying to keep everything together. His view on his work is shaken when he meets the philosophical, kindhearted video game designer Ota. In a film about life, it is not out of place for Yang to make pointed comments towards the nature of consumerism and how it does not care for real people and how they might be affected by it. All the truths and hardships of the different stages of life happen simultaneously – the uncorrupted optimism of youth despite getting picked on, the melodrama of teenage love, the money problems and newborns of young adulthood. The crushing feelings of regret about the outcome of your life that come with middle age.
One of the most obvious features of the film is that Yang never lets the viewer forget that they are just that – a viewer. There is intention behind the lack of closeup shots and the overall positioning of the camera. The stillness of the scenes and the long shots never let us get any closer to these people than if we were staring at a photograph. For example, there is a long shot in the middle of the film where Ah-Di is found unconscious in the bathroom, but the camera stays on the living room, giving the characters a sense of privacy as if they were real people. As viewers (and people in real life) we will only ever be able to access half the truth, to view other people from an impenetrable barrier. In key moments, the camera often pans out the window so the viewer can only see a reflection of the people in the rooms as the busy highways of Taipei rush on. There is a distance between the people and their avatars. No matter the distances created, we are still deeply attached to these characters. In the deathly-still hotel room we feel the awkwardness and shame of Ting-Ting and Fatty. Across the street from them in a distant Japanese city, we feel the longing and regret of NJ and Sherry. As the mother breaks down behind a window and in a reflection, we feel her sadness and need for help. Yang does not confuse privacy and distance with a lack of empathy and love.
The story covers life’s stages, beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral. The big events in life and their melodrama are pushed to the background to give way to what Yang feels are the clearly more important ‘little moments’. These supposedly big events are treated with the mundane nowness of a real wedding or funeral. The ‘little moments’ are brimming with significance instead; we often don’t even realize what their impact was until the scenes are over. And that is the beauty of the film, Yang constantly dangles the audience and characters in the gap between the defining moment and realization. The characters do not even realize they have gone through a ‘character development scene’.
With the film Yi Yi Yang has perfectly captured how real-life works; we need to accept help from other people, and no one realizes they have chosen a path at a crossroad in life until the moment is visible in hindsight.
