Author Topic: Yi Yi  (Read 1418 times)

samfuller

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Yi Yi
« on: March 02, 2008, 11:34:06 AM »
Edward Yang's YI YI works within a style that has come to be known as "Asian minimalism" but also remains very firmly within the tradition of the family melodrama. The distinctiveness of Yang's film thus results from this distanced, long take, long shot approach within a melodramatic framework that manipulates the seemingly realistic story content.

The film concerns a middle-class family, focusing on the father, NJ, along with his two children, a teenage daughter and his young son. The film opens with the wedding of his wife's brother, who is marrying his pregnant girlfriend after recently splitting with his high school sweetheart. This plot point will be reenacted by the father during the course of the film. There is also the structuring character of the grandmother, who has a stroke near the film's beginning and stays in a coma for the film's duration before dying at the conclusion.

Throughout the film, Yang uses a repeated visual motif to express his multi-character narrative in which each strand comments upon the other: the overlaying of reflecting images of windows that create dense, layered compositions. Early in the film, one character states: "Is there anything real left?" These compositions seem to ask the same question. The choice of this repeated stylistic motif is echoed by the film's storylines, such as the mother's spiritual quest as well as the father's negotiations with a Japanese gaming artist.

At one crucial point, the artist Ota has a conversation with NJ, whose company is considering hiring, although they eventually decide to hire his imitator instead. In a single long take sequence, Ota performs a card trick and then emphasizing that no magic is involved. Unfortunately, he states, NJ's company is looking for a magician. The next day, NJ is informed that his company is going with Ota's imitator. At the same time, NJ's ex-girlfriend, Sherry, with whom NJ is rekindling a romance, decides to leave without saying goodbye. In many ways, NJ is trying to reconnect with a magic from his youth. This can be seen in one of the most stylized shots in the film, when NJ calls Sherry for the first time from his office, in a scene filtered in dazzlingly blue light and shadow, in stark contrast to the more natural lighting of the rest of the film.

As the film continues, the interconnections between the characters, especially the generational recurrences, threaten to turn the film into an overly symbolic exercise in the "human condition" and the "circle of life". The father mentions being obsessed with Sherry from an early age, and we see his young son do the same with a girl from his school. The daughter's boyfriend flees from a possible sexual encounter with her in a hotel, and we hear the father repeat the same story.

However, the film's conclusion complicates all of this material in ways that question any simple humanism and emphasize historical-social contingency. The final scene of the film, with the young son making a moving speech to his dead grandmother, may seem too precious, but it takes place within a fairly bleak emotional landscape. Especially telling is what occurs just before this. The father comes into the room and observes his crying wife. However, instead of sitting down next to her, he passes over to sit next to his daughter. Earlier, when talking to Sherry, NJ mentions his jealousy that his daughter will soon by leaving him. The disturbing incestuous overtones of this are heightened by the murder committed by the daughter's boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend's mother's lover, who was also sleeping with the young girl.

Daringly, Yang implicates the audience's main identification figure (and thus the audience) even as he concludes with a closing speech from a young aspiring photographer who, like Yang, looks to reveal the truth even if it can only be a half-truth from one side. What Yang wants to emphasize is the hidden sides of individuals, even if this side is also only a half-truth. The question is thus not so much "is there anything real left?" than "how much of the real are we capable of possessing?". While Yang is pessimistic about this, his very act of making this monumental work speaks of an optimism to at least try.

facedad

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Re: Yi Yi
« Reply #1 on: March 02, 2008, 12:33:47 PM »
many of us watched it as part of a marathon
You're just jealous! Nobody loves you because you're tiny and made of meat!

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