Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

“Yi Yi” is like “American Beauty” in examining several budding loves of teenagers who are considerably less sophisticated than they pretend to be and festering adult relationships, including the male protagonist’s commitment to his job. As in “American Beauty” a yearning man is gunned down.

“Yi Yi” also like “American Beauty” in having beautiful cinematography of alienation, though I’d say the photography is more alienated and less gorgeous than Conrad Hill’s for “American Beauty.” The camera is generally farther away from the characters in “Yi Yi,” and outside windows often enough to recall Edward Hopper paintings of urban isolation.

I’d have to say that it is also like “American Beauty” in that the male characters are more fully developed than the female ones. The eight-year-old Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) or Wu Nien-Jen , who plays his father (N.J.) are onscreen more than Yang-Yang’ssister Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), their mother is absent through most of the film’sthree hours, and their resident grandmother is in a coma through most of the film (reminding me of Robert Altman’s incredible waste of Lillian Gish as a corpse through “The Wedding”).

At a leisurely pace, director Edward Yang (Confucian Confusion, Mahjong) shows Yang-Yang, Ting-Ting, and N.J. across a few months of attempted growth and frustration. Yang-Yang is a serious child facing serious epistemological concerns (to which I’ll return). He mostly looks very serious, and is tormented by a pack of older girls, but is capable of delight as he discovers the world around him. Ting-Ting goes from being the intermediary for her friend/neighbor to a romantic involvement that echoes the one her father recalls as his first and only true love. N.J. spends time with the woman from whom he has been separated for nearly three decades and is reminded of their incompatibility as well as of their long-ago passion.

There is hardly any representation of his marriage. In trying to talk to her mother (under the chance that the old woman can understand but not speak), the wife becomes very depressed and goes off to a Buddhist retreat. The children are largely unsupervised and verge on lethal trouble of which their parents remain ignorant. (There is a nurse for the grandmother.) N.J. has to deal with a business that is in trouble and with partners (I think they are partners, not fellow employees) who are neither savvy nor ethical.

Greed. materialism, and the loss of any spiritual mooring is the leitmotif of contemporary Taiwanese cinema, including in Yang’s earlier films and those Wu wrote (many for Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the acknowledged master) or directed (e.g., the terrific “Buddha Bless America”). N.J. revolts against business as usual, in part inspired by a Japanese businessman with whom he is negotiating a deal, Ota (Issey Ogata). They speak the one language they share, English (older Taiwanese could speak Japanese). Their scenes together are fascinating and very quirky.

Portrait of the artist as a young philosopher

Yang Yang seems to me to be the writer-director Edward Yang as a serious young (8-year-old) man. After being teased for “artistic” photographs in his first venture (when he was trying to photograph mosquitoes on the ceiling), he takes photos of the backs of people’s heads, so they can know the side of themselves they cannot ordinarily see. I think that Yang’s films aim to show Taiwanese as they may not see themselves. Close to silent through much of the film, at the end he delivers a long and very literary speech to his grandmother’s picture.

I do not mean (or know) that the part of Yang-Yang draw’s on writer-director Yang’s youth, and my Taiwanese partner says that nothing should be read into the character’s name. But I think that Yang Yang is the one grappling with the issues of representing reality that intrigue Edward Yang. Various people (OK, they were all women) around me in the theater were cooing about how cute Yang Yang is. He is not at all an Everyman though the seriousness of his questioning of how anyone can know anything is perfectly conveyed by the young actor and by the director.

Yang holds shots that are often fairly distant for longer than current Hollywood directors would (the only one I’d cut is of the two girls, silent in the hall), but his camera setups are not as static and alienating to the audience as the many long takes in Hou Hsiao-Hsien films. Yang strikes me as much more of a humanist, and, even more than “American Beauty,” “Yi Yi” recalls Ozu Yasujiro’s examination of family life, especially “Ohayo” (1958) with a similarly mesmerizing young male child actor. I doubt that Japanese funding is responsible for what seem to me to be echoes of Ozu, since the visual style was already there in such earlier Yang films as “Taipei Story” and “Confucian Confusion.”

Although Yang’s films have regularly appeared in film festivals here, “Yi Yi” seems to be the first one in wider release. From hearing him several years ago, I can attest that Yang is completely fluent in English. Born in Shanghai and growing up in Taiwan, he attended USC, and worked as an engineer in Seattle until he was inspired by “Aguirre, Wrath of God” to make films (so that he was less clearly set on the path to being a film-writer and director than Yang Yang is). As with the American title “Confucian Confusion,” he has apparently sanctioned “A One and a Two” for what is literally “One One” (which may be two. . . at least the character in the title is indistinguishable from “two”).

Conclusion

“Yi Yi” focuses on some serious issues for once-booming and now-stagnating West Pacific economies and delves into those eternal issues of love, intersubjectivity, and the meaning of life. It includes birth, death, young love, old love, sex, debt, selfishness, self-denial, moral and amoral business transactions, (the preparations for) a wedding and a funeral.

What is not at all obvious from what I have written is that the film is often very funny. I don’t recall any cheap laughs, but there are many that are well earned.

The characters and the crises they face are sufficiently engrossing that the film did not seem long even though it clocked two hours and 53 minutes. There is a lot going on in and around the members of this one Taiwanese family!

©2001, Stephen O. Murray
This review was written for epinions and may not be posted elsewhere without explicit permission of the author.

Recommended: Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12