So, here I am with what I think is my first Taiwanese film. Unless I have seen some cheap action movie that came from that particular island, I can’t say that I have ever seen a film from Taiwan before. My general knowledge of Taiwan is limited as it is to whatever is going in the news about them and various tensions between the United States and China over whether or not Taiwan counts as an independent country or part of China. As such, I come to writer/director Edward Yang’s Yi Yi as an outsider trying to make sense of a three hour movie that I would probably classify as a family drama if anything.
That said, it’s like no family drama I have ever seen before. I figure that’s appropriate.
Yi Yi, according to the opening credits, translates to “a one and a two”. That apparently is one possible translation, and it could just as easily translate to “one by one” or “one after another” according to Wikipedia. With that in mind, I’d argue this is a movie about learning to live with regret. The focus is primarily on the Jian family. Father NJ (Wu Nien-jen) is unhappy at his job at a failing company. Mother Min-Min (Elaine Jin) arguably has the least to do as she spends a good deal of the film off-screen at a Buddhist monastery trying to find some sense of inner peace. Teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) is feeling a great deal of guilt over her grandmother’s recent stroke, the reason her mother felt the need to go to the monastery. And finally young son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) is just a precocious boy who gets teased by girls his age and seems to be developing an interest in photography, which may make him something of a stand-in for director Edward Yang.
Essentially, it strikes me that the film has a great deal of interest in regret. The film opens with the wedding of Min-Min’s brother A-Di (Chen Hsi-Sheng) to his obviously pregnant girlfriend. Min-Min and A-Di’s mother may not care much for her new daughter-in-law, but two things of note happen that day, a day A-Di selected because the almanac pegged it as a particularly lucky day. The two things are both rather small at first blush: NJ has a chance encounter with Sherry (Su-Yun Ko), his first love. Meanwhile, after taking the grandmother home during the wedding feast, Ting-Ting gets distracted and forgets to take a bag of trash out to the building’s dumpster from her grandmother’s balcony. The grandmother was later found unconscious by the dumpsters, and Ting-Ting alone thinks it may be because the old woman was taking the trash out at the time.
Those two elements don’t necessarily drive the film so much as demonstrate the themes. NJ apparently never quite got over Sherry, and the feeling is a bit mutual. There’s a similar situation going on with A-Di and an ex-girlfriend of his own, though A-Di’s feelings are a bit harder to figure out. Likewise, Ting-Ting starts to develop some romantic feelings for her friend Lili’s ironically named boyfriend Fatty. It was observing Lili with Fatty on the street that caused Ting-Ting to forget about her grandmother’s garbage. First loves seem to be a running theme here as NJ and Sherry spend time together at about the same time as Ting-Ting, when she isn’t beating herself up over whether or not her unconscious grandmother will forgive her, is finding perhaps her own first love.
There’s something to be said for first loves. It’s a time when people make foolish mistakes and have ideas about love and romance that time and age will probably show is something to look back on with mild embarrassment. I mean, I know I do. But part of growing up is realizing that even when times suck, they can still be something that will work out for the best. Or something like that. That does seem to be how this film concludes.
For example, there’s a scene early on when NJ is meeting a man for a perspective business deal, and the dialogue suggests that every day brings something new and you can’t go back and experience things a second time. That seems to be the message here. NJ and Sherry meet up in Tokyo when he’s there for business, and while there still seems to be emotions there, the two are both thirty years older and married. Even when Sherry suggests they share a room and then run off with each other, NJ knows basically it can’t happen. Even given the second chance, he knows he would have still ended up with Min-Min as he already has, a fact he shares with his wife later to her visible appreciation. As for Ting-Ting, she learns to forgive herself even though her grandmother never woke up. NJ’s business isn’t doing any better. Min-Min isn’t experiencing any more inner peace than she was before. It’s mostly that the different members of the family are now feeling some measure of emotional honesty. Life doesn’t give out fairy tale endings, but it can be accepted for what it is and provide a measure of serenity as a result.
And yet, while that may not be a happy ending, it isn’t exactly a miserable one either. Young Yang-Yang gets the final word, reading a poem at his grandmother’s coffin, one where he speculates on how life changes as much as a child his age can. Yang-Yang had a habit of asking deep questions for his age, such as how whether or not perspective can mean a person can only ever know half of the truth, and his photography seems to be set up to get pictures of things he can’t normally see like the back of his head. There’s an odd sort of wisdom to the boy while he still retains a basic childishness. That may be the best way to understand Yi Yi: the things we understood as a child may not be the best way to see the world, but the best we can do is live with what we have and be honest with how we feel.
NEXT: Next up is more Italian cinema, the sort that sounds like it’s gonna be a potential tear-jerker with the 1952 film Umberto D. about an old man facing the prospects of homelessness.
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