Yi Yi

Edward Yang's Yi Yi was everything I hoped it would be: a rich epic about a group of people who all happen to be in one family. Over the course of three well-spent hours, we get to know these people as well or better than if we had known them for years. Yang's film neither condescends to its subjects (no making fun of the middle class here) nor to the viewers (no emotional manipulation using the readily available 8-year old boy on premises, no gratuitous tragedies, etc.). It's not just reality, which any dork can film: Yang has evidently first thought of the entire lives of realistic characters, then decided to show us one pivotal moment in their lives. He might as well have taken the memoirs of his friends and made movies out of them. But there's something besides these fairly normal lives: as cheesy as it sounds (and it should), Yang wants to show us how lucky we are to be alive and have control over our destinies. And, through patience and sober filmmaking, he does just that.

It all begins with the preparations for a wedding. Suddenly, the ex-lover of the groom walks in and makes a scene, disturbing the groom's mother. Her granddaughter takes her home, where she has a stroke. Her daughter grows distraught and worried about the emptiness; her husband meets, after 30 years, his first crush, whom he almost married; his reticient daughter gets a boyfriend; and his son, left alone by everyone, becomes a quasi-philosopher.

Over the course of three hours, we follow these stories, plus a few others. The only person not to get equal screen time is the mother, who disappears relatively early on in the proceedings to a spiritual retreat and isn't seen again until the end of the movie. It's an inexplicable choice on Yang's part, but a totally excusable one considering the richness of the other stories. Let me put it simply and succinctly: if you enjoy learning all about a person's character, interests and life, you will love this movie. The whole cast is wonderful, but Issey Ogata's performance as a charismatic Japanese businessman is warm and marvelous.

It's all about finding life's meaning, growth, spirituality, destiny, and other Big Ideas that normally reduce lesser directors to tedious symbolism, painfully spare dialogue, and other devices designed to fool the viewer in to thinking that less is more. No; as James Cameron has said, sometimes more is more. And by allowing himself the time to tell his story, Yang has given us a marvelous film that very rarely ventures into sometimes unavoidable sentimentality. Don't be scared by this movie's length, or the sub-titles (if foreign movies in general scare you); please watch this movie

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