Yi Yi (Yang, 2000): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 3.15pm
This film, part of the Edward Yang season at BFI Southbank, also screens on March 2nd and March 5th (with introdusciton by season programmer Hyun Jin Cho).
Chicago Reader review:
Edward Yang's most accessible movie is also his best since A Brighter Summer Day,
displaying a comparable mastery that won him the prize for best
direction in Cannes. In keeping with the musical connotation of the
English title, the thematic counterpoint between generations is as
adroit as the focus on a single generation was in his earlier
masterpiece. Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral in the
same contemporary Taipei family, the film takes almost three hours to
unfold, and not a moment seems gratuitous or squandered. Working again
with nonprofessional actors, Yang coaxes a standpout lead performance
from Wu Nienjen (a major screenwriter and director in his own right) as a
middle-aged partner in a failing computer company who has a secret
Tokyo rendez-vous with a former girlfriend he jilted 30 years ago, now
living in Chicago, while trying to team up professionally with a
Japanese games designer. (The chats between the latter two are all in
English, and Yang's own background in American computers serves him
well.) Other major characters include the hero's spiritually traumatized
wife, her comatose mother, his pregnant sister and her debt-ridden
husband, his teenage daughter, and his eight-year-old son. The latter—a
comic and unsentimental marvel named Yang-Yang—may come closest to
serving as Yang's own mouthpiece; the kid becomes obsessed with
photographing what people can't see, such as the backs of their own
heads, which comprises for him the half of reality that's missed. Yang,
one comes to feel, misses nothing, thanks to the interweave of shifting
viewpoints and poignant emotional refrains. Cutting between the
absent-mindedness of three family members in the opening sequence and
orchestrating comparable thematic rhymes later, he makes his family one
of the richest in modern movies—with the deepest impacts made by the
oldest and youngest members, like the top and bottom notes in a musical
scale.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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