I<\/span>n an early scene of Edward Yang\u2019s final film Yi Yi, Wu Nien-jen\u2019s jaded businessman NJ and Issey Ogata\u2019s enigmatic game designer Ota sit across from one another in an opulent Chinese restaurant. The programmer, after taking a shot of huangjiu, puts down his chopsticks and pensively asks NJ, \u201cStrange, why are we afraid of the first time?\u201d Though this comment seems to be aimed at the risk-averse nature of a stagnant video games industry, it is also the central question that lies at the core of Yang\u2019s nearly three-hour urban tale. A city symphony and family melodrama of deceptively epic proportions, Yi Yi is not only the culmination of Yang\u2019s Taipei-centric filmography, it also stands as a defining entry into turn of the century world cinema. Perhaps eclipsed by the legacies of two other Chinese-language successes of 2000 \u2013 Ang Lee\u2019s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Wong Kar Wai\u2019s In The Mood for Love \u2013 Yang\u2019s final work is nonetheless unparalleled in its sprawling, yet tightly woven, tale of old worlds falling apart and new realities emerging.<\/p>\n Set in late 1990s Taipei, Yi Yi mainly observes the middle class Jians, who at first appear to be a typical modern Taiwanese family. Both NJ and his wife Min-Min are working professionals; their eldest Ting-Ting attends a first-rate girls\u2019 high school, and their youngest Yang-Yang is a reserved, but endlessly curious, shutterbug. It is on the eve of Min-Min\u2019s brother A-Di\u2019s chaotic wedding that this fragile veneer of a happy family begins to crack. Min-Min\u2019s mother falls into a coma, NJ\u2019s childhood lover Sherry re-enters his life, and Ting-Ting will soon find herself entangled in a love triangle with her neighbor Lili and her boyfriend Fatty. All of these parallel storylines play outside by side, seamlessly ebbing and flowing into one another, tied together by the film\u2019s poetic editing style and its soothing orchestral score \u2013 composed by the late filmmaker\u2019s wife Kai Li-peng.<\/p>\n Often the best family dramas are more than just intimate portraits of parents and children. Films like Luchino Visconti\u2019s The Leopard and Oz\u016b Yasujiro\u2019s Tokyo Story are as much about epochal currents of history as they are complex domestic politics. In both cases, relatively banal familial crises are placed at the center of revolutionary moments, the former in the throes of Italian unification and the latter in postwar Tokyo.<\/p>\n On the surface, these films seem to mainly address standard themes usually found in the genre: adolescent desire, filial responsibility and contentious marriages. Yet, these stories also highlight the lyrical poetry of disruptive shifts; that even the fates of different generations \u2013 diametrically opposed in values and outlook \u2013 tragically rhyme. A new age has arrived but the same lessons must be repeated. As Alain Delon\u2019s Prince Tancredi famously put it, \u201cfor things to remain the same, everything must change.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n While Yang\u2019s period drama A Brighter Summer Day captures a lost episode of mid-century Taiwanese history, Yang\u2019s contemporary set works like Yi Yi crystallized an uncertain present. In an introduction Kai gave to the film in New York\u2019s Lincoln Center last year, she revealed that the original working title of the film was \u201cY2K Project\u201d \u2013 named after the infamous computer bug that threatened to upend the digital world in the new millennium. Yang, a former computer engineer himself, draws on this apocalyptic technological anxiety and imbues it into the mundane fabric of life.<\/p>\n In the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crash, on the verge of the dot com bubble popping, Yang\u2019s Taipei denizens find themselves free-falling into the void of global capitalism. Especially in NJ\u2019s software development company, a cynical attitude of cost-cutting efficiency and copycat capitalism prevails among his business partners, making him wonder: \u201cIs anything real left?\u201d The adults in Yi Yi are totally shattered by the cascading onslaught of subtle cruelties in their lives. This is especially true for Min-Min, who suffers an emotional breakdown from her mother\u2019s illness and the mounting pressures of her own position as the families\u2019 incumbent matriarch.<\/p>\n Unlike Yang-Yang \u2013 still filled with youthful zeal \u2013 the adults, and even Ting-Ting, are constantly confronted with disappointment. There seems to be no shortage of regret and failure. NJ embodies an archetypical modern Chinese father figure, a quiet, disaffected man constantly reconciling foregone desires and his dissatisfaction with the present. Viewers might recognize this type from Yang\u2019s other films \u2013 Ah Lung in Taipei Story or Winston Chen in Mahjong \u2013 or perhaps as characters in their own lives.<\/p>\n Though not Taiwanese myself, having grown up in Manila\u2019s Chinese community, Yang\u2019s characters feel intimately familiar to me. In the aforementioned introduction Kai gave for the film recently, she describes the experience of rewatching Yi Yi as similar to having \u201ca friend you can always visit and have a very intimate talk with.\u201d Over the years, I realized the film\u2019s enduring potency might have less to do with an intrinsic \u201cChinese-ness,\u201d but rather its depiction of an intensely globalized cosmopolitan experience. Yang understood that in the new century a sense of displacement was not limited to the Taiwanese, or other ethnic diasporas, but rather an increasingly universal experience shared by city dwellers worldwide.<\/p>\n Some of Yang\u2019s most impactful imagery in the film can be found in moments of silent reflection. Throughout Yi Yi, there are extended shots of high-rise windows that linger in the mind long after they have elapsed. His characters\u2019 faces are faintly reflected on the panes as columns of automobiles zip past Taipei\u2019s vast networks of roads and flyovers. Yang\u2019s work navigates an endemic urban alienation, one engendered by a nonstop world of growth charts and computer algorithms. Herein lies the film\u2019s greatest achievement \u2013 its sincere documentation of everyday life in this very moment of time.<\/p>\n Yi Yi doesn\u2019t capture the blazing firework displays of the global millennium celebrations, the emergence of new political leaders or sensationalized coverage of bloodshed. Instead, much like Yang-Yang, the Taipei filmmaker attentively observes with his camera in hand, always in pursuit of the unseen and overlooked \u201chalf-truths.\u201d For him, the richest stories are not those found in blown up headlines and the 24\/7 broadcasts, but rather in the mundane. In regular moments of ecstasy, regular moments of disappointment and the all too regular instances of heartbreak. Yi Yi strays away from images of the 2000s\u2019 crashing epochal tides, instead choosing to reside in the gentle undercurrents of change.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The post Yi Yi, or Y2K<\/a> appeared first on Little White Lies<\/a>.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/lwlies.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Yi-Yi-900x0-c-default.jpg\")
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