Yi Yi

I don't expect this review to be particularly insightful or coherent, but I have a lot of thoughts about this movie that I wanted to write for my own sake later, because I plan to rewatch this knowing what I know now about it. I was surprised at first watching this movie how difficult it was for me to watch and understand what was going on. This movie starts in the middle of a story 'in media res' with quite a lot of characters and relationships that are missing a lot of context, and it's hard to know what a character is thinking or feeling at first or perhaps, more accurately what you're supposed to be thinking or feeling. It's tempting to watch movies like this, where it takes great difficulty to understand the story to be bad storytelling, bad technique, indeed sometimes this is the case. Especially in film as a medium, as opposed to for instance literature, where you have may have access to a characters 'inner monologue', its necessary for the filmmaker to use all of their tools to communicate information, or mood, or a characters thoughts or feelings. It's not to say that this movie doesn't effectively use these technique to communicate affect, but as the case may be in this movie, and other of my favorite movies which may be described using the term 'slice of life', the filmmaker leaves a gap between themselves and the audience, and this is room for interpretation. there's all kinds of distinctions of this kind in art; in film, formalist vs. realist, in literature or poetry, expressive vs. communicative writing. I generally find when the writer or filmmaker does 'more of the work' for the audience, the scope of the interpretation is narrowed but more well understood. When you as the audience are asked to do 'more work' in interpreting it, you shape it into a more personal story, you in a meaningful way made part of the story and so you feel strongly connected to it. This always has the chance of totally falling flat because if too much context is removed the story may be impossible to interpret, but I explain all of this to say this movie is the perfect example of this kind of movie and that in the case of this movie it works perfectly. To me, it is exactly the right mix of interpretive to communicative; as the audience you're given enough exposition to the characters, to know what they're thinking but still the time and space to fill in the blanks for yourself. You're given evocative images alongside a many-course-meal of food for thought. I love how the movie tells the story of many characters, in very different stages of life and love in the same family concurrently. I think my favorite aspect of the film is exploring the different perspectives each family member has in each stage of life. For instance, Yi Yi, in the youngest stage says he knows very little and as a child he's probably right, but as a child also is extremely perceptive of things that people forget in adulthood. He wants to tell people what they don't know, give them the perspective of life that they can't have, and takes pictures of the back of peoples heads to show them something they can't see or know. The film illustrates these differences by showing each characters reactions to the grandmother being in a coma. Yi Yi doesn't speak to his grandmother in the coma, because he thinks he can't tell her anything she doesn't already know, and someone with more experience. His mother on the other hand speaks to her about the coma and tells her things, until she runs out of things to say and laments that her life is so blank that she can't think of anything to say. The father says it feels like praying because, he doubts his own sincerity and if she can even hear him, his perspective is more practical, or worldy. The older sister feels guilty, because her forgetting to take out the trash lead to the accident that put her in a coma, she's really not at fault but her guilt speaks to a feeling of insecurity of being a teenager. The grandmother herself, gets out of the coma only to forgive her grandaughter, and then die. She has at her age a grace and understanding, which is neither childlike, nor insecure, nor cynical, she's not tired of life and she's not scared of dying. Needless to say I have a lot more I could say, this movie was great, I'm gonna end it here because I have a headache.