Yi Yi
Yi Yi is an incredibly powerful film that tries to answer the question: “What is the meaning of life?” It really didn’t have a straightforward plot, the characters don’t really have any goal to work towards to or any conflict to face. We just see the Jian family member’s and what they do on a daily basis.
In my opinion, this film’s message is about how your life won’t really change you and your personality in a 180 way that many movies portrays. Life is a mixture of happy and sad things, you will go through it, live through it, and heal from it like a scar, it will forever serve as a reminder of what you’ve been through and in the end, everything will go back to normal.
The most major example of this is Ting Ting, she was seduced by her friend’s off and on boyfriend, Fatty, who captured her heart and started her “teenage love” phase by going out on dates to the movies. But after being discarded by Fatty and going back to her friend, she is emotionally hurt intensely and even asks her comatose grandmother what has she done to deserve this. But after a while, she grows numb to the pain, she moves on and even tries to tell Fatty that they can still remain friends. After Ting Ting discovers that Fatty has committed a murder, the film makes you think that this might traumatise Ting Ting and change her life forever, but she really doesn’t change all that much, the event is just reduced to a joke and she just goes back to her house and take a nap after being interrogated by the police. She remains who she is just like the beginning of the film but became wiser than before.
The entire film builds upon their grandmother’s coma, how her death will forever change everything and impact their lives forever. But when her death really happened, nothing much really changes, it is a rather gentle and peaceful death instead. In the end, they cope with her death and grow into a more experienced version of themselves.
This film is also very strong love letter to cinema and films out there, telling us that what films do is “show people what they can’t see” through the side story of
Yang Yang. He spends the entire film trying to get a camera, takes many random shots of strangers and his own family’s back side of their heads, and then he reveals near the end that he wants to show people what they can’t see, and even the small line of his uncle that “we live three times as long since man have invented movies. It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life”, which perfectly encapsulates why I love watching films so much.
I personally felt a more personal connection to this film, because I’m Chinese, and this film really showed all the stereotypes of every single Chinese family members: The very superstitious uncle, the daughter with high expectations placed upon them just because she is in a prestigious school, the little son who is being bullied by his cousins for being small (that little son was me growing up), and many more.
Edward Yang must have been touched by god when he was writing this film, especially when he was writing Mr Ota, he was such a fascinating and powerful character that steals every scene he was in.