Yi Yi (2000)
Completed in 1999, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi didn’t premiere until the spring of 2000.
The film’s immediate success, including a best director award at the Cannes Film Fest, sealed the director’s reputation as a major figure of the Taiwanese New Wave, which had emerged a decade earlier.
The wave’s other auteurs include Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-liang.
Yang shot his first movie at age 36, after spending years working in software in Seattle.
He died prematurely from cancer in 2007, which meant Yi Yi would be his last work, and one that now serves as his testament.
Its epic three-hour portrait of a multigenerational Taipei family in the midst of a crisis is filled with humor, romance, rage and despair.
It depicts the transformation of modern lives into material worthy of a great novel, captured by Yang in his masterly elliptical style.
A brilliant snapshot of its time, Yi Yi ushered in the 21st century with pessimism and some promise, empathy but not sympathy.
It’s a prime example of an artist using his visual and narrative powers to draw a particular world, which has been unfamiliar to most Western audiences.
