Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

tieman64 "People adore fences, but Nature doesn't give a hoot. Solitude is a human presumption." - Barbara Kingslover Like all of Edward Yang's pictures, "Yi Yi" is set in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Framed by a wedding and a funeral, and so union and separation, the film charts the trials and tribulations of at least four generations of Taiwanese men, women and children. Translated into English, Yang's title means "one one", or "each one".The film itself is preoccupied with "ones". Though Yang immerses us in a tapestry of relationships, each of his characters remain irrevocably alone. There's a dying grandmother, two schoolgirls, several men, women, husbands, wives, co-workers, past lovers...a smörgåsbord of interpersonal but impersonal drama. Everyone's oblivious to everyone else, forever trapped in their own private boxes."We haven't yet surpassed fighting and killing games because we haven't fully understood ourselves," a character says. "Yi Yi" itself posits human suffering as a failure of both perception and self-reflexivity. Our characters don't know what they want, why they hurt, act, how others see them or why and how others feel. Rectifying this is a character called Yang Yang, a precious eight year old who delights in taking photographs of "hidden" and "invisible things", including the backs of the heads of others. "You can't see it," he says, "I'm helping you." It is through Yang Yang that Edward Yang develops the film's autobiographical subplot. He turns the film's eight year old into a miniature version of himself, a budding sage who explores the catacombs of Taiwan and stumbles upon profundities which everyone else ignores. "Can we only know half the truth?" the kid asks, and resolves to become a photographer, determined to push the limits of human perspective.More than Yang's previous films – most of which are essentially Antonioni with rice - "Yi Yi" portrays contemporary capitalism as alienating, isolating and conducive of depression. "I'm never happy," one character mourns. "How can we be happy when we don't love what we do?" comes the reply. The World Health Organisation itself estimates that depression will be the second largest contributor to global death/disease by 2020, but such rates in urban Japan and China are already exorbitantly high; the very conditions capitalism requires negatively impacts children and workers.But if Antonioni is noxious and suffocating, "Yi Yi" portrays a more beautiful form of alienation. Yang's film is filled with boxes, squares, human beings immaculately framed by walls, windows, doorways or lost in the aural cocoons afforded by headphones. Lovers meet under bridges, humans pass one another in hallways, brush anonymous shoulders in elevators or hang suspended above highways in their pressure-cooker apartments. Yang's urban spaces are harsh, but beautiful, with sprinkles of green and patches of warm blacks and red. With Yang, characters and environment seem inseparable. Often his static shots of places and spaces seem more interesting, and thrilling, than the human beings who mope before them. Elsewhere his images evoke Edward Hopper ("Night on the El Train", "The Wine Shop", "Automat", "Night Windows", "House at Dusk", "New York Movie"), with their obsessions with layered windows and frames within frames.Like Robert Altman's "Short Cuts", Yang has scenes bleed into or foreshadow others. Unlike Altman, these connections are obvious: the laughter of one sequence morphs into the cries heard in the next, a husband's recounting of his romantic past is inter-cut with his daughter's baby steps into first love, and the sound of a thunderstorm on a school presentation becomes the literal raindrops which assault a street corner."Overfeeding may not improve growth. It may hamper reproductive drives. Some of you can't bloom," a teacher says, a speech with speaks to the ills of Yang's cast, but also bleeds into the very next sequence. Here a child is gestating, the baby's ultrasound image echoing the teacher's words: "It begins to acquire signs of human life." "Yi Yi" ends with the death of a grandmother, a moment of mysticism borrowed from Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu Monogatari". The woman's death, which corresponds to the birth of the aforementioned child, shatters everyone, but also, for the first time in the film, unifies Yang's cast in their suffering. Private, differing anguishes then become one singular anguish, at which point Yang Yang delivers a little metaphorical monologue in which he urges people to "listen", "discover where others went", "tell everyone" and "bring others to visit". The film then ends on a note of irony. If opening scenes portray alienation amidst a social gathering, Yang's climax portrays hugs and kisses at an event in which humans are brought to be torn apart. Twos become ones, divisions become erased, though only in a fanciful sense. Taipei is Taipei and nothing's changed. "I feel old," Yang Yang says. Edward Yang died of cancer in 2007. "Yi Yi" was his last picture.8.5/10 – Overlong but exquisitely shot. See "The Devil Probably" and "La Chinoise".

Ilpo Hirvonen Just as South-Korea so has Taiwan risen to the world of cinema in the beginning of the 21st century and Yi yi (A One and a Two) by Edward Yang is one of the top films of Taiwan. Many critics, magazines and sites have listed Yi yi in the lists of the best films of the decade and due to that the film has gained quite a reputation. But the reputation doesn't mean that this would be an easy treat or a pretentious art-house flick. Win of the best director at Cannes and plenty of other trophies for Edward Yang have just proved how talented he is. Just as in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) in Yi yi the situations build around family rituals; weddings, funerals, births and divorces. But at once I must say that one cannot even compare Yi yi with Magnolia, many have but I think they're competing on very different calibers. Yi yi is much more insightful, impressionistic and intimate compared to its western companion.An honest man, who is the shareholder of an IT company hears that his mother in law has sunk into a coma the same day his brother in law is getting married. This shakes his family, which includes his wife, his 8-year-old son and a teenage daughter. The doctor recommends them to keep company for her and different kind of confessions and explanations bond the stories of the characters together.Yi yi is a family saga, a chronicle and a study of the agony caused by performance pressures. Most of the story is set near a high block of flats and the halls of it, which is full of rich residents. Edward Yang's film is a fascination of impressionistic imagery; the reflections on the windows, the precisely considered pictures to the silhouette of high buildings and the traffic jams. His 'mise-en-scene' is amazingly well handled and he comes close to Bressonian geographic perfection where each image has a meaning. As Eric Rohmer has said film is art of state and the state of Yang's film tells us about rootlessness and agony. The visuality of Yi yi is very subtle - Yang uses a lot of inappropriate long shots when he shows us the chores of his characters, outside the room, behind the window filled with distressing reflections of the city and the traffic. So the postmodern architecture works as a way for Yang to tell us something about the lives of the characters.Edward Yang's film is a quality film for its style, but also for its purpose and contents. It's quite a philosophical film filled with ontological riddles: How can we see the whole truth, why am I me and not you. Yi yi is a film about generations and it forces the middle-aged characters to stop for a while and think about their lives; the choices made and the consequences to come. It challenges its viewer to think about the eternal question, the meaning of life and in an unique way.The urban aesthetics of Yi yi is gorgeous and the fascination Edward Yang feels for the high buildings, traffic and reflections is astonishing. At times the way he uses the state of film, resembles me of Jacques Tati's Play Time (1967). Filled with beautiful, gorgeous images Yi yi is a film about life and reality. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Yi yi truly is an 'Imitation of Life' and sometimes an imitation can be greater than life itself.One and a two.. what does the easy dilemma of one plus two equal. It certainly sounds easy but perhaps it's not. The meaning of life - the eternal dilemma. Edward Yang doesn't offer any answers for his audience but he does give a lot of thinking to do, while he is studying the dilemma himself. Yi yi is without a doubt a great film for its content, style, philosophy and purpose.

Eternality The passing of a great filmmaker is always greeted with sadness. Edward Yang was no exception. One of the most influential of Taiwanese filmmakers, Yang belonged to a class of film directors whose films resonated strongly with the society he lived in. He made a number of pictures during the 1990s, but his most lasting legacy was Yi Yi, a film released at the turn of the century (or millennium if you will), which, through the perspective of a single, but extended, middle-class Taiwanese family, provided viewers with an honest and insightful reflection of living in a modern, technological age.Structured around three very important cultural ceremonies, namely the wedding, the baby shower, and the funeral, the film brings as many characters as possible to the fore, and then breaks them up into smaller "units" for an in-depth study of their lives. This congregation and dissection of characters is the reason Yang's film is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to see a slice of themselves on screen, portrayed to a very realistic effect.Expertly developed, the elaborative narrative may seem deceptively complex but it is really just a series of simple observations of daily occurrences spliced together on film. Shot with honest objectivity, Yang's film sometimes also spotlights on the subjective emotions of certain characters, most notably that of Yang Yang (a somewhat reserved boy with a camera), his school-going sister (who discovers the fleeting emotion of love for the first time), and their morally-guided father (a mid-level boss of a corporation who meets an old flame).Of course, in a film like Yi Yi, which spans nearly three hours, these characters are multi-dimensionally developed. So much occur in their lives that their ups and downs captured in Yang's film are merely a "cross-sectional" view of their current circumstance. Apart from the above-mentioned cultural ceremonies, another common point that ties all the three main characters together is the grandmother, who suffers a nasty fall and enters into a coma. Interestingly, the unresponsive grandmother becomes sort of a "human mechanism" for catharsis, especially for the father and the daughter.Yang Yang, on the other hand, refuses to talk to his grandmother. He reasons that she is old and would probably know everything he would say, so why bother telling her things that she already understands. His relationship, or the seemingly lack of one, with her would become immensely meaningful towards the end of the film, cumulating in Yi Yi's most touching and thought-provoking moment – the recitation of a piece of self-written text by Yang Yang to his dead grandmother during her funeral.In quite a number of scenes, director Yang employs long shots to keep viewers a certain distance away from the characters. Although we could hear the (slightly fainter) dialogue, we are unable to observe the subtle facial reactions that would help us to register the feelings of these characters. In other instances, Yang uses mediated images, like that of a security camera, to capture the movements of the characters, highlighting the increase in surveillance in today's society.Yang also makes use of glass panels (of windows, doors, and walls) to create a "double-screen" effect. These glass panels give an added screen to the lens of the camera, further separating the viewer from the actors, forcing upon us the role of a "contemplative observer" as opposed to being a "willing participant" in the lives of these characters. The dual reflection of objects within and outside these glass panels sometimes produce naturally superimposed images; this is most beautiful during scenes shot in the night.I feel that Yi Yi's most important message comes from Yang Yang's camera, which is given to him by his father. He takes pictures of the back of people's heads, reasoning that these are images that people could never see, and explaining that a person's view of the world is always halved (i.e. never complete) because of this. This change in social perspective from an innocent boy after receiving the camera parallels that of the director's use of the film medium to reveal that life is often treated with so much subjectivity that an objective worldview is sometimes difficult for us to fathom. In three hours, Yang conveys that message very convincingly. But three hours is never enough for something that often takes us a lifetime to recognize. There is a word for it – it's called wisdom.SCORE: 9/10 (www.filmnomenon.blogspot.com) All rights reserved!

kalala Delicate and gorgeously filmed meditation on how we make meaning at different stages of life. Interlocking stories are full of interest--an unplanned pregnancy and marriage, a sudden illness, dramas at work and school-but the engine of the movie is not the many-petaled narrative but an underlying quest to, as the little son of the narrative focus puts it, "see what you see and have you see what I see." Among the overlapping parts of the story are the contrast between a family driven by impulse and belief in luck and one where each choice is done with humility and thought; an elderly parent's coma pushes family members into an existential crisis; teen rebellion and teen love as a fragile tremulous flower, not a gaudy explosion; an old love--rediscovered--and the reason it ended rediscovered. While one family member literally retreats to a mountaintop to be with a guru (who in the end is as disappointing as the comatose materfamilias) others find insight from a video game designer and revelation in images of the napes of necks. We saw this three days ago and I am still replaying scenes mentally. If you have never seen this, put it at the top of your Netflix list NOW.