“We live three times as long since man invented movies. We get twice in movies what we get from life.” --Fatty (Pang Chan Yu), in Yi Yi.
This is a movie to behold. It is a movie to look at. Should I judge it by its presumed aims, Yi Yi is a mixed success, but defining its aims is no sure thing. At just under three hours, it's too long, but it's too long in the way War & Peace is too long: you might not feel interested in everything being said to you as it veers away from the expected narrative, but you pay attention anyway, allowing the storyteller to meander, and it's worth your time to be pulled along in this way. What's deeply interesting is that something is happening within the characters, and you can see it on the screen.
It is shot with great care for how windows and doors frame the screen. Many movies show you spaces and places. This one shows them and frames them. People interact with one another from adjoining rooms. The main character, N.J. (Nien-Jen Wu), is taciturn. He lives in adjoining metaphorical space. Visually, he appears through a doorway or gazing out of a window. Constitutionally, he is inert. Private thoughts circulate beneath his visage on the screen, and in the silences within the dialog. He is eminently watchable, while he does nothing. His face is thoughtful and intelligent, but it offers few clues to what's inside. I found myself identifying with him, and rooting for him to make a great change, to break the bonds of his business and marriage. I was equally concerned with the wreck that could follow, because N.J.'s life feels more real than most movie lives, and bold changes in real life do some damage. Suffering awaits him no matter what he chooses. N.J. is on a knife's edge, as you sense while he watches his partners or his wife from a distance just far enough to be reserved, close enough to share intimate space, a small man, elegant in his slightly large suit.
One scene stood out to me. N.J.'s wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin) needs a break. She can't stand the banality of her daily existence. As she thinks this through, she stands in a darkened conference room, and we see her from the outside, through a window. The city is reflected in the window, divided into quadrants of activity, traffic in one, other offices in another. Behind her, colleagues cluster under florescent lights. The world buzzes around her in its normal courses while she stands in shadow and decides on a change. It's a wonderfully crafted take. Your eye travels everywhere over the screen, pulling in each of the scenes layered on top of one another through tricks of outside glass and a partially backlit room.
Another slow scene consists only of shots of the city from a moving train. Travelling, we take an interest in the non-travellers around us. We are transitioning through space. They belong here. They are doing something. Their lights are on. They are working, or watching television. They are with loved ones. As N.J. travels to his crisis, we watch the rest of the world doing their rest of the world thing. This is the conceit of movement and change: we imagine ourselves moving and changing while nothing else does. In the end, these characters change less than was hinted at, a serious flaw in fiction, but not necessarily in life.
