Review of Yi Yi (2000) by Viet Phuong N — 03 Jul 2015

For films like this, it is actually unnecessary to "review" or "analyse", as nothing is more common in the world than the humanist care that people give each other. By that, of course I do not mean that "Yi Yi" is a perfect film, as it is surely less accessible than the great works by Edward Yang's compatriot - Ang Lee, whose view and thoughts are equally humanist but more "global" (some may say "Westernised").

Luckily enough for me, being born in the "Sinosphere", Edward Yang's "Yi Yi" to me is utterly oriental with a deeply Buddhist sense of Prat?tyasamutpada, in simpler words the close and dependent relationship between people, between past and present, between life and death.

The way Edward Yang unveiled his interconnected layers of human stories in "Yi Yi" is utterly charming, soothing, yet it still makes the audience delightfully surprised by the subtle reflection of one generation's destiny on its successor's, by numerous abrupt turns or terminations of such stories, often through obscurity and blurriness of details.

I was deeply fascinated by the fact that Edward Yang in some cases concealed important details or outcomes of his stories from the audience, or only let them know in a very "hear-say", indirect ways that really reflect the fact that as our back (the physical back that is), there are plenty of things in life that we cannot see, ever, just like the future, just like how people really think about us, just like our ultimate destiny in life, no matter how wise we are, no matter how "far-sight" we try to be.

Thus, the best thing we can do is to "cover" the back of our beloved ones by our love, true love, just like the small but ever wise Yang-Yang, who in his simple but dearest way takes pictures of whom he loves, from their back, so that they would never have to die without knowing how their back really looks like.

It was a huge lost to the Taiwanese cinema, and the global cinema actually, when Yang died too early from cancer, but he will always be remembered for his humanist films, especially this "Last Bow", the best "bow" possible to the audience that is.