Edward Yang

(On Cable TV, March 2021) I am really not the best audience in the world for a middle-class domestic foreign melodrama that runs nearly three hours, But Yi Yi has convinced enough movie critics of its greatness that it features on the best-of lists that I’m using to guide my movie education, and that’s how I ended up sitting through it all (albeit in several sittings over several days). It does end up being quietly interesting in how it takes us into the life of a Taiwanese family experiencing several crises — the elderly grandma is paralyzed, the mother can’t deal with the stress and leaves for a Buddhist retreat; the father flirts with renewing a past relationship; the daughter has relationship issues; and the youngest son is experimenting with photography. If that feels like a lot, you have no idea of the wilder subplots at the edges of the narrative, perhaps best exemplified by a murder and the arrest of a supporting character; and the humiliation and suicide attempt of another. This being said, don’t expect much drama in this drama — not when it’s diluted in several hours’ worth of static footage, artistic intentions and unspectacular slice-of-life cinematography. Writer-director Edward Yang was going for something very specific in Yi Yi and probably achieved it, but it’s not a given that audiences will have the fortitude to sit through it all with undivided attention. I didn’t, and ended up doing so reluctantly. I probably would have enjoyed a radically cut-down version of the film, even acknowledging that this would probably destroy what makes this film so great to others. Despite the torpid pacing, there are things I did like — from a cinematographic perspective, there are some really interesting moments, including a dramatic scene that plays out as an audio drama over a static shot. Still, I’m not volunteering to watch Yi Yi ever again — I got the point a few minutes in, and the next three hours only repeated it.