Sweet and beautiful popular chronicle, without zest of morbidity or tearful pathos, where each shot is received like a wonder and encourages a return to childhood.
Undisputed
figure of the Taiwanese new wave, alongside Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang had
the most important success of his career with Yi Yi. Over nearly three hours,
the filmmaker paints the existential wanderings of a Taipei family, suddenly
confronted with the specter of the death of their matriarch. However, if the
film is traversed by this announced disappearance, it is also one of the most
beautiful tributes that the cinema has paid to what makes its ultimate life:
life, the real one.
Contrary to
what his official synopsis would suggest, Yi Yi is not self-centered on one
character, who would be given a prominent place in the narrative compared to
others. On the contrary, he chooses to mix, with rare narrative agility, the
crossed paths of a father, his daughter and his son who will, each in their own
way, taste the many surprises and discoveries that existence has in store for
them.
In which we
first see N.J., a computer engineer, but above all in his forties consumed by
the regrets of his youthful passions, finding his first love by chance at a
party. His older sister, Ting-Ting, is a reserved teenager who struggles to
hatch as much as she struggles to make her green plant bloom; she comes to try
out the fleeting charms of feeling in love with a frivolous neighbor. The young
Yang-Yang, perhaps the most moving character in the film, presents himself as a
mischievous kid with eclectic hobbies: throwing a balloon filled with water at
an overwhelmed schoolmaster, practicing freediving in a sink, before discovering
a particular interest in photographing the necks of his comrades and relatives.
Above them hovers the peaceful shadow of the grandmother, near whom everyone
comes to confide, less in the perspective - as initially planned - of lulling
her sleep than of finding a certain rest of the soul.
If this
triptych of characters over three distinct generations appears to us through
the doubts specific to their age (and which can also be ours), we see them come
out grown with each answer obtained, even if this requires committing an
imprudence. Their respective peregrinations, far from making Yi Yi a choral
film, let alone a sketch film, coincide towards one and the same ambition: to
capture what makes the essence of a unique life.
In this
global project, everyone has a role to play. As a young Candide, Yang-Yang
takes hold of the visible abundantly, seeking to capture it and then pass on
his newly acquired knowledge: neck photos are nothing other than a means of
showing others what others cannot. see for himself. With unfailing curiosity,
he will never stop questioning those close to him about his deepest anxieties.
At older ages, where behaviors are more implicit, Ting-Ting and especially N.J
become the archetypes of beings for whom the slightest disturbance can shake up
a destiny, thanks to a greedy mise en scène for hidden evidence.
You can
hardly see anything of Taipei's architectural excess: barely the dim light from
the streetlights, sometimes a motorway slip road, a red light. A decor like
there are thousands of them around the world, which has become familiar to
everyone. However, this setting stands out in that it is designed in the image
of the protagonists, the most obvious sign being the large number of shots in
which the bodies are reflected by a window and are superimposed on the exterior
landscape. These reverberating surfaces, both obstacles and embrasures, become
the receptacle of everyone's torments, but also of their desire for freedom.
One of the strengths of Yang's filmmaking is to succeed in extracting from a
refined visual work (a lot of wide and still shots) all kinds of symbols which
thus come to reveal what a close-up camera cannot sketch.
The last film
of its author, who will disappear from cancer seven years later, Yi Yi is a
jewel of simplicity, which has no other ambition than to talk about life, its
doubts, its questions but also about his learning, and who does so with unmatched
elegance and sobriety. It is a humanist fresco that does not say its name:
tackling these little things that shake up an existence, Yang sets out in
search of universal values made possible by individual journeys.
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