Yi Yi (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Film in the purest form
Once in a while you walk out of the theatre and you find yourself giving a big sigh. When that happens, it's not because you're tired about a movie you just have seen. On the contrary. In my case it means that I just experienced an artform that cannot be compared with any other kind of art. Yi Yi is a good example of this. For those who watch carefully, they will discover that the story of Yi Yi is not more than a saga, perhaps even a soap plot of a ordinary middle class family in Taipei. But those who have patience to go beyond the facade of the ordinary, they will see a movie dealing about individualism, childhood, commitments, second chances, urban loneliness, broken promises, families, despair and death. But Yi Yi also shows us the small qualities of life: humour, laugther, life questions posed by a diligent and intelligent young kid, first love, courage, the meaning of life and the search for happiness. But Yi Yi is told without the explosivity of American Beauty. Instead, we...

A slow-burning masterpiece
Ostensibly, Edward Yang's Yi Yi (A one and a two) is a movie focusing on a family in contemporary Taipei, living through exceptional and unexceptional challenges that any one of us might be confronted with. But what the film really succeeds in capturing through its characters and events is the enormity of human existence; the challenges and rewards of living on this earth. It does so in a slow, penetrating manner that works its magic during the film, but even more so once after the film has ended.

The movie is rich with well developed characters and subplots that justify its three hour length. Yet in the course of all the seemingly tumultuous events that take place, little changes in the long term once the credits roll. But then, everything has changed; the movie begins with a wedding, tosses in a birth in the middle, and ends with a funeral. In between all these greater moments are the smaller though no less important things in life that almost every one of us can relate to...

Art at its most inspired and inspiring
Cinema doesn't get any better than this. If you haven't seen this film then don't hesitate - buy the DVD right now, and play it when you're most in need of inspiration - it will dispel any doubts you might harbour about the power of film, the worth of art. The ability of Edward Yang to fuse imagination with, it must be assumed, an amazing honesty in reflecting upon his own life, to share what he holds most dear, and what evokes the most wonder, is something we, as an audience, can only marvel at and give thanks for. To say that 'Yi-Yi' inhabits the points of view of a child, an adolescent, an adult, a parent, a matriarch, the points of view of both male and female, that of the earnest, the honest, the ironic and idealistic, is to say that it truly touches upon life's richness. At one point in the film a character comments that films allow us to live life three times over, that's to say, they show us three times as much life as we could live by ourselves - most films give lie to...

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