Edward Yang’s tender, heart-rending Yi Yi is an epic whisper, a soft-spoken masterpiece that carefully observes the core members of the Jian family in the wake of the wedding of the family’s black sheep and an accident that puts the grandmother in a coma.  Shot almost entirely in medium and long shots with minimal camera movement, Yang allows the separate yet interrelated stories to come to life organically and mysteriously, always in tune with his characters humanity yet respectfully distant, providing them with an indelible inscrutability and a sovereignty upon which their creator does not impinge.  And yet, despite this, what Yang does show us is so full of compassion and an innate curiosity about and concern for the human condition that the result is not merely a fully realized portrait of family but, perhaps unwittingly, a treatise on modern existence and human relationships.  Lavish praise, I know, but this is unquestionably one of the most important films of the new millennium so forgive me for getting a little carried away.

The family’s patriarch, NJ, anchors the film in several ways - as the head of the family, the embodiment of Yang’s belief in human decency amidst inherent imperfections, and as a parallel to the changes his two children go through (Tin-Tin, a teenager coping with the thrills and disappointments of first love and Yang-Yang, a 9-year old struggling to comprehend his feelings towards an older female and developing a unique brand of artistic expression).  As NJ attempts to cultivate a working relationship with brilliant and personable Ota, the president of a company his company is considering purchasing, he fights the shallow short-sightedness of his co-workers who lean towards a less expensive imitation called Ato who also happens to be run by, much to the chagrin of NJ’s boss, a large-breasted woman.  NJ and Ota’s burgeoning friendship embodies Yang’s perspective that communication, both personal and professional, is becoming diluted, rendered secondary amidst the speed with which the modern world moves and changes.  It is this quandary that every character meets down the line, resulting in an array of comic and tragic outcomes.

As one can tell from the film’s title, the reversal of the business name and many of the characters names (there’s also a Li-Li and Min-Min), doubling, repetition and reflections play a critical role in the film.  Even Yang-Yang’s obsession with taking pictures of the back of people’s heads in effort “to show them what they can’t see” is explicitly linked to Yang’s thesis on the dual nature of our lives – the possible outcomes vs. the actual ones, what we see vs. what we don’t, our ideals vs. the reality of putting those ideals into practice, the real vs. the fake and so on.  This theme is coded is nearly every aspect of the film, from its structure to its visual scheme.  Characters are often shot through glass windows with faint reflections of what opposes them in a deceptively subtle attempt to capture what is both in and out of the frame, using the camera to embody this duality and the depth of reality not captured in a typical shot.  The faint “reflected reality” overlying reality itself is also indicative of the motif of doubles and repetition, most notably through NJ’s encounters with an old flame where he discovers another possible path his life could have taken.  In a remarkably bold and humane gesture, Yang doesn’t allow NJ to wallow in regret and instead, and fortunately without going so far as to suggest divine forces or predestination of any form, presents his characters as the totality of their experiences and these other possibilities not as missed opportunities, but rather opportunities to examine ones own happiness and self-worth on the path to a better understanding of ones place in the world.