Yi Yi

13/01/2026

Film    Download PDF  

Structuring the Image

Edward Yang’s sprawling state-of-the-nation film was part of a wave during the 1990s and into the early 2000s that may have  properly started with Short Cuts and included Crash, Wonderland, 71 Fragments of a Chronicle of Chance, Code Inconnu, and could also include Amores Perros and Pulp Fiction. Some would trace its roots to directors like Jean Renoir with Rules of the Game in 1939, and others might see that Altman was a master of its form long before Short Cuts – most especially Nashville in 1975. As David Bordwell says, ‘‘though there are some examples earlier in film history, that storytelling model had a sustained burst after Altman popularised it in Nashville (1975). Other filmmakers took it up, especially in the 1990s (Before the Rain, Exotica, Go, Pulp Fiction, etc.) and the 2000s (Babel, Dog Days, Love Actually). I don’t seem to see so many nowadays.’’ (Observations on Film Art) It seemed to emerge chiefly out of a given era, and this was perhaps a moment when film wanted to understand society as a structure, but still to hold on to the importance of characterisation. Some of the great 60/70s films about structural forces often played out more abstractly and especially in films by Miklos Jancso. In The Red and the White, The Confrontation and Red Psalm, the Hungarian director was interested in historical sweep; most of the network narrative works are more interested in human stories. Yet whether offering the rigour of Jancso or the warmth of Yang, they could all be deemed structuralist if we keep in mind the importance of looking at the films through an approach which always focuses on various broader forces. In Yi. Yi, Yang is interested in family structures, work structures and societal structures, seeing how they dovetail in ways that develop narrative and envelop the characters.
There are many ways into the question of structuralism, a movement at its most popular during the 1960s and 1970s, one that showed Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and others insistently arguing that the agency of the individual was weak and instead that structures dictated what we think and how we act. One might believe a person can think anything they like, but Foucault proposed one does so within structured possibilities, as he spoke about an archeology of knowledge: ‘‘The key idea of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault’s terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.’’ (Stanford)
By looking structurally at Yi Yi, we can see an inner circle, a secondary circle and an outer one. The inner circle is the family unit, the secondary one is work and school, and the outer one, more nebulous, society at large. These are important dimensions of the work; otherwise, the film risks the soap opera dimension that the worst of the network narratives adopt, as the story moves from character to character to keep the action enlivened, but without much sense of narrative or thematic development. A soap’s purpose is to keep us engaged in various conflicts, spats and dilemmas, with a heightening of events before a commercial break and a greater one at the end of each show. A film that offers a similar dramatic focus would be playing to the rules of standardised television when it has at its disposal the concentrated attention of viewers, and with a screen many times the size of a TV. Taking into account what philosopher Stanley Cavell says of TV, film is a viewing experience and TV a monitering one. Cavell sees television as ‘an aesthetic procedure in which the basis of a medium is acknowledged primarily by the format rather than primarily by its instantations. (The Fact of Television) Andre Bazin said something similar when saying he found the image far too imperfect and noted, This imperfection and the image’s small size do not allow us to consider TV as a plastic art.’’ (Andre Bazin’s New Media) Bazin was writing in the 1950s; Cavell’s remark was from the 1980s. Television has changed a lot since then, but nevertheless Will Tavlin would probably agree that TV may have increasingly become streaming content, but the problem hasn’t gone away. If anything, it has been exacerbated as cinema becomes part of what is called ‘casual viewing’. While films made with cinema in mind are expected to have efficient editing, cinematography and scripts (no matter if they didn’t always manage to achieve them), Tavlin proposes that it is hardly an aspiration in many works that are funded by and end up on various streaming services like Netflix. ‘’Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is ‘have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.’” (N Plus 1) Since watching stuff on the small screen is monitering, rather than viewing (to use Cavell’s term), then why concern oneself with the art and and craft of filmmaking, especially when such features require the concentration many are not going to give the streaming platforms? It is evident in the now-famous euphemistic phrase: Netflix and chill. Casual viewing gives way to casual sex, and the attention is clearly elsewhere.
The risk for network narrative films was that they were absorbing television techniques into cinematic situations, and allowing the viewer to watch inattentively a handful of stories taking place without feeling the need to invest too strongly in any of them. In many of the better ones, this was resolved by thematic control; in the weaker ones, by contingent demand, relying on coincidences that could make a large city seem like a small town, especially if a lot of things happen in a short period. Paul Haggis’s Crash is perhaps the most extreme example, rotoscoping various characters and events into a forty-eight-hour time frame, one that contracts temporality but stretches credulity.
If Yi Yi is one of the finest, this rests at least partly on its structural preoccupations, its interest in seeing that any crosscutting between stories needs to be less about eradicating the risk of viewer boredom than bringing out the interweaving of the familial, the institutionally societal, and the broadly social. Opening on a wedding and closing on a funeral, in between we follow chiefly the complicated life of NJ (played by Wu Nien-jen), whose mother-in-law falls into a coma and is initially looked after at home by his wife, who then leaves for a mountain retreat. He is left to take care of his mother, his daughter and his son, all the while dealing with complications at work. His colleagues are also old friends, and in modern Taiwanese society, these friends believe that old values needn’t apply. When the company asks NJ to negotiate with a Japanese businessman, others afterwards propose that they can work with another company that is cheaper and plagiarises the Japanese man’s product. In Tapei, NJ and the businessman spend an evening in honest conversation, and NJ can see this is a man of decent values who takes risks because he wants to innovate rather than conform. He feels he is letting the man down, and a gap opens up between NJ and his colleagues that seems to close again when NJ is asked at short notice to take off to Japan, where he also meets up with a Taiwanese woman who flies in from the States; a woman NJ broke up with after college, and the love is still there. For various reasons, it doesn’t work out, and nor does the business deal as the company reneges once again, and NJ resigns.
All the while, the story also follows his son Yang-Yang’s mistreatment by a teacher and the other kids at school, and also shows the boy’s introspective ingenuity that pays off thematically later. The film, too, explores NJ’s teenage daughter, Ting-Ting’s, relationship with her best friend, as well as her burgeoning affair with this friend’s ex-boyfriend. The mother becomes an absent character for most of the film and only returns near the conclusion, as more time is given over to the troublesome brother-in-law, A-Di, NJ’s colleague at work, who gets married at the beginning of the film and makes a hash of both his personal and professional life.
Perhaps offering all this detail gives the reader some idea of how easily, in plot terms, a network narrative film can fall into cumbersome cross-cutting, but Yang avoids predictable curiosity by insisting that the form remains reflective and that the theme is, throughout, insistently active. This means that Yang never quite gets involved in the stories he tells, determined to keep a distance, one that acknowledges limited purviews. It is a point Yang-Yang makes when speaking to his father. The boy notes that if he ‘can’t see what you see and you can’t see what I see, can we know only half the truth?’ Yang might be inclined to agree with the boy, and though network narrative films often give the impression they can go anywhere and tell us anything, the Taiwanese director can see that even if we change the point of view, we are still limited to that point of view. We see this strongly as Ting-Ting tries to make sense of both her own feelings and those of the friend whose ex-boyfriend, Fatty, she starts seeing after the friend and Fatty break up.
Ting-Ting witnesses a spat between the girl and her mother when it transpires that the mother has been sleeping with the girl’s teacher, and Ting-Ting looks on. Some might see the friend overreacting; the mother’s love life is her own business, even if it happens to be the daughter’s teacher. Late in the film, Ting-Ting passes Fatty outside her apartment block, and he is screaming at Ting-Ting, though Ting-Ting has done nothing wrong. By the end of the film, Fatty will have killed the teacher – the friend and the teacher were having an affair, making sense of the friend’s strong reaction to her mother’s lover (who was also hers), and makes sense also of Fatty’s rant that seems to have no point, but that we may retrospectively assume is rage as he discovers his girlfriend’s affair with the teacher,.
We come to understand events through Ting-Ting’s point of view, but it remains partial, slightly inexplicable, because the viewer makes sense of what has happened as if half-blind to the causality of events, with Ting-Ting witnessing only various snippets. If the TV soap usually moves from one character to another, and constantly makes us privy to their lives, Yang proposes that lives are secret things which remain partially hidden from oneself and half-hidden from everybody else. At the end of the film, we don’t know for sure what Ting-Ting’s feelings have been for Fatty, and don’t know whether Fatty started seeing Ting-Ting to make the friend jealous, as revenge for dating the teacher, or because he very much liked her. When Ting-Ting and Fatty go to a hotel room, shortly after they arrive, he leaves, feeling things aren’t right.
Yet this limiting of knowledge is also central to the film’s structural concerns, if we view structuralism in this context to mean no more than a character’s agency viewed as secondary to the forces playing upon them. This distanced approach to events that Yang adopts becomes a critical eye on society at large. When Denis Zhou says that ‘‘Doors, windows, and the grids of streets and buildings frequently orient his scenes; his signature shot is of two or more characters separated by a door frame, their physical isolation from one another bespeaking larger social, romantic, or intergenerational chasms’’ (New York Review of Books), this may be a feature of much of his work (Taipei Story, Terrorizers, A Brighter Summer Day), but it can be very useful in creating a gap between character specificity and a look at how society functions at a given moment. The structure of family, work (or school) and broader forces are evident, as these forces play out on families and in work environments. If A-Di is incapable of keeping his marriage together and his finances in order, this could be seen as no more than an individual’s failings. But that isn’t quite how Yang presents it, with the suggestion that, rather than A-Di being a societal anomaly, characters who express virtue are more likely to be the odd ones out. Everybody who works with NJ sees him as a person who stupidly honours loyalty over pragmatics. They don’t believe they are messing the Japanese businessman around; they are looking for the simplest and quickest way to make money. If they can use a knock-off product, no matter the promises NJ has made, then that is all to the good. Even A-Di’s suicide attempt appears less an act of personal responsibility than a reflection of his temporary social failure. He has made a hash of his life, having cheated on his spouse and got into debt, but the attempted suicide, while not presented farcically, is at the same time not quite treated seriously. His wife returns to the apartment, comments on the mess, and finds a lot more of it when she breaks the bathroom door down and finds him unconscious. Yang films the scene with no sense of urgency in the form, as he eschews point-of-view shots and rapid camera movement, instead offering glacial observation.
This seems less cynicism at work than a sense of perspective at play. A-Di is caught in a nouveau riche life, and the camera shows that this is what A-Di is so afraid of losing. When A-Di’s wife sobs and sobs as he returns to consciousness, Yang’s camera stays removed, as if to get in too close would turn the social critique into a personal tale. A-Di’s spouse is a trophy wife who is always well-turned out, and they live in an apartment that NJ can’t help but comment on when he first sees it. It has art on the walls, sculptures on the floor and golf clubs at the entrance. But all this is built on debt, with the place contrasted with NJ’s much humbler home. The reserve Yang adopts here may be consistent with his general style, but it also brings out well the critical distance that allows one to see this as more than a personal tragedy. It is just as much a social reflection.
Yang proposes there is an observational aspect to this style, saying ‘‘close-ups are the least effective mode of expression because they only give you facial expression, whereas any subtle movement — in the hand, in the body, in your posture, or in the way that a person walks — gives more information to the viewer than just the facial.” (IndieWire) This is true, but in the scene described above, the camera is at such a distance that it is more about the environment than the people in it. We notice this when A-Di’s wife looks for him in the apartment, and the camera, instead of following her, retreats behind walls and pillars to give us the luxurious space. The film implies that the gap between A-Di’s aspirations, bought on hock, and the reality that leaves him desperate and suicidal, is enormous, with the camera reflecting broadly on the culture that leaves NJ in a more compact space than his brother-in-law, though NJ plays by the rules and A-Di has a habit of defying them. It is indeed a Confucian Confusion (the name of an earlier Yang film), with the one inclined to follow traditional values likely to suffer as a consequence in this materialist Taiwan.
Of course, NJ would be unlikely to envy A-Di’s life, but he is clearly frustrated by a value system where one’s word is no longer one’s bond, and where he can feel close to a stranger who acts agreeably, and distant from a family member who acts so irresponsibly. This suggests that Yang is a moralist, and he may well be, but his approach to form indicates more that he is interested in the structure of a life rather than its ethos, or more that its ethos comes out of the structures one lives by. We might say A-Di succumbs to the materialism of the environment and that NJ resists, but that we say A-Di succumbs and NJ resists, rather than that A-Di defies and NJ conforms, makes clear what the accepted values Yang explores are in late 1990s Taiwan, where over the previous few decades people’s economic lives had improved enormously. ‘‘The Taiwan Miracle was a period in the late 20th century when Taiwan’s economy experienced an unprecedented growth rate, with the country also witnessing rapid industrialization,’ Joseph Kiprop noted. ‘‘Taiwan’s Gross National Product recorded an explosive growth of a staggering 360% from 1965-1986. Even more impressive was the country’s global industrial production output, which grew by 680% in the 1965-1986 period.’’ (World Atlas) The important thing in Yi Yi isn’t that Yang judges morally A-Di, but more a society that shows a burst of wealth, based on growth, which can be regarded as pragmatic, what NJ believes to be dubious. Equally, when Yang-Yang is bullied at school, both by the teacher and fellow pupils, and Fatty kills a teacher sleeping with his girlfriend’s daughter, this is part of a broader malaise. However, if told in a soap opera fashion, the structure would be less evident than the immediate drama. By cross-cutting between various stories, yet containing the events within a broader frame that is both the theme the film searches out and the form it takes, Yang would seem to have escaped the televisual and manages to convey the structural.
 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Yi Yi

Structuring the Image

Edward Yang’s sprawling state-of-the-nation film was part of a wave during the 1990s and into the early 2000s that may have  properly started with Short Cuts and included Crash, Wonderland, 71 Fragments of a Chronicle of Chance, Code Inconnu, and could also include Amores Perros and Pulp Fiction. Some would trace its roots to directors like Jean Renoir with Rules of the Game in 1939, and others might see that Altman was a master of its form long before Short Cuts – most especially Nashville in 1975. As David Bordwell says, ‘‘though there are some examples earlier in film history, that storytelling model had a sustained burst after Altman popularised it in Nashville (1975). Other filmmakers took it up, especially in the 1990s (Before the Rain, Exotica, Go, Pulp Fiction, etc.) and the 2000s (Babel, Dog Days, Love Actually). I don’t seem to see so many nowadays.’’ (Observations on Film Art) It seemed to emerge chiefly out of a given era, and this was perhaps a moment when film wanted to understand society as a structure, but still to hold on to the importance of characterisation. Some of the great 60/70s films about structural forces often played out more abstractly and especially in films by Miklos Jancso. In The Red and the White, The Confrontation and Red Psalm, the Hungarian director was interested in historical sweep; most of the network narrative works are more interested in human stories. Yet whether offering the rigour of Jancso or the warmth of Yang, they could all be deemed structuralist if we keep in mind the importance of looking at the films through an approach which always focuses on various broader forces. In Yi. Yi, Yang is interested in family structures, work structures and societal structures, seeing how they dovetail in ways that develop narrative and envelop the characters.
There are many ways into the question of structuralism, a movement at its most popular during the 1960s and 1970s, one that showed Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and others insistently arguing that the agency of the individual was weak and instead that structures dictated what we think and how we act. One might believe a person can think anything they like, but Foucault proposed one does so within structured possibilities, as he spoke about an archeology of knowledge: ‘‘The key idea of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault’s terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.’’ (Stanford)
By looking structurally at Yi Yi, we can see an inner circle, a secondary circle and an outer one. The inner circle is the family unit, the secondary one is work and school, and the outer one, more nebulous, society at large. These are important dimensions of the work; otherwise, the film risks the soap opera dimension that the worst of the network narratives adopt, as the story moves from character to character to keep the action enlivened, but without much sense of narrative or thematic development. A soap’s purpose is to keep us engaged in various conflicts, spats and dilemmas, with a heightening of events before a commercial break and a greater one at the end of each show. A film that offers a similar dramatic focus would be playing to the rules of standardised television when it has at its disposal the concentrated attention of viewers, and with a screen many times the size of a TV. Taking into account what philosopher Stanley Cavell says of TV, film is a viewing experience and TV a monitering one. Cavell sees television as ‘an aesthetic procedure in which the basis of a medium is acknowledged primarily by the format rather than primarily by its instantations. (The Fact of Television) Andre Bazin said something similar when saying he found the image far too imperfect and noted, This imperfection and the image’s small size do not allow us to consider TV as a plastic art.’’ (Andre Bazin’s New Media) Bazin was writing in the 1950s; Cavell’s remark was from the 1980s. Television has changed a lot since then, but nevertheless Will Tavlin would probably agree that TV may have increasingly become streaming content, but the problem hasn’t gone away. If anything, it has been exacerbated as cinema becomes part of what is called ‘casual viewing’. While films made with cinema in mind are expected to have efficient editing, cinematography and scripts (no matter if they didn’t always manage to achieve them), Tavlin proposes that it is hardly an aspiration in many works that are funded by and end up on various streaming services like Netflix. ‘’Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is ‘have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.’” (N Plus 1) Since watching stuff on the small screen is monitering, rather than viewing (to use Cavell’s term), then why concern oneself with the art and and craft of filmmaking, especially when such features require the concentration many are not going to give the streaming platforms? It is evident in the now-famous euphemistic phrase: Netflix and chill. Casual viewing gives way to casual sex, and the attention is clearly elsewhere.
The risk for network narrative films was that they were absorbing television techniques into cinematic situations, and allowing the viewer to watch inattentively a handful of stories taking place without feeling the need to invest too strongly in any of them. In many of the better ones, this was resolved by thematic control; in the weaker ones, by contingent demand, relying on coincidences that could make a large city seem like a small town, especially if a lot of things happen in a short period. Paul Haggis’s Crash is perhaps the most extreme example, rotoscoping various characters and events into a forty-eight-hour time frame, one that contracts temporality but stretches credulity.
If Yi Yi is one of the finest, this rests at least partly on its structural preoccupations, its interest in seeing that any crosscutting between stories needs to be less about eradicating the risk of viewer boredom than bringing out the interweaving of the familial, the institutionally societal, and the broadly social. Opening on a wedding and closing on a funeral, in between we follow chiefly the complicated life of NJ (played by Wu Nien-jen), whose mother-in-law falls into a coma and is initially looked after at home by his wife, who then leaves for a mountain retreat. He is left to take care of his mother, his daughter and his son, all the while dealing with complications at work. His colleagues are also old friends, and in modern Taiwanese society, these friends believe that old values needn’t apply. When the company asks NJ to negotiate with a Japanese businessman, others afterwards propose that they can work with another company that is cheaper and plagiarises the Japanese man’s product. In Tapei, NJ and the businessman spend an evening in honest conversation, and NJ can see this is a man of decent values who takes risks because he wants to innovate rather than conform. He feels he is letting the man down, and a gap opens up between NJ and his colleagues that seems to close again when NJ is asked at short notice to take off to Japan, where he also meets up with a Taiwanese woman who flies in from the States; a woman NJ broke up with after college, and the love is still there. For various reasons, it doesn’t work out, and nor does the business deal as the company reneges once again, and NJ resigns.
All the while, the story also follows his son Yang-Yang’s mistreatment by a teacher and the other kids at school, and also shows the boy’s introspective ingenuity that pays off thematically later. The film, too, explores NJ’s teenage daughter, Ting-Ting’s, relationship with her best friend, as well as her burgeoning affair with this friend’s ex-boyfriend. The mother becomes an absent character for most of the film and only returns near the conclusion, as more time is given over to the troublesome brother-in-law, A-Di, NJ’s colleague at work, who gets married at the beginning of the film and makes a hash of both his personal and professional life.
Perhaps offering all this detail gives the reader some idea of how easily, in plot terms, a network narrative film can fall into cumbersome cross-cutting, but Yang avoids predictable curiosity by insisting that the form remains reflective and that the theme is, throughout, insistently active. This means that Yang never quite gets involved in the stories he tells, determined to keep a distance, one that acknowledges limited purviews. It is a point Yang-Yang makes when speaking to his father. The boy notes that if he ‘can’t see what you see and you can’t see what I see, can we know only half the truth?’ Yang might be inclined to agree with the boy, and though network narrative films often give the impression they can go anywhere and tell us anything, the Taiwanese director can see that even if we change the point of view, we are still limited to that point of view. We see this strongly as Ting-Ting tries to make sense of both her own feelings and those of the friend whose ex-boyfriend, Fatty, she starts seeing after the friend and Fatty break up.
Ting-Ting witnesses a spat between the girl and her mother when it transpires that the mother has been sleeping with the girl’s teacher, and Ting-Ting looks on. Some might see the friend overreacting; the mother’s love life is her own business, even if it happens to be the daughter’s teacher. Late in the film, Ting-Ting passes Fatty outside her apartment block, and he is screaming at Ting-Ting, though Ting-Ting has done nothing wrong. By the end of the film, Fatty will have killed the teacher – the friend and the teacher were having an affair, making sense of the friend’s strong reaction to her mother’s lover (who was also hers), and makes sense also of Fatty’s rant that seems to have no point, but that we may retrospectively assume is rage as he discovers his girlfriend’s affair with the teacher,.
We come to understand events through Ting-Ting’s point of view, but it remains partial, slightly inexplicable, because the viewer makes sense of what has happened as if half-blind to the causality of events, with Ting-Ting witnessing only various snippets. If the TV soap usually moves from one character to another, and constantly makes us privy to their lives, Yang proposes that lives are secret things which remain partially hidden from oneself and half-hidden from everybody else. At the end of the film, we don’t know for sure what Ting-Ting’s feelings have been for Fatty, and don’t know whether Fatty started seeing Ting-Ting to make the friend jealous, as revenge for dating the teacher, or because he very much liked her. When Ting-Ting and Fatty go to a hotel room, shortly after they arrive, he leaves, feeling things aren’t right.
Yet this limiting of knowledge is also central to the film’s structural concerns, if we view structuralism in this context to mean no more than a character’s agency viewed as secondary to the forces playing upon them. This distanced approach to events that Yang adopts becomes a critical eye on society at large. When Denis Zhou says that ‘‘Doors, windows, and the grids of streets and buildings frequently orient his scenes; his signature shot is of two or more characters separated by a door frame, their physical isolation from one another bespeaking larger social, romantic, or intergenerational chasms’’ (New York Review of Books), this may be a feature of much of his work (Taipei Story, Terrorizers, A Brighter Summer Day), but it can be very useful in creating a gap between character specificity and a look at how society functions at a given moment. The structure of family, work (or school) and broader forces are evident, as these forces play out on families and in work environments. If A-Di is incapable of keeping his marriage together and his finances in order, this could be seen as no more than an individual’s failings. But that isn’t quite how Yang presents it, with the suggestion that, rather than A-Di being a societal anomaly, characters who express virtue are more likely to be the odd ones out. Everybody who works with NJ sees him as a person who stupidly honours loyalty over pragmatics. They don’t believe they are messing the Japanese businessman around; they are looking for the simplest and quickest way to make money. If they can use a knock-off product, no matter the promises NJ has made, then that is all to the good. Even A-Di’s suicide attempt appears less an act of personal responsibility than a reflection of his temporary social failure. He has made a hash of his life, having cheated on his spouse and got into debt, but the attempted suicide, while not presented farcically, is at the same time not quite treated seriously. His wife returns to the apartment, comments on the mess, and finds a lot more of it when she breaks the bathroom door down and finds him unconscious. Yang films the scene with no sense of urgency in the form, as he eschews point-of-view shots and rapid camera movement, instead offering glacial observation.
This seems less cynicism at work than a sense of perspective at play. A-Di is caught in a nouveau riche life, and the camera shows that this is what A-Di is so afraid of losing. When A-Di’s wife sobs and sobs as he returns to consciousness, Yang’s camera stays removed, as if to get in too close would turn the social critique into a personal tale. A-Di’s spouse is a trophy wife who is always well-turned out, and they live in an apartment that NJ can’t help but comment on when he first sees it. It has art on the walls, sculptures on the floor and golf clubs at the entrance. But all this is built on debt, with the place contrasted with NJ’s much humbler home. The reserve Yang adopts here may be consistent with his general style, but it also brings out well the critical distance that allows one to see this as more than a personal tragedy. It is just as much a social reflection.
Yang proposes there is an observational aspect to this style, saying ‘‘close-ups are the least effective mode of expression because they only give you facial expression, whereas any subtle movement — in the hand, in the body, in your posture, or in the way that a person walks — gives more information to the viewer than just the facial.” (IndieWire) This is true, but in the scene described above, the camera is at such a distance that it is more about the environment than the people in it. We notice this when A-Di’s wife looks for him in the apartment, and the camera, instead of following her, retreats behind walls and pillars to give us the luxurious space. The film implies that the gap between A-Di’s aspirations, bought on hock, and the reality that leaves him desperate and suicidal, is enormous, with the camera reflecting broadly on the culture that leaves NJ in a more compact space than his brother-in-law, though NJ plays by the rules and A-Di has a habit of defying them. It is indeed a Confucian Confusion (the name of an earlier Yang film), with the one inclined to follow traditional values likely to suffer as a consequence in this materialist Taiwan.
Of course, NJ would be unlikely to envy A-Di’s life, but he is clearly frustrated by a value system where one’s word is no longer one’s bond, and where he can feel close to a stranger who acts agreeably, and distant from a family member who acts so irresponsibly. This suggests that Yang is a moralist, and he may well be, but his approach to form indicates more that he is interested in the structure of a life rather than its ethos, or more that its ethos comes out of the structures one lives by. We might say A-Di succumbs to the materialism of the environment and that NJ resists, but that we say A-Di succumbs and NJ resists, rather than that A-Di defies and NJ conforms, makes clear what the accepted values Yang explores are in late 1990s Taiwan, where over the previous few decades people’s economic lives had improved enormously. ‘‘The Taiwan Miracle was a period in the late 20th century when Taiwan’s economy experienced an unprecedented growth rate, with the country also witnessing rapid industrialization,’ Joseph Kiprop noted. ‘‘Taiwan’s Gross National Product recorded an explosive growth of a staggering 360% from 1965-1986. Even more impressive was the country’s global industrial production output, which grew by 680% in the 1965-1986 period.’’ (World Atlas) The important thing in Yi Yi isn’t that Yang judges morally A-Di, but more a society that shows a burst of wealth, based on growth, which can be regarded as pragmatic, what NJ believes to be dubious. Equally, when Yang-Yang is bullied at school, both by the teacher and fellow pupils, and Fatty kills a teacher sleeping with his girlfriend’s daughter, this is part of a broader malaise. However, if told in a soap opera fashion, the structure would be less evident than the immediate drama. By cross-cutting between various stories, yet containing the events within a broader frame that is both the theme the film searches out and the form it takes, Yang would seem to have escaped the televisual and manages to convey the structural.
 

© Tony McKibbin