10. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (d. Spike Lee, USA, 2006) Whether viewed as a process of fact-checking and historical investigation, an outlet that allows the victims and survivors of Hurricane Katrina to speak their minds, an impressionistic exploration of what New Orleans represents and the images it conjures, and/or a striking ethnography of American cities' problematic yet electrifying melting-pot populations, When the Levees Broke is among the most valuable films made in this country since the new millennium. The movie is actually all of these things and many more, which helps to explain the documentary's four-hour running time (it was originally released as a miniseries on HBO). While some topics that the film attempts to uncover are exposited less successfully than others (many have criticized, for example, the film's disturbing but convincing claim that the shoddy craftsmanship and possibly intentional destruction of New Orleans' levees represented a far-reaching governmental conspiracy), that exhaustive breadth is also what makes When the Levees Broke so valuable. More than a document of an overwhelming tragedy in American history, it is a document of a specific place and time and the people who came together (whether violently or peacefully) within that setting. Seeing the entire film not on television but at a premiere screening at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I realized the overwhelming social power of the movie—with all of the pain and tragedy that the documentary evokes, it ultimately seems to be an act of cultural unification, asking that we not forget about the significance of New Orleans and really explore the context in which Katrina struck. When the Levees Broke manages to do what countless news media outlets couldn't in the aftermath of either Katrina or 9/11: simultaneously commemorate the victims of these tragedies and investigate what they meant sociohistorically. Among the brutal images of Lee's film—bloated victims floating through flooded streets, dilapidated houses marked with foreboding X's—audiences can band together in outrage. Look at what our government has done, how drastically they failed; look at this country's myths so incontrovertibly proven wrong.
Lee, a director often prone to grand stylistic tricks and a blatant authorial hand, here suppresses his own voice. Certainly, he makes his points through canny editing, through allusion and through suggested historical parallels, but this is no Michael Moore diatribe. Consisting primarily of talking-head interviews and unaired news footage, the embittered power of the movie emerges through montage. Contradictions and lies are exposed when the claims of FEMA, Michael Brown, George W. Bush, are placed adjacent to footage of people suffering without aid—treated like outcasts, aliens, refuse. Lee's most remarkable feat here is in taking himself out of the picture (at least explicitly), allowing the people of New Orleans to tell their own story. I've always been a fan of the director's work, but When the Levees Broke is on a level all its own—more powerful, in its own way, than even Do the Right Thing, and evoking an even greater level of impassioned outrage.
9. The Seeds (d. Wojciech Kaspierski, Poland, 2006) The limited theatrical exhibition outlets for short films in this country have led to the assumption that films' running times are somehow in direct proportion to their value, or at least that a movie less than an hour may be worth watching as a television interlude but not as a self-contained film in itself. Because this pattern of film viewing has much to do with the high price of renting celluloid film for theatrical exhibition, and the high number of tickets that need to be sold to recoup this price, and the desire for people who are going out to catch a movie to be provided with several hours of entertainment, the general dismissal of short films will probably continue. But if somehow, at some point, you get the chance to see The Seeds, don't waste the opportunity; it packs a wallop rare for a film of any length.I saw Kasperki's film at the Milwaukee Film Festival in 2006, where I happened to be volunteering as an intern for the short film viewing committee. After watching a handful of good-not-great shorts that were being considered for inclusion in the festival, I was unprepared for the haunting power of The Seeds; even without the benefit of comparison, it would have been clear that this film was in a league of its own.
Set in a secluded village in southern Siberia, the movie observes an agrarian family struggling with their intense love and hatred for each other. There is a violent tragedy in this family's past that is not ever entirely exposited for us; a daughter in the family also seems afflicted by some mental illness. Resistant to explain anything to us clearly, The Seeds simply observes and suggests, portraying a turbulent family life that probably could not be elucidated for us anyway, even if we did know exactly what was happening. The family's interaction with each other is rough, their pain apparent, but this is because of the fact that they love each other rather than despite that fact. A scene suggesting the family's cruel indifference towards one daughter can be followed by a painfully tender scene between the patriarch and that same daughter; we realize that familial love and anger may sometimes go hand-in-hand.
It may seem hyperbolic to compare the movie to Tarkovsky and Bergman simultaneously, but that was my honest reaction when I first saw the movie; never before have I seen a film that combines so intensely the almost cosmic sense of alienation that defines Tarkovsky with Bergman's harrowingly magnified evocations of pain and passion. In thirty minutes, we bear witness to a family struggling with life on the other side of the world, isolated both geographically and emotionally. Out of something so common and relatable as familial woes, The Seeds manages to create a majestic and troubling sense of wonder.
8. The Wind Will Carry Us (d. Abbas Kiarostami, Iran/France, 2000) Among the most unique movies I've ever seen, Kiarostami's sublime dark comedy is both absurd and modestly realistic, documentary and fiction. An engineer (known only as The Engineer) and his two assistants travel from Tehran to a remote Kurdish village; throughout the movie, we don't know exactly why they have traveled here, only that they have come to visit a remarkably old woman (also never seen) and perhaps to work on completing a film that, seemingly, gets no nearer to completion. Rather than explain these mysteries to us, The Wind Will Carry Us coasts by on observing the daily lives of the residents of Siah Dareh (hence its documentary aspects) or crafting sublimely subtle sight gags out of deft manipulations of sight and sound, relying especially on the edge of the frame and offscreen happenings. J. Hoberman likens Kiarostami's stylistic punnery to the films of Jacques Tati, which helps to explain why I love this movie so much; its wonderfully stilted, almost-absurd dialogue also reminded me of Jim Jarmusch. Themes regarding the rift between modern technology and Iran's or Kurdistan's traditional societies seem almost to rise to the surface (the main character keeps on having to run up the village's highest hill in order to receive a cell-phone call from Tehran—this is also where the village's graveyard is situated), but, in a bemused style that I tend to favor, these themes are only hinted at rather than voiced explicitly. We can ponder such ideas if we want, or we can laugh at Kiarostami's sly sense of humor, or (just as satisfyingly) we can look at the countryside. The director's style is democratic: the viewer decides what he or she will concentrate on, what he or she will enjoy. And here, there's much to enjoy.
Detractors may claim that this blithely oblique style, this evasion of any specific plot or thematic concept, can lead to inconsequentiality—that we may walk away from The Wind Will Carry Us with our curiosities piqued, but unenlightened. Assuming that “enlightenment” is actually something that movies should be expected to offer, I would counter that confusion can, in fact, lead to enlightenment. Lacking a specific narrative or thematic guide to usher us through a film, we are left to our own devices, and fumbling with our own bewilderment, we may personally arrive at something far grander within ourselves than what any filmmaker can suggest to us. Films that at first seem to be about nothing sometimes seem, by their end, to be about everything.
7. Kabala (d. Assane Kouyaté, Mali/France, 2005) I've always enjoyed African film (despite the fact that an entire continent's cinema cannot and should not be grouped together into a single subset), but the complete uniqueness and striking narrative styles that define so many of the films from Mali and Nigeria and Senegal and elsewhere are also what make them largely unsuccessful in this country. Because distributors and exhibitors in the States are often unwilling to give African films even a limited release (Bamako and Tsotsi—otherwise known as Crash in Africa—are two of the few that I can think of over the last couple years) most American audiences have to rely on film festivals and online DVD companies to get their hands on African movies. Which is a shame, since many of them are so beautiful, majestic, and (to use a problematic and potentially condescending word) exotic that they really should be seen on the big screen. Kabala is the best example from the last decade, a Malian-French co-production that has a story and a primary theme that are actually quite familiar from numerous recent international productions, but that still seems totally different than anything else you've seen. It's about a sacred well in a Malian village that has recently become contaminated. The elders decide that a traditional fire dance is required to rid the well of its impurities. When one young man's torch doesn't light during the ceremony, he is suddenly accused of illegitimacy and cast out of the village. Years later, he returns home to provide further assistance to the still-plagued village, only to find that much has changed since his departure.
Like numerous other recent films from Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and other Northern African countries, Kabala is about the rift between traditional religion and modern resources; about the coexistence of contemporary business and economics and a more mystical form of ancient spirituality; and about the dangers and benefits that may be gained from depending upon outside sources. The movie is faced with a difficult enigma: it may simultaneously seem to pander to Western audiences (in its criticisms of established conservative traditions and insularity) and to indulge in a brazen form of traditional African folklore that seems totally alien to most Western viewers.
But this enigma is really what the movie is about—coming to terms with the difficult decision of whether or not to depend on outside resources to “modernize” some African regions. Since this is what the movie is concerned with, its simultaneous indulgence in and subversion of traditional religious tenets makes sense, and contributes to a bewildering style that encapsulates the movie's difficult sociocultural quandary.
It also makes Kabala astonishingly beautiful. The Malian settings are gorgeous to begin with, but they are filmed so lushly—and Andrée Davanture's editing transitions so smoothly between powerful close-ups and majestic long shots—that this terrain takes on a mythical quality. Just as ably, though, Kabala can intensify its human relationships into the stuff of grand melodrama—the movie is as striking in its drama as in its scenery.
6. Hero (d. Zhang Yimou, Hong Kong/China, 2004) As a middle-schooler just beginning to embrace my love for film, I would rewatch kinetic (but undeniably silly) kung-fu films like Fist of Legend and Twin Warriors over and over again, transfixed by the propulsive acrobatics they offered (and, perhaps, also by their cartoonish plots). I still think these films have value in an almost-abstract, motion-and-light kind of way—the graceful movements of bodies in these films may be favorably compared to the lights and shapes flitting about the screen in animated works by Len Lye and Norman McLaren, for example—but I can just as easily recognize that the majority of kung-fu films have as little interest in innovative storytelling, aesthetic ingenuity, or thematic heft as they have great passion for their action sequences. (This is to disregard peculiarities like Wong Kar-wai's hybrid Ashes of Time or some obscure and magical Shaw Brothers nuggets from the '70s.) I've never denied that I love these movies, but sometimes they are a bit of a guilty pleasure—hypnotic, dizzying, electrifying, but hardly groundbreaking.Hero is something else entirely—a kung-fu film about pacifism. In it, the warrior Nameless (Jet Li) arrives at the court of the King of Qin claiming to have killed three of the most deadly assassins in the kingdom, all of whom had been trying to kill the King. Flashbacks are employed, but all of them are equally untrustworthy—nothing is as it seems to be, as every epic battle and meticulously choreographed duel may or may not be a ruse undertaken for a larger political purpose. Its fight scenes are gorgeous—shot by Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's frequent cinematographer), they embellish their color-coded pageantry, as crimson leaves flutter around warriors and drops of water cascade through the screen while fighters skip blithely over the surface of a lake—but the movie is just as much about political machination as fight scenes. In its own bombastic way, Hero is about politics as much as some of Zhang Yimou's previous works (such as Ju Dou or Raise the Red Lantern).
If the movie indulges in martial arts operatics but is still, essentially, about the power of peaceful resistance, that contradiction never really seems hypocritical. The violence here almost always takes on a plaintive, tragic tone; transcending action-movie filler, the martial arts in Hero are likened to traditional Chinese music, calligraphy, and theater, and thus are posited as an essential aspect of China's cultural history. The real coup is not in suggesting that the martial arts are an integral component of Chinese culture, or portraying them as a ballet—numerous kung-fu films have done this, including, most famously, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—but in theorizing about how this history and this art form can be used in order to prevent further political tyranny and violence. (J. Hoberman claims that Hero is a Leni Riefenstahl-esque indulgence in the aesthetics of fascism—that the movie condones the actions of a despot killing in the name of eventual unification—but it seems that Hero's admittedly overblown pageantry is meant as an indictment of shallow political theatricality, not a celebration of it.)
Zhang's best film is probably still the quietly enraged Ju Dou (1991), but it undeniably belongs to a different career timeframe than Hero. In some ways, we may lament Zhang's move towards incredibly expensive kung-fu epics (Hero had, at the time of its release, the highest budget of any Chinese movie ever made), especially since it seems Hero was put into production partially as an attempt to one-up Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While Zhang would make the equally impressive (yet less complex) House of Flying Daggers immediately after Hero, he would also go on to make the ugly, empty Curse of the Golden Flower. (I haven't seen his latest feature, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop, but the majority of reviews suggest that it's similarly garish.) Whatever Hero means in the context of Zhang's career, though, it does seem remarkably unique within the martial arts genre—a deft and exciting action picture that uses the tropes of its predecessors to question the political repercussions of violent force.
5. The Holy Girl (d. Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/Italy/ Netherlands/Spain, 2005) The subversive power of Martel's incredibly sly dark comedy is so reserved that it takes a while to sneak up on you; when it does, though, you realize that Martel's half-blasphemous/half-reverent take on sin, pleasure, redemption, and Catholicism is worthy of Luis Buñuel (only Martel's humor is a little sprier than Buñuel's atheist absurdity). Following a Catholic-school lecture on faith and vocation, 14-year-old Amalia (María Alche, whose face always appears half angelic and half devilish) is lured by the heavenly sounds of a theremin being played during a street performance. While she and a small crowd observes this theremin player, Amalia suddenly finds herself being groped by a tall, middle-aged doctor standing directly behind her. She soon discovers that this doctor is attending a medical conference being held at the hotel owned by her mother. Deducing that the lustful Dr. Jano—who somehow seems more despondent than lecherous, despite the fact that he's feeling up a teenager—has been sent to her for the salvation of his soul, Amalia undertakes her newfound, heaven-sent vocation.
With The Holy Girl and its predecessor, La Ciénaga (2001), Martel has forged a totally unique style in modern cinema. It's tempting to compare her deadpan, formally-based humor to Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki, but Martel's comedy somehow seems even more devious than theirs. Deploying off-kilter perspectives and disorienting editing structures to bizarre effect, Martel and her crew attempt to create a world that always seems alien, mythical, disorienting in its perpetually hazy humidity. (Martel's films are set in the small northwest Argentinian town of Salta, where she also grew up.) We usually don't know what's happening within a given scene, or even in the movie as a whole, until we're well beyond the establishing point. (This is actually somewhat of a flaw, I think, in Martel's 2008 film The Headless Woman, but in her first two features, it's sublime.) This is why it feels we've made a discovery whenever we detect one of Martel's clever in-jokes, and why we may identify so fully with the characters' sense of detachment and profound confusion.
The Holy Girl ends on a high note, almost effervescently, making it clear that Martel's aim is not to mock her characters but to identify with their ethical confusion. With astonishing formal exactness, she lets these prickly webs of human interaction play out; we are bemused by the irony and the unexpectedness of these interactions, but at the same time we identify with the sexual confusion and religious doubt that plagues the main characters. That numerous reviewers read the film in almost diametrically opposite ways (some saw it as liberating, dexterous comedy; some as a haunting and bleak cautionary tale) is a testament to how ambiguous and non-judgmental the movie is.
4. Beau Travail (d. Claire Denis, France, 2000) What the hell happens in Beau Travail? It should come as no surprise to fans of Denis that that question can't really be answered. It's a loose adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, set amongst the French Foreign Legion in Djibouti, but beyond that—as in L'Intrus, 35 Shots of Rum, I Can't Sleep, and some other Denis films—the movie is mostly about observation and atmosphere. Denis seems to recognize that she is a perpetual outsider to this isolated cadre of militaristic men in eastern Africa, the most stereotypically masculine subculture you can imagine; so instead of offering any moral interpretations or narrative motivations, she (and her cinematographer, the great Agnés Godard) simply watch the men interact with each other. Small hints at their characters may be gleaned through looks, gestures, fleeting actions, but none of these men can be “explained” in their entirety.Beyond some of the most beautifully photographed scenery you'll ever see in a movie, Beau Travail is notable for adapting Melville's incredibly cryptic and metaphorical prose to the cinematic form. Of course films can be elusive and cryptic, but seeing images play out before us lends things a concrete, actualized nature—the transformative power of movies makes us believe that these things are actually happening (even if we don't always know exactly what these things are). Denis's sublime skill with Beau Travail is to transpose Melville's ruminations to a visual form that ponders the nature of good and evil, camaraderie, repressed homosexuality, and other intangible notions solely through observation. Although we can't specifically put a name on the heated emotions and moods that Beau Travail puts us through, it does undoubtedly work us into a frenzy; we are transported to an unnamable and overwhelming mindstate.
The half-naked bodies of the soldiers exercising in the blazing sun are a common visual motif in the movie; Denis and Godard do aestheticize the men, and such scenes do take on an air of eroticism (which makes sense given the homoeroticism Melville included in his story), but most of the men are never exactly explored as flesh-and-blood individuals with real inner states. The men, like the movie itself, are mostly about immediacy, corporeality, physicality, the things we can see on the surface that suggest something deeper (but only suggest it). The final scene of the movie is a bewildering summation of liberation and chaos, but it's only the breaking point of what the movie is trying to do all along, only in more restrained ways—tear out of its shell and flail at us, mystifyingly.
3. Kings and Queen (d. Arnaud Desplechin, France, 2005) Kings and Queen has, at one point, one of the most purely bizarre and unexpected interludes I've ever seen in a movie (it involves Mathieu Amalric's character, a neurotic charmer named Ismaël, bursting into a breakdancing routine in a sanitarium); shortly thereafter, it offers us a madcap, hilarious scene in which Ismaël and his smarmy attorney try to steal drugs from the sanitarium's pharmacy, a sequence almost unparalleled in its unbridled energy; and finally, at the end of the movie, it offers us a sweetly awkward interaction between Ismaël and his surrogate son, Elias, that is among the most tender and affecting portraits of familial love that you'll ever see in a movie. The greatness of these scenes lies partially in the performance by Amalric, France's best actor working today, but it's mostly the result of Arnaud Desplechin. The director is more than a brilliant dramatist or comedian or postmodernist or innovator; he's all of these things at once. Desplechin manages a deft balancing act that is most impressive because none of these various styles or conceits seem pranksterish or disingenuous. As impressive as Mathieu Amalric's performance is Emmanuelle Devos's as Nora, the queen of the title. Her kings include four men with whom she's been in love: her son, Elias; Elias's deceased father; Nora's own father; and Ismaël, an impulsive musician with whom Nora lived for a time. The relationship between Nora and Ismaël is now more platonic than sexual, though no less genuine; this is why Nora asks Ismaël to act as Elias's father.
Like A Christmas Tale, this basic storyline, reminiscent of a number of family melodramas, is merely a jumping-off point for Desplechin's numerous tangents and ruminations—on love, on French history and classical art, on hatred, on the difficulties of communication. Even when the movie focuses on advancing its plot, its aesthetic ingenuity continues to overwhelm even as its narrative captivates us—for example, during the sequence in which we discover how Elias's father died, an unsettling scene portrayed in the style of modernist theatre, with abstract lighting and evocatively spare sets. Miraculously, the movie's experimentation with style and narrative never serves to undermine or weaken its emotional aspects. An unexpected insert of Nora's father reading to her a vitriolic letter—as he's framed in an almost direct frontal composition and the film stock takes on an extremely grainy, blue-gray quality—could have been an indulgent misstep in another director's hands, but here, her father's words become even more passionate, more obliterating, thanks to the scene's aesthetic excess.
Simplistically, one could claim that Nora's storyline in Kings and Queen represents the style of grand melodrama, that Ismaël's takes on the traits of screwball comedy, and that the movie itself is about the overwhelming highs and lows that everyone experiences, and how the movies as an art form, throughout their entire history, have helped us persevere through them. Parts of this appraisal would be accurate, but it also seems too easy, too schematic, which Kings and Queen definitely is not. It may be more apt to say that the movie is about how happiness necessarily carries with it a twinge of sadness and vice versa, and that love, true love, is so passionate and unrestrained that it cannot survive without madness and anger and desperation. This is why the tumult of emotions and styles in Desplechin's movies never seem parodic or insincere; his movies are about how real life is closer to this maddening whirlwind than to the convenient genres and emotions we usually find in films. While Kings and Queen is resolutely cinematic, then, it is also closer to bewildering (and wondrous) reality than almost any movie you will see.
2. Head-On (d. Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2005) The title is appropriate; so is its original German title, Gegen die Wand, which translates as “Against the Wall.” The movie rushes at you without restraint, angrily, ferociously, passionately. It's raw and aggressive, which befits a movie about lust, the alienation of immigrants in their adopted country, the conservatism of religious and cultural tradition. It will likely turn you off, and only a scene later seduce you again with its intensity and bravado. It's that kind of movie.The movie is about two Turkish immigrants living in Hamburg: Sibel, a beautiful 22-year-old woman desperate to escape her restrictive home life with her parents; and Cahit, an aimless drunk perhaps twice her age who she asks to marry her so she can leave home. Both characters are suicidal—they meet in a mental institution after she tries to slit her wrists and he drives full-speed into a brick wall. (Only one of the many ways in which the movie's American and German titles are manifested.) Initially, their marriage is completely emotionless, an act of desperation. Even as their compassion for each other deepens, their sincerity is always tinged with a sense of desperation and futility.
As you may be able to surmise, this is not a pleasant movie. It has moments of levity, even sweetness, but for the most part we are reminded of how much these characters hate themselves. While Head-On is in part a movie about the alienation and loneliness felt by immigrants in a foreign land (and the genuine sense of community that may nonetheless be achieved there), it is more generally about reaching a point in your life when everything seems hopeless, and trying to find a way in which that bleakness may be alleviated. To criticize this movie for its overwhelming unpleasantness is to miss the point; it's one of the few films I've seen recently that wants to portray lives at their bleakest, darkest, lowest points, not in an attempt at shock value, but to reach out to viewers who have felt this way and may still feel this way.
Funded by both German and Turkish production companies, the movie was heralded by audiences and critics in both countries as either a German or a Turkish triumph, respectively—an irony that points towards both the economic co-dependence and implicit contentiousness between the two countries, especially in Germany. This, too, is partially what the movie is about. The power of Head-On's implicit sociocultural commentary is epitomized by repeated shots of a traditional Turkish band performing on a carpeted stage in Istanbul—a reminder that Fatih Akin is not decrying traditional Turkish culture, but lamenting how that culture may not transplant to a new land so easily, and also how that traditionalism may stifle younger generations more than it unifies them. Even more broadly, the film may be about how, in the modern world, distinct ethnic cultures must be increasingly assimilated into other ways of life, forcing all of us to establish new identities and moralities without depending upon traditional national codes and mores.
Head-On is not remarkable simply because it is so bleak; it evokes, instead, a desperate passion that most lives must deal with at some point. Raw and volatile, hauntingly beautiful, and acted by two performers (Birol Ünel and Sibel Kekilli) who appear immersed in the act of baring their souls, it is one of the most emotionally turbulent movies you will ever see. Afterwards, you won't be uplifted, but you will feel like you've lived through, and rebounded from, immense tragedy.
1. Yi Yi (A One and a Two) (d. Edward Yang, Taiwan/Japan, 2000) Jean-Luc Godard once famously said that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half”; I find it more accurate, if less impressive, to claim that Yi Yi (A One and a Two) is the world in three hours. Edward Yang's majestic, light-footed, sublime, funny movie spends about a year with three generations of an affluent family in Taipei. Nothing momentous happens, but at the same time, everything that happens is momentous: characters ponder infidelity, the meaning of their lives, choices they've made, lost opportunities and shattered dreams. Most broadly, Yi Yi is about the unexpected turns that our lives take and the fact that, for years, decades, lifetimes afterwards, we wonder if the choices we've made are right. How would our lives have been different if we had done this differently, if we had chosen to do this instead of this? The movie goes about these questions in unassuming, clever ways. Successful businessman NJ, the patriarch of the central family, bumps into his first love on an elevator; realizing that his workaday lifestyle is so hurried that he has neglected his own happiness, he regrets standing her up a long time ago, confessing these doubts and concerns to a Japanese business partner. (The Taiwanese man and his Japanese friend must speak English to each other; it's the only language they both understand.) NJ's son, eight-year-old Yang-Yang, ponders what he sees and wonders if he can really trust his vision all the time. He also experiences his first love with a classmate; in sweet, fumbling fashion, he tries to drop a water balloon on his crush, and accidentally hits the principal of his school instead. In a miraculous scene shortly thereafter, during a school fieldtrip, Yang-Yang observes his classmate in a planetarium with a vista of sparkling stars in the background, and you begin to fall in love yourself. Meanwhile, NJ's wife speaks to her mother-in-law (who is in a coma) and realized how flat and unfulfilling her life is. Their daughter, Ting-Ting, wonders whether or not she should start a fling with her best friend's boyfriend. Death, birth, and marriage also happen. A checklist of what happens in the movie can't do justice to how sprawling and affecting it is. Each tiny happenstance, no matter how slight, takes on epic proportions, because we realize how differently things may turn out if only one other thing had happened instead.
More ably than any other movie I've ever seen, Yi Yi evokes the difficulties and joys of living in the modern metropolis. Scenes are often filmed via reflections on the windows of stores and automobiles; other scenes play out in extreme long shot, as intimate relationships take place amongst thousands of passersby. Modern life here is seen as electrifying and overwhelming; technology and consumerism are ubiquitous, but so is a sense of community and possibility. This depiction of modern life and technology bears specifically upon Taiwanese culture, as NJ's generation finds themselves immersed in a booming industry of computer products and a globalized electronics industry. As economics and technologies change drastically around us, so do families and personal lives; Yi Yi eloquently empathizes with these unsettling changes at the same time that it embraces them.
The director, Edward Yang, who passed away in 2007, achieved his masterpiece with Yi Yi (almost as good is Yang's sprawling 1991 film A Brighter Summer Day). It has its moments of tragedy and lamentation, but mostly, we are filled with a great sense of elation, a reassurance that the doubts, regrets, and difficulties that we deal with in our own lives are in fact shared by people throughout the world. Yang can achieve this grand sympathy because he loves his characters, and, despite the turmoil through which it puts us, he loves life.
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