Edward Yang's "Yi Yi" in 35mm

YI YI
Directed by Edward Yang • 2000
In Mandarin with English subtitles

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Maybe no film can encompass all of human experience, but it’s remarkable just how much of it is in "Yi Yi": a birth, a funeral, a wedding, a first date, near-death episodes, breakups, reconciliations, corporate intrigue, generational ennui, and the inscrutable actions of the most precocious young photographer in Taiwan. Detailing a stream of quotidian ordeals large and small in an extended family living in Taipei, Edward Yang’s epic consanguineal saga alternates between the lives of its ensemble as they come together and pull apart between major life events: patriarch NJ, a hangdog salary man in the midst of a midlife crisis; daughter Ting-Ting, in the blush of first love; son Yang-Yang, an outsider at school; newly married uncle A-Di, incapable of managing life as a family man; mother Min-Min, coming to terms with the approaching death of her own mother. The closest Yang ever came to crossover arthouse success in the United States, "Yi Yi" found a broader audience and greater critical acclaim than any of the director’s earlier pictures due in no small part to its tempering of the still-present bitterness that flavors all of Yang’s films with a heaping of tender comedy. "Yi Yi" would be Yang’s last film (he died of cancer in 2007), but through it he achieved the success that so often eluded his characters and gifted us one of the greatest films this young century has yet seen. The victim of limited print availability and fickle US distribution courtesy of arthouse villains best left unnamed, "Yi Yi" finally returns to Chicago for the first time since its premiere run at the Music Box Theatre for a special one-time-only screening in an archival 35mm print. (CW)

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173 min • Atom Films • 35mm from Yale Film Archive, permission Janus