Probably a stone cold masterpiece, which is something I would have declared confidently without recourse to personal taste if asked within the first hour. Yang’s touch is so light and thorough you can become immured to it as I did for much of its second hour. The drama is seamlessly naturalized and balanced into the mundane and the master-shot social and public scenes give the impression they could be half accidental, erupting with small surprises – think of the soundscapes of the wedding scenes, the way the traffic lights switch to green and then one red when Fatty assures Ting-Ting he loves only her, the surprising effect of the copy machine’s top as it is repeatedly lifted into frame in Min-Min’s office, or how the birds get caught in flight outside the conference window. Nothing is heightened, or rather, registers as such; most every instance of an expressive mise is simply a matter of a particular setting. Feel the way the shots and scenes, especially early, crash into each other – and in lesser hands would be discordant – but here magnify the scope of its cinematic context into an unassuming and delicate enormity, before gradually smoothing into a resembling shape like stones long left to the effects of sand or water. If you sense this is tuning into white noise (re: my above equivocation), just focus on any one aspect of the sound or image, really consider it if only its bare existence in that form, and the feeling returns. Even when Yang pushes his thematic interests – mostly through the young Yang-Yang – he knows how to strike obliquely, like say, the back of a head: an awareness of something so obvious it evades notice. Though this was shot on 35, even the crappy dvd scan of my disc lends itself the quality of a curious surveilling videographer privy to the wide-ranging incidents and concerns around this family’s life with the backgrounds of traffic, pedestrians, offices, and windows like the suggestion this is just one thread in a larger fabric; the camera’s eye comes across as just someone else, maybe in passing, maybe you know them, it could be your neighbor. “Lightning may have produced the first amino acid, and that was the beginning of everything.” Maximalist Ozu, if that’s not too much of a contradiction. 

——————

“It begins to acquire signs of human life. It begins to think... then matures into a living entity... and becomes our most devoted companion. That’s the limitless future for computer games. We haven’t yet surpassed fighting and killing games. Not because we haven’t fully understood computers. But we haven’t fully understood ourselves... human beings.”

What a dunk, and still relevant to the present state of gaming