Katalas’s review published on Letterboxd:
洋洋: 婆婆，我不知道的事情太多了。所以，你知道我以後想做什麼嗎？ 我要去告訴別人他們不知道的事。給別人看他們看不到的東西。我想，這樣一定天天都很好玩。說不定，有一天我會發現你到底去了哪裡。
The cycle of life. Yi Yi (一一Yī Yī which litteraly means 'One One') is the translation of life as a film. Not one, but two.
Edward Yang presents to us the daily life of the Jiang family, middle-class people living in Taipei. Three generations under one roof (sāndài tóng táng 三代同堂), they go through hardship when the grandmother (on the mother side) has had a stroke and is now in some form of coma. The Jiang family may have three generations in their appartment, but the truth is, Yi Yi always focuses on two of those generations, which are the latters, with one having two lives, and the other, a parallel between the other generation.
It's made clear the moment the title appears before us. 一一, one and one, becomes 'two' when written in vertical alignment (二 èr). The father, N.J. (Wu Nien-Jen), stumbles upon his first love again during a wedding, Sherry (Su-Yun Ko), a girl he hadn't seen for thirty years. This event makes him think, daydreaming about what could have been, had he not chosen the life he's living right now and had met the girl who waited for him. Two lives put in vertical alignment, one that he lives in Taipei, the other, when he meets her again in Tokyo.
Meanwhile, N.J.'s daughter, Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee, the only role she played as an actress), daydreams about having a romantic relationship, something she envies in her friend. And when she does, a parallel (or, yet again, a vertical alignment between two lives) is made between what she experiences, and what her father had experienced in the past. Several transitions are edited so that we understand that what Ting-Ting is going through is exactly what recounts N.J. with Sherry when they meet in Tokyo.
But Yi Yi is not only about lives. It's also the truth that brings pictures and movies. The younger of the Jiang family, Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), has a vivid spirit. It's no wonder his name is actually Wāngyáng 汪洋, a word which, in Chinese literary, could be translated as 'magnanimous' or 'broad-minded'. When N.J. finally succeeds to introduce him the wonders of photography, Yang-Yang uses it to see the 'half-truth' we don't get to see. Or think of the conversation between Ting-Ting and Fatty (Pang Chang Yu), who explains that, ever since Cinema, “movies give us twice what we get from daily life". Because of pictures, 一 and 一 become 二.
Of course, Yi Yi isn't just about ones and twos. There is so much going on in Edward Yang's epic film. Most important of all, it's a reminder of how immense and vast life is. We only focus on what we see, what we've experienced, and that's only natural, not only from a visual point of view, but because it is the human nature to always think for itself. But what about the other 'half-truth'? The one that's behind our head but cannot see? Or the fact that N.J., a Taiwanese middle-class man, realises that Ota (Issey Ogata), a Japanese whose rank is higher than N.J.'s, faces and has faces hardship in his life? Simply put it, Yi Yi is a reminder that life is far more detailed and boundless, something we usually tend to forget.
The cycle of life. A struggle between what we expect of life, and what reality is. There may not be second chances in our lives, but in the end, Yi Yi wants you to remember that your life is worth everything, even through difficulty and discomfort. It starts with a wedding, and ends with a funeral, but in between, life was born too, with the aim to prevailing.
