Richard von Busack's After Images: Yi Yi, or Unfinished Business

Sometimes, after a break-up, it's as if the other party has dropped into a crack of the world. One morning, there might be a paper bag clothes and books on the doorstep. Maybe over the following months, one hears a few rumors from mutual friends. Finally, complete silence. Despite what they tell you, not everyone can be cyberstalked. High school science classes teach us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but what happens to all the energy you spent loving someone? All you can hope for, ten or twenty years down the line, is an exit interview: a chance meeting at a time when both of you are past fury and despair, to encounter one another in some neutral spot, to remember and forgive.

Edward Yang's 2000 masterpiece Yi Yi  is newly available on Criterion Collection, befitting its status as one of Sight and Sound's best films of the last 25 years. The array of characters makes it a toss-up who the real center of the film, but maybe Yi Yi is most accessible in its middle sequence, the episode of  two lovers meeting for the first time in 30 years. She, Sherry (Su-Yun Ko) lives in Chicago; her Chinese-American husband works and travels for work all the time. He  (Nien-Jen Wu) is married, two kids, and lives inTaipei. He's a mid-level executive at an unscrupulous and in-trouble video-game company.  The two have united for a weekend in Tokyo and are at last ready to discuss the reason why he stood her up three decades before. The director Yang gives the couple a lot of space  --  some 300 feet between the actors and the camera  --  as they try understand what happened to them. It's the sweetest part of summer, and they walk through a leafy park with granite shrines and bird houses. It's a heavenly contrast to NJ's neighborhood, the westernized Da-An district of Taiwan, with its ceaselessly flowing automobile traffic; the roadway is in many of Yang's scenes here, even if only as reflections on a windowpane. During the long walk in the park it finally becomes apparent why NJ looks like a man imploded.  His ambitions were dashed.  He was pressured by family and friends into electrical engineering (a field Yang graduated in, before he went on to film school). At first, his career bored him, and now it disgusts him, since they're now manufacturing violent video games. In the name of being a human conduit between his family's past and their future, NJ swallowed his own ambitions. He knew in advance how much it would hurt and how isolated he would be ... and yet there's nothing depressing in this. Indeed, it's a strange kind of heroism.

Yang cross-cuts between this tentative weekend re-meeting with the story of Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), NJ's daughter. Home alone, she goes on a late night date with a troubled young man called "Fatty" (Pang Chang Yu). The two don't understand one another. In Yang's Taiwan it's never what's said that counts; the real trick is avoiding confrontation. It's a city of intensely private people forced to live in close quarters, in thin-walled apartments.  The young peoples' courtship is a mirror of what happened to NJ and Sherry, and how NJ ran away from consummating their relationship because of fear and guilt.


Yi Yi doesn't offer much hope from romantic love; it's wise enough to suggest that contentment can last, even if happiness can't. While it's not about solace coming from heaven, it's still a delicately spiritual film.  Organized religion isn't much help  --  the Buddhist "master" who lures away NJ's wife (Elaine Jin) hits the family for a handout on his way out the door.  But on business NJ meets with a Japanese high-tech guru called Ota (Issei Ogata, who had the title role in Tony Takitani); they converse with each other in their common language, a halting and beguiling English. Even an atheist could admit Ota is in a state of grace. When we first see Ota, he's charming some pigeons. They land on his shoulders as if he were St. Francis. The two men don't talk in New Age jargon; instead they discuss practical matters of honesty, and friendship and the love of music. And later, the sickbed of the family's grandmother becomes a kind of confessional booth. Since she's paralyzed and insensate after a stroke, she becomes a sounding board; the various members of NJ's family try to talk to her in a way they can't talk to anyone else.  Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) NJ's picked-on 8 year old son, can't bear it and doesn't understand what he's supposed to say. But at the bedside, NJ has a flash of insight: talking to the lady is like prayer: "I'm not sure if the other party can hear, and I'm not sure if I'm sincere enough." 

During the almost-three-hour length of this film about an extended family, caught between a wedding and a funeral, Yang handles separate characters with such skill that there never quite seems to be anything that qualifies as a subplot. As in Mike Leigh and Yasujiro Ozu films, here's the sense that anyone of the characters could be followed through into a movie of their own. If there's anything like a Yang signature shot, it's the repeated image of exterior reflections on windowpanes. A mirrored skyline of Tokyo on a weeping lady's  window is a more lyrical cityscape than anything in Lost in Translation. Mirrors and cameras have the same function in Yang's world, in helping us see two things at once. 

Yang-Yang puzzles his father NJ by telling him, "I can't see what you see, and you can't see what I see." The father pauses and replies, "You need a camera." Before throwing away his own life, Fatty says: "We live three times as long since man invented movies." Aside from the ability to sell spectacle and diversion,Yi Yi outlines an essential function of cinema: to provide reverse angles and after images, to help us imagine how to play those scenes and say those goodbyes we never got to say in real life.