In revisiting Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi, which I haven’t seen in about a decade, I was surprised by how much bad stuff happens. I remembered the wedding reception that kicks off the movie and the murder that more or less concludes it, but everything in between had vanished from my memory. I had no recollection of the grandmother having a stroke, of the brother going into debt, of the wife’s breakdown, of the husband’s emotional affair, of the daughter’s romantic misadventure. I didn’t remember that the neighbors existed, let alone everything that happens with, around, and to them. If I were to lay out for you the plot of Yi-Yi, such as it is, it would seem like an incredibly depressing movie, and I suppose in some ways it is.
It’s telling, then, and very much to the point of Yang’s film, that my immediate response upon seeing the first frames of Yi-Yi in a theater, of seeing the brother and his pregnant bride framed by the extended family in the middle of the wedding ceremony, was to smile. And I don’t mean a small, pleasant smile. I was so happy to spend time with these people that I was beaming. I was happy to see my friends again.
Yi-Yi comes as close as a film can to capturing life in its totality. We spent less than three hours with all of these people, but by the end, it’s reasonable to feel like you know them. Everyone you see on screen is a full person, funny and impulsive and selfish and kind. They are all fundamentally good, or at least they are all fundamentally trying. You don’t blame the wife for suddenly disappearing on a spiritual retreat for weeks. You don’t blame the husband for spending a week in Japan reliving the past with the first, and possibly only, woman he ever loved. You don’t blame the neighbor for having absolutely horrendous taste in men. Yang manages to show people in their entirety. He doesn’t reduce them in any sense.
For much of the movie, you’d be forgiven for interpreting the overall argument as a pessimistic one: life is full of regrets, and terrible things happen even to these good people. It isn’t until the closing stretch that Yang’s humanist argument snaps into focus. Coming back from Japan, the husband says, “I had the chance to relive part of my youth…I suddenly realized that even if I was given a second chance I wouldn't need it, I really wouldn’t.”
The daughter, alone in the apartment with her comatose grandmother, leaves her room and sees grandma sitting in a chair and humming “Ode to Joy.” By this point, Yang has carefully set up echoes of the past in the events of the present, and we understand without being told that grandma has experienced for herself many of the events that we’ve seen. She is at the end of her life, and still she is singing “Ode to Joy,” which is echoed in the opening bars of the score. In some small way, through all of the struggles and the ennui and the disappointments, it all works out alright.
It is no small feat, to make a movie about unfortunate event after unfortunate event without it ever feeling morose or indulgent. Yang pulls it off because his film is so matter-of-fact. These difficult stretches are as equal a part of life as the good times. The division is a false one. They coexist, much as the terrible moments of this film exist seamlessly alongside the funny, the sweet, and the endearing.