Yi yi

Edward Yang won a long overdue Best Director prize in Cannes for this funny, deeply touching and altogether masterly account of a family in present-day Taipei. Everything comes down at once on the head of NJ Jian (Wu Nienjen, himself no mean screenwriter/director), who’s a partner in a failing computer firm. His elderly mother-in-law goes into a coma on the very day that his brother-in-law gets married; NJ runs into his long-lost first love while he’s at the wedding reception, and starts wondering if his life could have been different. Before long NJ’s wife has gone off to follow a religious guru, their young son has got into trouble at school and their teenage daughter is getting her first harsh lesson in the joys and pitfalls of dating.Directed with a formal precision which never masks the warmth of its feeling for the characters, the film suggests that the ways we deal with our problems change very little over the years, even if the problems themselves do change. Yang marshals a dozen major characters and nearly as many strands of storyline (including an extended interlude in Japan as NJ juggles a rendezvous with his old girlfriend and a meeting with a software genius who may or may not save the computer company) with apparently effortless clarity. Yi Yi offers a worldly and very wise vision of the ways we all live now. (Tony Rayns)