ON A BALMY evening in Edward Yang’s Taipei-set family drama Yi Yi, a young couple on their first date sit reflectively in a fast-food restaurant. While talking about a sad film that they’ve just watched, a debate arises about the importance of movies versus the real world. “My uncle says, ‘We live three times as long since man invented movies,’” the boy, Fatty (Chang Yu Pang), argues. “It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.”
Yang’s body of work, which sits at the forefront of the New Taiwan Cinema movement that rose in the early ’80s, has extended many a lifespan if Fatty’s argument is anything to go by. Yi Yi is arguably his most recognised and internationally lauded film, a near three-hour study of urban life shown via a middle-class family based in the city. It’s a finely tuned balancing act that probes into the ebb and flow of life within the condensed spaces of the Taiwan capital, from a birth to a funeral and a first romance to a lost love.