Yi Yi (Criterion Collection)

This Taiwanese film is fascinating for us westerners because of the vision it gives of love and women in Chinese society. Love has a wider meaning than what we generally comprehend with this word. It is not only love for a woman or a man with a sentimental or sexual intention, but it is the basic human dimension of society. This is very true in the revealing dimension the coma of the grand mother takes in the family circle and the impossibility for everyone to speak to that comatose woman in spite of the love the various members do feel for her. The conclusion of the film, the love declaration of the little son, but after the death of the grandmother, is a real illumination about how love is an exchange of experience, and the little boy can feel old because he exchanges his age with his grandmother's and hence regenerates her in her own death. But this love, within a couple, becomes the revealing element of the frustrations and expectations of the woman who is finding her liberation, hence her possible realization as a free being in this love relation. On the side of the boy or man, there is a fear, the fear to be in a way enslaved, reduced to a state of non-liberty by this very love. And yet the father discovers through the meeting of an old girl-friend of his he ran away from not to become the slave of her willfulness that he did what she wanted him to do which became the reason of his flight. Hence love becomes a mirror in which there is a perfect exchange of motivations and visions : she sees him like this and this becomes his perspective, and vice versa. This leads us to the conclusion that real love is a double mirror in which each lover falls mutually and simultaneously. This double mirror is both fascinating and disturbing. Are we living in a gallery of mirrors where the mirrors are our own neighbors for whom we are one mirror among others ? And this is amplified by the little boy who is obsessed by the fact that we can only see one side of a person at the time and never see the other side at the same time. We are both witnesses and blind people since we can both see and not see at the same time. In, other words seeing something means not seeing something else. This entertwining of vision and blindness, along with mirror ghosts that are what we see brings us to a really Chinese experience : remember the proverb about a finger showing the moon and what an idiot will do : look at the finger and miss the moon. But is the one who sees the moon and misses the finger more intelligent ?

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

The quality of this DVD makes The Last Emperor transfer actually look good by comparison. Yi-Yi was filmed in 35mm, but to see it on DVD you'd swear it was done in 8mm. On top of that, the images are jittery, not smoothe.

The people who oversaw the production of this DVD, Maryann Manelski and Kimberly Rubin, have a lot of explaining to do.

I'm not sure what the DVD is like, but the VHS is impossible to read or follow. Good translation requires subtitles that are easy to read, with good timing or placed on a black strip background.

But here, and at many times, WHITE subtitles are up against a WHITE FLOOR or WHITE SHIRTS! Now how easy can that be to read, especially if the titles move quickly?

I gave this an hour's attempt, armed with finger on the PAUSE button, rewinding and straining to read the subtitles and I could not possibly follow along. Often Japanese movies don't give us good close-ups, so it is difficult to know who is who, plus who is speaking!

This review pertains to the VHS version. So, unfortunately, I can't tell you anything about the movie. You need to understand the language, read lips, mind read or invite a Japanese friend over to translate for you. Scrap it!...MzRizz