Yi Yi [& Y.V.]

I have either too little or too much to say about Yi Yi, Edward Yang’s film about a middle-class family in modern Taiwan, voted third best of the decade by two different critic polls.  I recently watched the Criterion Collection DVD twice, once with a small film club audience at the Clark and again on HDTV with the commentary track on.  I didn’t mind that so few forsook a beautiful May afternoon to come inside and spend three hours in the dark with me, looking at ordinary folk in an extraordinary film.  As it happened, a dimming projection bulb did not make the most of the glowing Criterion transfer, but it certainly did show through in HD.  The viewer becomes a neighbor in the modern apartment building where a businessman father, a mother overburdened by the collapse of her own mother, a teenage daughter, and a grade-school son interact with family, friends, and associates, in what gradually becomes a wonderfully rounded portrait of life as it’s lived in a contemporary city.  Warm and funny, while quiet and exquisitely controlled, Yang expresses a viewpoint that is unblinking but endearing, especially in the persons of the two children.  Suspended between a wedding and a funeral, with a birth in the middle, the film encompasses a lot in a small scope, and gets richer upon repeated viewing.  (2000, dvd)  *9*  (MC-92)

On the other hand, I really have little to say about The Young Victoria (2009, dvd, MC-64) except the costumes and settings were impressive, and the estimable Emily Blunt does project a novel approach to the dowager queen, as a teenage monarch falling in love with her Prince Albert.  Despite raising hopes for more than it delivers, the film felt thin to me, and tarted up with perfunctory editing tricks, as if the budget had been shot on the décor so they had to truncate the running time.  The giveaway is extended title cards at the beginning and end of the film, as if to tell the story they never got around to telling.  Anglophiles may still want to see it, for the production values alone.