Director Yang Dechang is a Taiwanese and graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering. After working in an American software company for seven years, he returned to Taiwan to make movies. He was already thirty years old at that time. In the future, together with Hou Hsiao-hsien and others, he became one of the standard bearers of Taiwan's new film movement.
Perhaps, for many people, knowing the name of Yang Dechang is still through the gossip news of his ten-year sexless marriage with Cai Qin, although Yang Dechang himself said that "ten years of marriage is blank", but Cai Qin said, "In ten years, I am for this. Duan love gave everything", we have no way of knowing the entanglement, but the man who can make Cai Qin give everything must not be a simple man who can be distinguished by affection and ruthlessness. Yang Dechang has had three marriages, which is one of the reasons why he has a deeper understanding and insight into family and marriage than others. Therefore, in the movie "One One", we can see that there are many shadows of director Yang Dechang himself.
"Yi Yi" is a feature film that lasts for three hours. For me, who didn't eat breakfast and didn't get up until noon to watch the disc, it was a huge physical test. For three hours, although my stomach kept protesting , but the wonderful film has always made me reluctant to stop to appease my belly. This shows from another side that this is a sufficiently successful film. In fact, it not only won the best director award at the Cannes Film Festival, but also won the "Time" magazine's top ten films of the year.
When the film was filmed, Yang Dechang was fifty-three years old, and he had passed the age of knowing the destiny. His life experience and insight into human nature had reached a considerable height. The film "Yi Yi" can be regarded as Yang Dechang's summary and reflection on life, human nature and life experience, and this summary and reflection is completed with the help of every character in the film.
The plot of the film is very simple, telling about the emotions and life of each family member in a middle-class family in Taiwan. The rhythm of the whole film is calm and restrained, and you can hardly feel the big ups and downs, but it makes people clearly aware of how turbulent the deep current lurking under the still water is. All the shots are bland when separated, and they are all seemingly trivial details, but when the shots are brought together, it is like a trickle of streams. A river of life in my heart.
NJ is the father in the family, the core character of the film and a microcosm of Yang Dechang himself. He runs a software company in partnership with his classmates. He is loyal and easy-going. have no choice. At his brother-in-law's wedding, he accidentally met his first love girlfriend because he was unwilling to accept the other party's arrangement without saying goodbye. Later, on a business trip to Tokyo, their first love girlfriend also came to Tokyo, and they relived the days when they were together. It's just that all this is strictly limited by NJ within the scope of emotions, without breaking the bottom line of morality.
Amin is the mother of the family. In addition to being a husband and teaching children, she also has her own job. She occasionally goes to the temple with her colleagues for meditation, but she always feels that she has no understanding. After her mother-in-law became in a vegetative state, the doctor ordered someone to talk to the old man every day, so she arranged for her family to take turns talking to her mother-in-law. After a period of time, she suddenly found that she said the same thing to her mother-in-law every day, which made her feel very different about her life. Seriously suspicious, she cried and told NJ how I became like this. In order to seek liberation, Amin went to the temple to practice again, and the master in the temple also came to the house several times to persuade NJ to go to the mountain to accompany Amin to practice, but NJ refused.
Tingting is NJ's daughter and goes to the best Beiyi Girls' High School in Taipei. She is a quiet and kind girl who wears the same uniform to school every day. She had a good time with the neighbor girl Lili, and she knew Lili's boyfriend Fatty. The fat man is actually not fat, he is a very handsome boy. After Lili and Fatty broke up, Fatty first asked Tingting to help send letters to Lili, and then Fatty began to pursue Tingting, which was Tingting's first love. But one day, Tingting found out that Lili was with Fatty again. When Tingting told Fatty that she would not blame him, Fatty yelled at her, completely hurting the heart of this kind girl. All first loves are beautiful, but also the most fragile. In front of her mother-in-law's bed, Tingting asked her mother-in-law, did I do something wrong? In fact, there is nothing wrong with her, it's just that feelings are more difficult to understand than water. Later, Fatty killed her English teacher for Lili.
Yangyang is NJ's son, smart and cute, somewhat introverted and sensitive, the smallest in the class, and is often bullied by girls. Even at his uncle's wedding, he would be teased by other girls. From the chat between NJ and his first love girlfriend, we can know that Yangyang actually has the shadow of NJ's childhood. Because Yangyang is a child, the world seen from the child's eyes is always full of questions and curiosity. He will ask NJ many questions, but even NJ can't answer it. For example, he asked "why each of us can only see half of it? I see why you can't see it". He picked up the camera and took pictures, all of which were the backs of people's heads. He washed them out and gave them to his uncle, saying, "This is something you can't see." The girl he likes can swim, so he hides in the bathroom every day to practice holding his breath in the washbasin. He read his composition at his mother-in-law's funeral and said, "When I saw my little cousin outside who had not been named, I found that I was getting old too."
The bits and pieces of this family are a condensed version of our real life. NJ, Amin, Tingting, Yangyang, although they are different in age, gender, and location, they all have their own troubles, and they have all kinds of feelings in their lives that they cannot tell or understand to outsiders.
NJ people are middle-aged, there are old people and small people, and the company is in recession. My brother-in-law has to help often. All these need NJ to bear and sort out alone, and at this time, the first love appears again. And still fell in love with him. It seems that these are situations that many middle-aged men encounter. As a housewife, Amin became bored with the repeated decades of life, and hoped to find relief from religion. For women, with the increase of age, the scope of social interaction becomes more and more narrow, and the content of life becomes more and more simple and repetitive, which makes life lose passion and purpose. The adolescent Tingting also encountered setbacks and pains in her relationship, but no one could solve it. And Yangyang is always bullied by girls and reprimanded by the dean in school, which makes Yangyang have to find his own way to get revenge on each other.
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