A new TIFF film series showcases a brilliant director you’ve probably never heard of

Yang-Yang, the precocious young hero of 2000’s “Yi Yi” is a shutterbug, as well as a surrogate for his creator: his moniker doubles writer-director’s Edward Yang surname in a way that suggests self-portraiture. A preternaturally curious kid, Yang-Yang spends the majority of the three-hour film taking Polaroids of the backs of people’s heads — the byproduct of a philosophical conversation he’s had with his father about the nature of perception. “I can only see what’s in front, not what’s behind,” the boy says plainly. “So I can only know half of the truth.”
Few movies are more truthful — or more perceptive — than “Yi Yi,” a wry and wonderfully open-hearted drama that documents the ups and downs of a prosperous but fractious family over the course of a year (it begins at a wedding and ends at a funeral). A consensus critical favourite and surprise art-house hit, the film won Yang the best director prize at Cannes and helped to introduce him to North American audiences after he’d spent two decades making masterpieces in Taiwan.
For a filmmaker so preoccupied with the passage of time — and unusually gifted at conveying such tremulous, existential sensations through his chosen medium — Yang didn’t have nearly enough of it. Born in Shanghai in 1947 and educated in both Taipei and the United States, the director scaled heights of acclaim before dying in 2007 at the age of 59.
Judging from his filmography, Yang ranks among the most intelligent and cosmopolitan filmmakers of his era, skillfully limning the labyrinthine political and historical complexities of Taiwanese society while gesturing toward larger, palpably urgent themes of globalization.
The spectre of late capitalism haunts his precisely composed frames, but Yang had a light touch. In one of “Yi Yi”‘s funniest and most indelible sequences, a harried but loving family man tries to cheer up his sulky son by taking him to McDonald’s. As Dad yawns under the fluorescent lights, his son sizes up a Big Mac with carnivorous delight: this is what “billions and billions served” looks like.
Yang only made seven features (eight if you include his segment in the 1982 omnibus “In Our Time”), all of which are worth seeing as part of Edward Yang’s Taipei Stories, TIFF’s retrospective beginning July 4. For the uninitiated, the bittersweet emotions and novelistic sweep of “Yi Yi” might be a good place to start.
But for many familiar with his work, the director’s true masterpiece is 1991’s “A Brighter Summer Day,” a Shakespearean story of star-crossed teenage lovers set in the early 1960s — a moment of profound cultural upheaval caused by the Chinese Civil War and the subsequent declaration of martial law by the ruling nationalist authorities. Forcibly alienated from their traditions — and heavily influenced by the American troops stationed among them as part of the Cold War — many of Taiwan’s teens bought into neo-tribal, youth-gang ideologies. Clear-eyed beneath its gauzy veil of nostalgia, the film links the roiling emotions of its characters to larger pockets of turbulence while building steadily to a tragic conclusion.
At four hours, “A Brighter Summer Day” is an epic, but it moves like a shot. Between its brooding tone and ecstatic use of period pop music (the title refers to a misheard lyric from an Elvis Presley song), it’s a vision of anxious alienation and violent catharsis worthy of Scorsese.
Not all of Yang’s movies are so languorous. As its title suggests, 1994’s “A Confucian Confusion” is a comedy pitched at screwball velocity, organized around a series of romantic entanglements within a group of young, upwardly mobile professionals. Nimbly mixing personal and professional intrigue against a satirical backdrop (the title simultaneously celebrates and skewers philosophical inquiry), Yang sketches a generational portrait of restless, mixed-up urbanites that’s ultimately no less scathing for being empathetic — and vice versa.
There’s a similar sense of agitation driving 1996’s “Mahjong,” which sets its sights several rungs down on the social ladder: what begins as a swirling romantic comedy eventually descends into the lower depths of noir, shot through with vexing questions about ethics and morality.
There were times when Yang got even darker, as in 1986’s “The Terrorizers,” which interweaves three separate storylines into a tensely pressurized (and ultimately brutal) thriller — one steeped in narrative and thematic ambiguity. While it might seem hard to reconcile the cool fatalism of “The Terrorizers” with the all-embracing humanism of “Yi Yi,” the solution is that Yang’s work contained multitudes — including a compulsion to look at the truth from many different angles.
“That’s reality,” he said in 2000. “If you don’t want to look at it, I don’t want to talk to you. I’ll talk to the whole world instead.”