In the seven years between his seventh feature Yi Yi (A One and a Two) and his death by colon cancer at the age of 59 last year, Edward Yang didn’t direct another film. Now it feels like he’d been amiss in not using that time to give the world a few more movies but, like so many artists of his calibre, Yang never had a smooth ride in the film business. According to critic and friend Tony Rayns in an interview on a recent DVD release of Yi Yi — a film that screens this week as part of Cinematheque Ontario’s Yang retrospective — he didn’t even allow his most internationally successful movie to be released in his home country of Taiwan. Rayns blames this strange decision on Yang’s ire for and disappointment in the Taiwanese film industry, whose growth he had been so instrumental in fostering during the ’80s, yet Rayns describes now as “effectively dead.”

Of the several projects Yang left unfinished, the most unlikely yet most tantalizing prospect was The Wind, an animated kung-fu movie to be made in collaboration with Jackie Chan. Though the star has expressed his hopes of finishing it, we’ll never really know how such a movie would compare with the intricately constructed, morally complex works that preceded it. It would certainly have represented a new beginning for Yang. In the commentary track for Yi Yi, he sounds ready to leave behind his favourite subject, the city of Taipei. Indeed, he acknowledges that he may have achieved his fullest and most honest view of the place he knew so well. “Maybe people in the future, when they look at this film, will know how life was like back then,” he says.

It’s also Yang’s most emotionally generous portrait of Taiwan, having far less of the anger that marks the preceding features. Moreover, the generational conflicts so starkly presented in his early films — reflecting Taiwan’s troubled history and perpetually uncertain present, as well as its citizens’ divided loyalty between tradition and money-loving Western modernity — are not nearly so pronounced.

An undercurrent of rage is palpable even in the most delicate moments in A Brighter Summer Day (HHHHH; March 14, 7:30pm), the four-hour 1991 drama about Taiwanese teens in the early ’60s that is widely regarded as Yang’s first masterpiece. Based on the real story of a murder that occurred while Yang was in high school, the slow-burning narrative unfolds in a highly novelistic manner, the smallest details eventually accruing into a Dickensian portrait of a society in the midst of upheaval. The somewhat ungrammatical title is a line in Elvis Presley’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” — a nod to the imported American pop culture with which the teens are obsessed. And just as they are apt to misunderstand the lyrics to their favourite songs, the young characters here are unable to comprehend the economic, political and historical forces that will make dust of their dreams.

The film could also be seen as another variation in the age-old story of children paying for the sins of their parents. That subtext comes to the fore in 1996’s Mahjong (HHH; March 16, 4:45pm). In this outrageously cynical dramedy — which still has plenty of sting despite its lack of subtlety and iffy performances by its non-Taiwanese actors — Yang depicts a busy array of transactions as equally underhanded whether their nature is erotic, mercantile or both. French star Virginie Ledoyen appears as a highly-sought-after newcomer to Taipei but at the centre of the action is Red Fish (Tang Congsheng), a rich-boy con-man who has clearly inherited his skill for duplicity from his capitalist running dog of a dad. But even this smooth operator crumbles under the weight of that unfortunate legacy. As he cries at one of his not-so-honourable elders, “Why did you make us live filthy lives like yours?”

Maybe Yang got something out of his system with Mahjong because its much-loved follow-up has a more forgiving take on its characters young and old. With the subtitle “A One and a Two” referring to the jazz tunes that permeate the movie and emphasize the narrative’s free-flowing musical structure, Yi Yi (HHHHH; March 15, 7:30pm) has a place alongside A Brighter Summer Day among the best films of the last two decades. Wu Nien-Jen — a member of Yang’s repertory of players who was better known as a screenwriter and another prime mover in the Taiwanese New Wave — plays NJ, a middle-class businessman whose family endures a series of tumultuous events that do more to separate them than bring them together.

Again, a few little lives serve as a microcosm of Taiwanese society but the sociopolitical themes are just one part of a very rich tapestry and Yang navigates the often sudden shifts between satirical comedy and full-bore tragedy with a deftness that recalls Jean Renoir. After such an achievement, it’s no wonder why many of us were eager to see what Yang did next, and why his death leaves us feeling so deprived. 

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