Sport builders get fairly quick shrift on display, largely by not being represented in any respect. Filmmakers usually like to make films about pushed, uncompromising artists identical to themselves, however for some motive — in all probability both snobbery, concern, or lack of knowledge — they don’t typically select individuals who make video video games as topics.
On the uncommon events that they do, the devs often fall into one in all three classes: inane losers, just like the stoner testers in Grandma’s Boy; sinister tech bros orchestrating some society-destroying company nightmare, like Michael C. Corridor in Gamer or Ben Mendelsohn in Prepared Participant One; or kinky geniuses unwittingly opening a portal to a psychosexual hellscape in arthouse fare like Existenz or Demonlover.
Think about my shock, then, after I unexpectedly stumbled throughout a sport developer character in a film from a quarter-century in the past who’s poised, grounded, cool in an understated manner, admired by his friends, and in addition a traditional grownup human. I’m talking of Mr. Ota, a Japanese sport creator who seems in, of all issues, the traditional, three-hour Taiwanese household drama Yi Yi.
Yi Yi, which is an excellent film, is an expansive story about fashionable life in Taipei, centered on a pc engineer known as NJ (Wu Nien-jen). After NJ’s mother-in-law suffers a stroke, the movie variously follows his depressive spouse, introverted teenage daughter, inquisitive younger son, and fool brother-in-law by some melancholy but life-affirming ups and downs. In the meantime, NJ suffers a midlife disaster in each his skilled and romantic lives. He bumps into an outdated flame, stirring sudden emotions, whereas at work he’s tasked with chasing down a contract with Ota, a well-known sport designer who causes him to query his objective in life.
Ota, performed by Issey Ogata, is launched pitching NJ and his enterprise companions in a contemplative temper. He asks why video games need to be about capturing and killing, and proposes they might create one thing completely different collectively, one thing lovely. He’s just a little pretentious, like Hideo Kojima, however, in his smart sweaters and wire-frame spectacles, he’s additionally type of healthful, like Shigeru Miyamoto.
NJ and Ota communicate to one another in halting English. Ota’s soulful, philosophical musings, which sound so seductive in Ogata’s soothingly deep voice, stir suppressed inventive longings in NJ. The 2 hit it off and exit in town in Taipei, the place Ota brings the home down at a karaoke bar along with his piano-playing expertise. Later, NJ visits Ota in Tokyo, the place Ota reveals that he wished to be a magician as a baby, and exhibits off some close-up magic. (What an ideal game-dev backstory.) He’s a complete dude.
He’s additionally, admittedly, idealized. Yi Yi was written and directed by Edward Yang, a pioneer of Taiwanese New Wave cinema within the Eighties. Yang, who died in 2007, all the time beloved movie however skilled as {an electrical} engineer. He was working in computer systems in Seattle when a screening of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God rekindled his ardour, and he determined to turn out to be a filmmaker. NJ looks as if a model of Yang who by no means made that alternative; Ota’s position within the drama is to represent the highway not taken. (He even gently encourages NJ to reconnect along with his outdated flame.) Yang consequently invests him with an aspirational degree of philosophical cool and inventive purity which could come off as contrived, if Ogata’s efficiency wasn’t so disarming and deeply felt.
However nonetheless — a sport developer as a mannequin of inventive purity! In a film!! A film that was a global arthouse hit 25 years in the past!!! I went to see a rep screening of Yi Yi with none information of the Ota character, and was greatly surprised by him. I don’t know if Yang favored video video games; his computing background suggests he at the least had a working consciousness of them, however the film avoids going into any particulars. However the level is that an ideal artist like Yang noticed no motive to not see himself — an idealized model of himself, even — mirrored in a sport creator. That’s lovely. And so is Yi Yi.
Yi Yi is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.
