N.J. and Min Min meet these disappointments in their own way. Min Min goes off to a spiritual retreat hoping to find some meaning in her life, while N.J. toys with the idea of withdrawing from his deadening routine. You see a little of that withdrawal in the way he uses music to shut out the world. (There's a wonderful moment when he sits with his headphones on singing along phonetically to the Shirelles' "Baby It's You.")

And while he's respected at his job, his weariness at the endless routines of new acquisitions and deals keeps threatening to break through to the surface. He finds relief from two unexpected people. One of them is Ota (Issey Ogata, who looks amusingly like a Japanese Bill Gates), a self-made business tycoon who turns out to be as forthright as he is enigmatic. Ota tends to talk about business in metaphors, but his calmness, his refusal to exaggerate or offer false hope, suggests someone who has found a way to put his work in proper perspective with the rest of his life. (Ogata has a wonderfully calming presence.)

The other is Sherry (Su-Yun Ko), the woman N.J. gave up years ago who, like him, has married and started her own life. She accompanies him on a trip to Japan and while the two don't fall into bed, they begin sorting out the emotions that have been left hanging between them all these years.

"Yi Yi" is like an honest version of "It's a Wonderful Life," but where Frank Capra works to erase and deny any of the doubts that come from the choices we make, Yang never denies those doubts. This is a movie that embraces compromise and regret, not as a sellout, but as the inevitable state of things and not something that makes the life we settle for a lie.

It's a measure of Yang's offhand method that the comic scenes involving Yang-Yang are the place where the director makes his statement about his art. Yang directs little Jonathan Chang beautifully, never pushing his cuteness on us but allowing us to experience it for ourselves. Yang respects the seriousness of children. Yang-Yang goes through life inquisitively, pragmatically, testing out what each new experience tells him. He has the soberness of a little old man in the body of someone to whom everything is brand new. That's what makes him so funny.

It's also what makes him the filmmaker's stand-in. Yang-Yang uses the camera his father gives him to photograph everything around him, at one point embarking on a series of pictures showing the backs of people's heads and then presenting his subjects with the resulting photos. It's one of the odd things that kids do, but it's also a perfect metaphor for what a filmmaker does: He shows us the parts of ourselves that we can't see.

It's too early to tell whether Edward Yang is a great filmmaker, but he has greatness in him. He has a way to go to be equal to the great humanist filmmakers -- Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray -- but like them he works to remove barriers between us and the people on-screen. Even when Yang shoots the characters from a distance or through glass we're never emotionally removed from them. Those distances and obstacles are what they have to learn to overcome. "Yi Yi" makes you wish that Renoir, De Sica and Ray were here to see it. They'd likely recognize a filmmaker who thinks that the highest ambition he can aspire to is to be absolutely clear-eyed about the people he puts in front of his camera, and still love them.

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