Yi Yi

Yi Yi

Opening Shot

A wedding. Not a glamorous one. A functional, slightly awkward Taipei wedding where the relatives don't all like each other and the photographer has to ask people to smile. Edward Yang doesn't open with a thesis or a provocation. He opens with the thing itself: a family gathered for an occasion that's supposed to be happy but mostly just reminds everyone of their own problems. The grandmother has a stroke that night. Life, as it does, ignores the schedule.

What It Does

Yang Wei-han's cinematography is deceptively simple. Long, static shots framed through glass, reflected in surfaces, observed from across the street. The camera watches the Jian family the way you'd watch neighbors through a window: with distance that somehow creates more intimacy than a close-up. Yang frequently frames characters against the Taipei skyline, dwarfing them against the city, and the effect is the opposite of what you'd expect. The smallness makes the emotions bigger.

The film follows three generations simultaneously. NJ, a middle-aged engineer, reconnects with an old girlfriend and confronts the road not taken. Ting-Ting, his teenage daughter, navigates first love with the clumsiness that first love deserves. Yang-Yang, his eight-year-old son, takes photographs of the backs of people's heads because "you can't see what I see." Each storyline is a complete film in miniature, and Yang cuts between them without hierarchy. The child's confusion is treated with the same gravity as the father's midlife reckoning.

There's no score to speak of. Peng Kaili's music appears sparingly, and when it does, it's so quiet you might mistake it for ambient sound. Yang trusts the events to carry their own weight. A teenager stands in the rain. A man sits alone in a Tokyo hotel room. An old woman lies unconscious while her family takes turns talking to her. No musical cue tells you what to feel.

Why It's on the List

Yi Yi is proof that a film about nothing extraordinary can be the most extraordinary film you've ever seen. No murders. No catastrophes. No narrative tricks. Just a family living through a year that changes them in ways they won't understand for decades. Yang made this film and then died seven years later at 59, which makes the film's closing eulogy scene almost unbearable in retrospect. He understood something most filmmakers don't: the smallest moments are the heaviest ones, and the job of cinema is to make you hold still long enough to feel them.

The Argument Against

At 173 minutes, the film asks for patience that modern viewing habits make difficult. The business subplot involving NJ's company and a Japanese game developer feels more schematic than the family material, functioning as thesis statement rather than lived experience. And Yang's deliberate refusal to privilege any storyline over another means that some viewers will connect deeply with one thread and feel stranded during another. The democracy of attention is a strength and a limitation.

Closing Image

Yang-Yang stands at his grandmother's funeral and reads a letter he wrote to her. He tells her that he's sorry, and that he feels old. He is eight years old. The camera holds on his face, and for a moment you see an entire life compressed into a child's expression. Then the family files out, and the room empties, and the film ends where every film must end: with the people walking away from the thing that changed them.