There’s so much going on in Yi Yi, and so much of it is beautiful. But the thing I find the most touching about Edward Yang’s masterful family drama—currently the eleventh highest-rated feature of all time on , averaging a 4.5 rating among 170k viewers—is its tender, attentive interest in the inner worlds of its characters, even those who aren’t usually at the center of stories like these. “These people—this family—is important. Not in the dramatic events that occur, but in the quiet moments, the transitions between those events, the normal, the everyday,” PTAbro writes.
Yi Yi is one of those films that sounds like it’s about nothing but is actually about everything. It’s about the involved but ultimately inconsequential dilemmas and situations that make up life itself, captured in ways that are both featherlight and awe-inspiring. Every human being contains an entire universe, and few films treat quietly seismic moments in their characters’ lives—teenage friendships turning into rivalries, tiptoeing to the edge of an affair—with as much care as this one.
The lives of adults and children are given equal weight; even eight-year-old Yang Yang (Jonathan Chang) has his own problems and preoccupations. Most sublime of all is the rhyming scheme of love, as teenage Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and her father, N.J. (Wu Nien-jen), experience first love from opposite sides. “By having such a wide span of ages in the characters, Yang is able to portray a lifetime in film,” SimBelm explains. “First attraction, first love, first relationship, relationships breaking up, marriage, pregnancy, parenting, relationships with children and elderly parents, mortality… Not only does Yang portray these experiences, but he overlaps and reflects them. A daughter has her first experience of love whilst her father relives his own.”
The film’s visuals are just as rich. members wax particularly poetic about the imagery of reflections, as Karsten gushes over, but the thing that hooked me upon a recent rewatch is the series of posters hanging in the lobby when Ting Ting goes on a movie date. Did they see The Phantom Menace? Wild Wild West? Analyze This? It’s one detail among many to absorb in Janus Films’ new 4k restoration, currently touring North American art house in honor of Yi Yi’s 25th anniversary.
