Yi Yi presents a quiet, observational story about family and everyday life in Taiwan, it’s a film that focuses on the Yang Family and small but important moments of their lives that define who they are in the future.
Edward Yang’s magnum opus sets out to construct a narrative that is much different than many of the modern day films we see in the Criterion Collection, instead of plot, drama, and concept driven, the film reflects how people understand life differently at different ages and outlooks. It’s a slow film that to an unfocused eye can be deemed tedious, but is able to balance multiple quiet storylines within one family structure, showing how each character struggles with the personal questions they have about their identity, responsibility, and happiness. Yi Yi is a deeply reflective 3-hour journey about how people move through life, regret the past, and try to understand the world around them through ordinary moments.
Yang’s film is structured around the family members of the same name, the Yang family. Each of four characters represent different emotions, perspectives and stages of life moving between, NJ the father, Min-Min the mother, Ting-Ting the daughter, and Yang Yang (the young son). Each story brings a different level of intrigue to its audience perhaps affecting different audiences more or less depending on their stage in life; however Yang Yang’s story is particularly interesting to not just me as a viewer but to most of the film’s audience whether general or analytical.
NJ’s storyline particularly focuses on regret and missed opportunities as his reunion with an old love as he travels for work forces him to reconsider all of the life choices he has made that lead him to this point. His character explores adulthood, responsibility, and the feeling of wondering what life could have been, a general perspective of life from the future looking back at the past. Because of the inevitability of NJ’s story, his plot line becomes the emotional center of the adult perspective of the film alongside his wife.
Ting-Ting’s storyline represents quite the opposite of her father’s, that of adolescence and emotional confusion. The young girl becomes involved in the complicated relationships of her friends and romantic interests as she provides the audience with a Taiwanese coming of age story in contrast to her family. The story of growing up explores the guilt, responsibility, and the confusion of growing up, as she grows her young adult life. Her experiences allow the four sided film to reflect peacefully on how young people begin to understand the consequences of their actions, a rising conflict that feels like living in the present and looking toward the future, more than any of their other storylines.
Yang- Yang’s storyline represents, as said earlier, the most intriguing and beautiful arc of the story as his character resembles the childhood curiosity and innocence of a young boy navigating life. He famously takes photographs of the backs of people’s heads, explaining in perhaps the most philosophical outlook of the entire film that people can’t see what is behind them, a comment created for his father. The idea that people cannot see their full lives from their own perspective is an idea that Yang-Yang’s family desperately needed to hear, while also providing a simple and profound lens for the audience as well.
Edward Yang’s filmmaking style is truly what brings these storylines from separate entities in one long film, into one of the most famous philosophical films of the 21st century. He is able to establish a calm, patient, and observational film that focuses only on ordinary moments rather than dramatic events. His long takes and quiet scenes are what allow the audiences the proper time to reflect on the characters he has created, his pacing emphasizes life unfolding slowly rather than building toward a traditional narrative climax like many movies do. Yang’s film finds meaning in everyday interactions and subtle emotional shifts breaking the mold of traditional storytelling and paving the way for a new type of cinema that defines the new wave of Taiwanese films, as unique and separate. In this case, it’s a new way of speaking about so many important concepts, regret, family responsibility, growing up, perspective, and how people interpret their own lives. Yang’s magnum opus takes so many of these concepts and finds a way to explore them all with its 4 family members set up, Yi Yi suggests that no one fully understands life while they are living it.
In conclusion, Yi Yi ultimately becomes a meditation on how people move through life and attempt to understand it. The film’s quiet storytelling and layer perspectives allow it to explore childhood, adolescence, and adulthood simultaneously providing an incredibly unique experience. Yang creates a film that finds meaning in ordinary experiences with an unordinary film template, it’s a reflective and deeply human film about seeing life from multiple perspectives and realizing how little we truly understand in the moment about our own lives. The film as a whole and its meditative journey earns an 84/100 from the TwilightRoom.
Twilight Room Score: 84.1/100
