I’ve heard so much about Yi Yi and have been wanting to watch Edward Yang’s movies for the longest time. But I was being really cheap and didn’t feel like buying a Criterion subscription, so thus I suffered silently (true first world problem right here) until the day that I could afford to actually go and buy myself a subscription. And so, in October 2021, I was granted a free trial of Criterion with my new iPad and Apple account, so Yi Yi ended up being one of the first movies that I watched. I will confirm that it was very much worth the wait, I absolutely loved it (spoiler).
Well, since I’m going to gush about this film now and what it’s about, let’s get this review started.
Edward Yang’s final film seems mundane on the surface, but offers so much richness and lush visuals that we can’t help but to be transfixed.
Director Edward Yang won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Yi Yi, which was his last film before his death in 2007 of cancer. He was only fifty-seven when he died. But Yi Yi is a magnificent piece of art, something that cannot just be explained on this page and review. Dear viewer, if you have somehow not watched the movie yet and have stumbled onto this website, you must find yourself a copy of Yi Yi in order to savor and cherish it.
We begin with a marriage. The mother of the family we’re following in this film, Min-Min, has a brother who is getting married. It is at this wedding that the father, NJ, runs into one of his old flames who is now married to an American. Naturally, in a true wink-wink fashion, she gives him her phone number. But while there is a marriage to celebrate, something else major happens almost immediately happens: Min-Min’s mother has a stroke and is rendered comatose.
This is when we then zone out of this intimate family portrait and discover what makes people so uniquely miserable NJ hates his job and is reminiscing on his life’s regrets, particularly where he left his old flame suddenly and without a reason. He is romanticizing the past in order to escape his miserable present, which, if you’ve done this before, you know that this is a major mistake. Don’t go running back to people just because you’re lonely and sad. That’s always a mistake.
We then pivot to the children, Ting-Ting and Yang-Yang. Ting-Ting feels guilty because she was taking out the trash when her grandmother collapsed, but then Ting-Ting manages to interweave herself into a strange love triangle between her neighbor, her neighbor’s boyfriend, and the sexual politics of being a youth.
Meanwhile her brother Yang-Yang is being bullied at school and, in order to keep himself going, he teaches himself how to swim—I found that to be an excellent metaphor for survival. To keep going, to keep swimming, you must learn how to kick and move forward.
All as these messes are happening, the family visits the comatose grandmother and talks to her, just as the doctors have said to do. Each of the characters feels this distinct kind of emptiness in their lives and is trying to fill it somehow. For NJ, it’s the love he lost thirty years ago when he walked away and the fact he doesn’t have the life he always dreamed of.
For Ting-Ting, she just wants her grandmother back. Yang-Yang wants to find the way of moving through life, taking photographs of the backs of people’s heads, in order help people see themselves. He then takes up swimming in order to find a way through life. Then, as the final connector to the problem in this family, the mother, Min-Min, is having a major existentialist crisis. The mother gets the least amount of attention in this movie, but I would’ve been really interested to see more of her story and how she’s viewing the stories of her children and husband.
These stories are woven so tightly, bound together by an image repeated, and, like many of Yang’s other films, the environment plays a key part in how the story unfolds. If you’re into how cities play a role in cinema, then this movie will be a delectable treat for you—we see both Taipei and Tokyo in this movie, allowing NJ and our characters to move through space and time and continue this little loop of nostalgia and regret. And while the loop begins with a wedding, it ends with a death—a classic symbol in the concept of union and death.
Overall Thoughts
Watch it. It’s a stunning movie that will give you a lot to think about after. This was not my first Yang movie (I’ve previously watched A Brighter Summer Day), so I knew what to expect when it came to cinematography and his unique style and approach when it comes to cinema. This isn’t a film that you’re going to watch once and be done with it. I think I definitely will be dwelling on it and its story for a long time, chewing on what it means and reflects with my own life, and returning to rewatch the movie again and again. It’s totally worth it; it’s too much of a timeless film, despite it very clearly being filmed in the late nineties.
