‘Yi Yi’ is a Quiet Masterpiece with a Simple Truth
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Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is regarded by many as one of the great works of the last 25 years. How fitting, then, to start the millennium off with a film that says everything by seeming to say nothing at all.
At first glance, the movie could be mistaken for a collection of ordinary moments in a single family’s life: taking out the garbage, enduring the drudgery of office work, caring for an ailing parent, or grinding through the endless schoolwork children face each day. On the surface, these scenes appear commonplace—even dull.
Yet Yang seems to be mining something much more meaningful in this collection of events from the Jian family’s life. As the ordinary goings-on of the mother, Min-Min; the father, NJ; the sister, Ting-Ting; and the brother, Yang Yang, all progress over the course of the story, something transcendent begins to emerge.
The film’s power lies in the way it allows us to glimpse ourselves within the Jians. In Ting-Ting’s fragile devotion as she clasps her grandmother’s hand. In NJ’s melancholy recognition of lost love while a colleague delivers a haunting rendition of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata at a karaoke bar. In Yang Yang’s playful wanderings through the apartment hallways, capturing mosquitoes with his camera as though striving to preserve what adults fail to notice. Even the uncle’s drunken, ill-fated wedding takes on an unexpected poignancy.
At the heart of this quiet masterpiece lies a simple truth: life is meant to be lived in its entirety—the good, the bad, and everything in between. Across three hours, Yang delivers his magnum opus, a work that reminds us life can be painful and liberating at once. And it is in that fragile tension that we find its true poetry.