on Yi Yi, my favourite movie and why I think everyone must watch it

Fatty: “My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies.”
Ting-Ting: “How can that be?”
Fatty: “It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.”

My favourite movie is Yi Yi. My life feels different since watching it years ago. It made me feel connected to the world around me and made my heart and head feel lighter. I want to share why I (and others) love this film so much and strongly encourage you to watch it. I genuinely believe it can change your life — I know it did mine.

I discovered Yi Yi by stumbling across it on a movie review site and then being captivated by the reviews that appeared:

“Random thought: Whenever I have a dark day, I watch Yi Yi’s trailer to remind me there’s wonder in all of humanity.”

“captures the very essence of life itself”

“This movie makes you want to cry yet you may not know why.”

“I dare say it’s the kind of film you don’t miss if you’ve spent your whole life and haven’t watched it. In the same way, if you have watched, you will probably never forget this film or at least fragments of it.”

“Always my favourite film. Forever Yang.”

“Edward Yang is possibly my favourite director despite me only having seen ~three of his movies. Each one left me with indescribable emotion and made me feel truly connected with humanity. I’m trying to pace out watching his other films so that I can appreciate them more.”

And then several reviews followed with superlatives like: “goddamn,” “magnificent,” “wonderful.”

These weren’t sorted by the “best” reviews—these were literally just the most recent reviews, without any filtering.

In case you come from my corner of the internet and want more validation, Tyler Cowen calls Yi Yi one of his favourite films (he even rented out a movie theatre to screen it) and Scott Sumner gave it a perfect 4, listing it as one of the greatest films of the 21st century.

Seeing reviews like this, how could I not be tempted?

When I watched the movie, all the reviews immediately felt so true to me. I cried, and then I felt a profound connection with humanity and a deep sense of joy—and then decided that the very next day, I would rewatch it.

While the reception for Yi Yi is near universally positive (extremely so—it’s widely regarded as one of the best movies of all time), it’s very common for people to describe the film in a way that, if you haven’t seen it, seems mysterious. They say it’s powerful, or that it deeply impacts them, but they can’t quite explain why. So I am going to try to explain at least why I think Yi Yi is so impactful to so many—and hopefully, by reading this, you feel the curiosity to explore it for yourself.

In the most boring sense, Yi Yi is a film about life. Yi Yi means “one by one” in Chinese. I think this is the director’s thesis: we are all, one by one, living our own version of the same life.

Sure, the movie is beautifully shot, amazingly written, has great actors, and a great musical score, but I think Yi Yi is great for a very simple reason: how it overwhelms you with life.

Yi Yi—and for full disclosure, it’s 3 hours long (and quite slow at that) and in Mandarin—is a story about a Taiwanese family in the 90s going through the vicissitudes of life.

The film starts with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and its halfway point is marked by a birth. But while it is filled with these ceremonial milestones, it’s not these major events that drive the story. Instead, it’s the life in the cracks, the unceremonial, everyday moments happening in between, that truly give the film its meaning.

In Yi Yi, the grandmother falls into a coma after a stroke and lies there the entire film, with the family told to keep talking to her—quietly drawing out everyone’s confessions and regrets; the mother is having a midlife crisis and escapes to a Buddhist retreat, in part because, confronted with the silent grandmother, she realizes she has nothing to say to her; the uncle is perpetually broke, highly superstitious, and newly married to a pregnant woman he can’t quite handle, while his ex-girlfriend lurks around trying to sabotage everything; the father is facing a struggling business and has just been unexpectedly reunited with his first love, a woman he abandoned thirty years ago and has spent years regretting; the teenage daughter is weighed down by guilt over feeling responsible for her grandmother’s collapse, and tangled up in a painful love triangle with her best friend and a boy they both like; and the son, the heart of the film, is a young boy with an insatiable curiosity who wants to learn, understand, and experience everything, while constantly running into the problems of authority, rules, and the judgment of the kids around him.

All lead characters go through trials and tribulations that seem incredibly difficult, and to them, feel like the most important concern in the entire world. The film doesn’t moralize these affairs; rather, it just shows them to you, one after the other, as inevitabilities of life. But there is something about seeing all of these experiences, one after the other, that makes you finally realize: to go through these kinds of challenges is the human experience.

It leaves you with the message that whatever you are currently experiencing, it is all okay. It is all part of it. We are all experiencing it—not exactly the same it, but more or less, it.

In this way, Yi Yi reminds me of the Book of Ecclesiastes. All that has happened will happen again, and it happens to everyone. Rather than fighting this cycle or feeling isolated by it, we must embrace it, realize we are not alone in it, and keep going.

At the time I watched Yi Yi, I was struggling with a long-past but still not completely healed breakup. I lived with this repeated cursed thought—I felt that because I was so particular, that after having broken up with my ex, I would never meet anyone else who I was as compatible with, and I had to live a life doomed with this unfortunate reality. This is going to sound silly to you, but I genuinely thought my situation was objectively unique and that, basically, I was cursed.

And then when I watched Yi Yi, a weight was lifted from my shoulders. In that moment, my entire feeling disappeared. Because I really internalized that while every person thinks their struggle is uniquely challenging, we all share these struggles, which collectively, makes them not unique at all. In Yi Yi, by showing story after story of these supposedly “unique” challenges, I felt my experience was deeply shared. And with Yi Yi focusing so heavily on the story of growth and the passage of time, my problems suddenly seemed so trivial, so likely to be solved simply by giving them more time.

You may read what I wrote and think, well, if I was in that specific situation, maybe Yi Yi would be meaningful for me too. But I am telling you, the sentiment from nearly everyone who watches it is the same—it leaves you with this exact impression, irrespective of what your unique, all-consuming challenge is.

Werner Herzog describes the film like this:
“For me, when I watched the film for the first time, it was hard to distinguish: who belongs to this family? Who is the uncle? Who are the brothers? And all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter anymore. It doesn’t matter—family structures do not matter anymore, because human beings become visible. Very very deep. And all of a sudden, cultural boundaries do not exist anymore. I see myself. We see ourselves in these figures. And we see the dramas. We see the human. We take a deep look into the human condition; into the human soul. And all of a sudden, it doesn’t matter anymore whether Edward Yang is Taiwanese or was Taiwanese or whether he was French nouvelle vague, Brazilian cinema nuovo, because we recognize ourselves. And that’s something deep that cinema can do.”

Yi Yi is really led by three characters—two who are unabashedly positive by disposition, and one who learns this through the lessons in the film.

Yang-Yang, the cutest child actor I’ve ever seen, drives the film. He is incredibly naive and innocent. He doesn’t know anything, but he goes on unabashed, exploring his passions. He is constantly getting into trouble, exploring everything on his own, getting into hijinks like dropping water balloons on his mean teacher’s head, cutting class to buy film for his camera, or sneaking up to a group of girls and loudly popping balloons by their ears.

Yang-Yang decides to start taking photos of the backs of people’s heads, which is mocked by those who see it. He thinks we can only see half the truth of what’s ahead of us, and we need help to see this other perspective. Yang-Yang learns by doing. He sees someone swimming and decides to explore it himself, first by holding his breath in a bathtub and then by jumping into a pool when nobody is around. He teaches himself photography driven by pure curiosity.

But Yang-Yang doesn’t know anything—he doesn’t know that when you can’t swim, jumping into a pool without anyone around is a bad idea. He doesn’t know that taking photos of the backs of people’s heads doesn’t actually show them the literal “other half of the truth.” But while he is wrong about these particular facts, he is ultimately right about the bigger picture: that in life, we can’t be jaded, we can’t be constrained, and we need to keep learning, being curious, and following our passions. In a way, Yang-Yang’s camera is exactly what Edward Yang is doing with this film—showing you the back of your own head, the part of your life you couldn’t see yourself.

Yang-Yang: “Daddy, you can’t see what I see and I can’t see what you see. So how can I know what you see?”
N.J.: “Good question. I never thought of that. That’s why we need a camera. Do you want one to play with?”
Yang-Yang: “Daddy, can we only know half of the truth?”
N.J.: “What? I don’t get it.”
Yang-Yang: “I can only see what’s in front, not what’s behind. So I can only know half of the truth, right?”

Yang-Yang: “I’m sorry, Grandma. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to you. I think all the stuff I could tell you... You must already know. Otherwise, you wouldn’t always tell me to ‘Listen!’ They all say you’ve gone away. But you didn’t tell me where you went. I guess it’s someplace you think I should know. But, Grandma, I know so little. Do you know what I want to do when I grow up? I want to tell people things they don’t know. Show them stuff they haven’t seen. It’ll be so much fun. Perhaps one day... I’ll find out where you’ve gone. If I do, can I tell everyone, and bring them to visit you? Grandma, I miss you. Especially when I see my newborn cousin who still doesn’t have a name. He reminds me that you always said you felt old. I want to tell him that I feel I am old, too.”

Then there is Mr. Ota, a Japanese software developer who the father’s company is courting as a potential business partner. He is a totally free character who lives his life with authenticity, consumed with art, open to the world and living life to the fullest. In both his work and his life, what matters to him is the soul of what’s being created, not its surface. To see his energy, joy, and integrity is infectious.

Ota: “Why are we afraid of the first time? Every day in life is a first time. Every morning is new. We never live the same day twice. We’re never afraid of getting up every morning. Why?”

And finally, the father, N.J., who struggles with confronting the reality of the past 30 years. He has lived with the regret of leaving his first love, because he felt suffocated by her expectations. Given the rare opportunity to travel to Japan and rekindle his relationship with her, he ultimately learns that his life could only have unfolded the way it did. The reasons he acted then were fundamental to who he was, and everything that happened could only have happened that way. And in seeing his son and his potential business partner move through the world with such passion and curiosity, he begins to sense what his own life has been missing.

N.J.: “I had a chance to relive part of my youth. My first thought was that then I could make things turn out differently, but they turned out the same, or not much different. I suddenly realized that even if I was given a second chance, I wouldn’t need it. I really wouldn’t.”

N.J.: “The first time I held your hand. We were at a railroad crossing, going to the movies. I reached for you, ashamed of my sweaty palm. Now, I’m holding your hand again, only it’s a different place, a different time, a different age… but the same sweaty palm.”

I think this is why people feel so impacted by Yi Yi. It overwhelms you with life, with humanness, and with the feeling that we are all experiencing not the exact same thing, but something that is more or less the same. And it reminds you that if that life is pursued with curiosity and optimism, we will prevail. Yi Yi is, in the end, exactly what Fatty’s uncle promised: a film that gives you twice what you get from daily life.