I have a uniquely difficult time writing critically about the films of Edward Yang. It was clear to me before I had seen Yi Yi that Yang was one of the great directors, but it’s difficult to summarize why I like his films so much. To try to pin them down to a single idea seems reductive. They are about so many different things. My review of A Brighter Summer Day effectively concluded that I couldn’t identify one dominant take away from the film, but, taken as a holistic experience, the film was a masterwork. So too is the case with Yi Yi which one could argue the central idea of the film is a range of things - an examination of lives at a time of technological upheaval, a city film showing lives in Taipei, a poetic exploration of letting go of the past and moving into the future, or a profound meditation on the value of shared experiences and perspective between people.

I’ll reference Yang’s press notes on the film when asked why does he make films:

My one line answer was just about as simple as the question: “So I don’t have to speak so much.” ... The best thing a director can say should probably be found inside the film he has made, not on the page. This film is very much as simple as the ones and twos in life.

So, despite its narrative and thematic complexity, I believe there is a simplicity to Yang’s approach. Maybe it’s best not summarized in words, best experienced by simply being watched. But the most simple way I can regard the film in the context of this review Is by considering the overwhelming feeling it left me with when the credits rolled: grace.

Yang has so much love for his characters. Watching the film a second time with Yang’s commentary, he reveals that he believes people fundamentally aren’t lazy, everyone is giving their best all the time. Yang has an optimism for the people that populate his films - each experience and perspective is valuable, and that perhaps those perspectives are less different than his characters realize.

Consider the many instances of overlapping sound where dialogue from the next scene begins in the previous one, yet seems relevant to both. Or where something that happens to one character prefigures what will happen to another, like the thunderstorm film Yang-Yang watches while feeling his first romantic attraction cutting to Ting-Ting experiencing first love in a thunderstorm. There’s that brilliantly intercut sequence where NJ and Ting-Ting separately go on romantic promenades, NJ discussing his nostalgia for his young love in a way that seems to describe what happens to Ting-Ting. I don’t think Yang is suggesting these experiences are necessarily the same, but rather that the experiences of each character informs what happens to any other character, their fears and trepidations, that they have more in common than they are willing to share.

And so, at the end of the film, after each of the family has gone through similar character arcs, for the most part never discussing with each other the change they have been through, Yang-Yang summarizes much of what each has learned, that even as a child, he feels old, and that he wants to share with people things they do not know. That’s where that feeling of grace comes in, in Yang’s acknowledgment of the value of universal human experience. But you could probably point to plenty of other scenes where characters give poignant sermons that speak to human nature. Yi Yi is a prismatic experience like that, and one of the great films.