Quotidian misery; the endless cycle of joy and sadness within which the seemingly blank lives of ordinary humans are cursed to continue on surrounded by the dim fluorescence of urban sprawl and the deafening hum of faceless crowds.

Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is an unassuming masterpiece; a deeply moving film that will make you cry and cry and cry by deliberately underplaying the emotional intensity of the many little moments that make up its portrayal of an average local family. Whether it is the mundane tension of a crucial business meeting, the profound heartache of teenage loneliness, the quiet intensity of a past romance, the inescapable grip of your own foibles, the swirling confusion of the first crush, or the punishing realization of the meaningless cruelty of your banal existence, each moment of this is an observed, really more than any other movie, keenly, meticulously observed meditation on the power of waking up every morning.

And yet there is a joy to be found here. There is absurdity and laughter; some of it sweet, some darkly ironic. There are innocent children and petulant adults. There are inopportune bursts of anger, hilarious misunderstandings, and melodramatic fisticuffs.

And then there are fleeting moments of beauty; nervously holding onto the hands of the girl you like, a wedding picture, a warm hug, playing in the bath, playing Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata in a drab karaoke bar, a kiss under the traffic lights, a meal with friends, resting your head on the laps of your grandma.

All of it filmed with deceptive grace; the wide masters that exaggerate the insignificance of people lost in the emptiness of their environment, the beautiful reflections that drown those same people in the indifferent gloss of the outside world, that wonderful scene set against the projector, the singles that capture every little reaction, the distant voyeuristic shots that blur the line between the observer and the observed, each scene is filled to the brim with the recognizable beauty of seemingly trivial details.

So much so that the movie makes a place in your mind as your own memory would; it's as if you know these people and have lived in these places. A feeling enhanced by the movie’s fragmented structure that is quick to move from one tiny moment to another but over the course of its nearly three-hour runtime all these little, almost disconnected pieces come together to form a grand mosaic of human experience that is all the more impressive for its unwavering allegiance to the shrine of simplicity.