‘Yi Yi’ is a Gorgeous Meditation on the Mundanity of Unhappiness

Nothing seems to happen in some films. In others, everything occurs at once. Taiwanese auteur Edward Yang’s mesmerizing drama “Yi Yi” (2000) deftly bridges this dichotomy, detailing the monotony of adulthood while also illuminating the complex emotional upheavals that strain even the closest of familial bonds.

Situated in Taipei, Yang’s film follows the lives of the intergenerational, working-class Jian family through the perspectives of three individuals: a disillusioned engineer and father NJ (Wu Nien-jen), his reserved adolescent daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), and his uncannily perceptive eight-year-old son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), who uses his camera as a means of making sense of the world. By braiding together these three narratives, Yang communicates the unique challenges of each stage of life while emphasizing shared themes of change, loss, and longing.

“Yi Yi” opens with the marriage of NJ’s brother-in-law A-Di (Chen Hsi-Sheng) and a pregnant Xiao-Yan (Hsiao Shu-shen). Their wedding, though supposedly an occasion for celebration, is anything but — the bride and groom are expressionless, perhaps even bored, and the attendees’ uncomfortable silence is punctuated by a baby’s distressed cries. The unnerving juxtaposition between the wedding’s exterior pomp and its bleak atmosphere exemplifies a core tension in the film: that between performative calmness and interior turbulence; between neat lies and complicated, repressed truths. Though Yang’s characters are profoundly unhappy and confused, they refuse to admit this to both themselves and to others.

The film also succeeds as a subtle study on the distressing vapidity of life. Between dramatic sequences, Yang inserts uneventful, panoramic shots of ordinary scenes — a busy crosswalk, a diner, and a wedge of skyline – all steeped in saturated hues of red, cerulean, and green. These memorable shots of kinetic cityscapes and lively arguments are at once breathtaking and unsettling. Their slow pace suggests an agitating stagnance, one that steadily grates on Yang’s characters as the film progresses.

The visceral discomfort evoked by the film’s meticulous cinematography is accentuated by the emotional frustration of Yang’s characters. Shortly after A-Di and Xiao-Yan’s wedding, the mother (Yang Ru-Yan) of NJ’s wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin) has a stroke that leaves her comatose. The cramped bedroom where she subsists on life support becomes the backdrop for some of the film’s most raw, unnerving moments of emotional vulnerability.

In a particularly memorable scene, Min-Min sits at the edge of the bed, detailing her daily routine to her mother in hopes of coaxing her to consciousness. Abruptly, she begins to weep, expressing her confused remorse over the repetitiveness of her daily activities: “I have so little,” she laments between violent sobs, “How can it be so little? I live in a blank! Every day … every day … I’m like a fool! What am I doing every day?” Her despair over the possibility of her mother’s imminent death is shadowed by a subtler existential anxiety about the insignificance of her own life.

Toward the end of the film, an exhausted Ting-Ting walks into her grandmother’s bedroom to find her awake. She rests her head on her grandmother’s lap, closing her eyes. “Why is the world,” Ting-Ting begins, “so different from what we thought it was? Now that you’re awake and see it again — has it changed at all?” The camera transitions abruptly to Ting-Ting dozing alone, suggesting that her fleeting exchange with her grandmother was a dream. This supposition is confirmed by the doctors crowding the bedroom: Her grandmother is dead.

It is deeply symbolic that Yang chooses to open with a wedding and end with a funeral. During the latter, Yang-Yang speaks to his late grandmother. His small figure, clothed in starched black, vividly contrasts the heaps of white flowers resting on draped tables below a photograph of his grandmother.

“Do you know what I want to do,” he asks, “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 whether you’ve gone.” The purity of Yang-Yang’s undeterred aspirations — his shining, carefree vision for the future — throws the disillusionment and melancholy of the adult world into sharp relief.

It remains unclear whether Yang-Yang will preserve the audacity of his dreams or resign himself, like those before him, to the bleak tedium of a life filled with obligations and regrets. This thematic ambiguity is precisely Yang’s intent: Rather than confer to viewers a simplified binary of optimism and despair, he provides glimpses of newness and hope within the largely grim fabric of the family’s intergenerational story, ones that intimate the potential for change. It is for the audience to decide for themselves what complex sentiment lingers behind Yang-Yang’s knowing gaze as the screen cuts to black.