14 Days of Love: ‘Yi Yi’ (2000)

Valentine’s Day may be a rather silly holiday, but it is a wonderful excuse to celebrate love and romance in the movies. In that spirit, check back each day leading up to February 14th for a cinematic advent calendar of recommendations presented as mini-reviews.

Day 8: Yi Yi (2000)
Dir. Edward Yang
Nien-Jen Wu, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang

Logline: Three generations of a Taipei family grapple with tragedy, longing, and connection while worrying about the family matriarch.

Why you should watch: The word epic is usually tossed around for movies containing bloodied battlefields, showdowns in space, or traveling through time. I find that limited application rather reductive, for some of the most epic stories are the most agonizingly human. Edward Yang’s Yi Yi may be the ultimate entry in that latter category. Working from a screenplay he also penned (a theme in these entries), Yang’s film meditates on the way that love and loss impact people at differing stages in their lives. Yang accomplishes this by fanning his film out focus on three generations of the Jian family: father N.J. (Nien-Jen Wu), mother Min-Min (Elaine Jin), teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), and young son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang). The backdrop for all is the sudden sickness of Min-Min’s mother, which unsettles each of them, unlocking various existential spirals that each lead back to the idea of connecting with someone else. 

Yi Yi’s storytelling coup is that Yang treats each generation’s issues with the utmost empathy. Yes, Yang-Yang’s stakes of a first childhood could pale in contrast to Ting-Ting’s grappling with teenage sexuality, which in turn could slip under the weight of N.J. reconnecting with an old lover and questioning his marriage. Yet, each one is granted equal thematic billing so that Yi Yi emerges as a multi-generational probing of how age impacts one’s conception of love and reminds all of us that, in the moment, what we feel is as overwhelming as we can imagine. Far too many movies look down on the travails of childhood fumblings around with love as either something silly, or immature that we must leave behind. Yi Yi never condescends, therefore weaving N.J., Ting-Ting, and Yang-Yang into a moving braid of stories that all lead back to the film’s soul; a family defined by complicated yet fierce love for another. 

Yang, a visionary member of the Taiwanese New Wave, died far too young, leaving us with a gaping hole in place of the full career that could have been. That fact makes Yi Yi all the more precious to me: a masterwork of humanity left behind by titan of the form. 

Where you can watch: Streaming on Criterion Channel. Rent on Apple, YouTube, and elsewhere.

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Devin McGrath-Conwell

Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.