Stills from Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000), a brilliant movie that challenged my entire relationship with film. Yang is a compositional genius and I find myself returning over and over again to these scenes.
Celine Nguyen has an excellent write up on the film:
edward yang's yi yi and the tender despairs of taiwanese family life
The film is of an ordinary Taiwanese family, with ordinary concerns: a teenage love triangle, an elderly family member’s stroke, a marriage grown distant, a shotgun marriage in the extended family. It’s this ordinariness, depicted through Yang’s careful, quietly tender style, that makes Yi Yi such a moving work.
Numerous critics, in the last twenty-plus years, have written about the cinematic excellence of the film, the cultural impact, its long-term influence and significance. I don’t really know enough about film to speak to those things. I just know that I felt personally attached to all the characters; I was painfully attentive to the disappointments they encountered, the small moments of hard-won peace and serenity they attained.
