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Yi Yi Movie Review

Yi Yi is a 2000 Taiwanese drama film directed by Edward Yang and starring Wu Nien-jen. It is a highly overrated movie that is way too long and uneventful.

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“Why are we afraid of the first time?

Every day in life is a first time. Every morning is new.

We never live the same day twice.

We’re never afraid of getting up every morning. Why?“

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Each member of a middle-class Taipei family seeks to reconcile past and present relationships within their daily lives. Now regarded as one of the best films of the 2000s, Yi Yi was and still is a big deal among cinephiles and critics, but I personally did not find it all that great. I’d had great expectations for it and they were not met unfortunately.

This may be the case of personal preferences creeping in, but I’ve never gravitated toward sprawling family sagas, and this one portrays literally an entire family from all three generations, thus it was too dense and unnecessarily prolonged. For a family drama, the three-hour runtime is simply excessive. There was never any need for it, thus the pacing was off and for a lot of its length I was bored to death.

The kid storyline with his troubles in school was quite standard, the business subplot was uninteresting to me, and only the funeral and the wedding were strikingly memorable. When all of the family was together, these moments achieved greatness and the epic tone that the movie clearly strove for. This is an urban family drama first and foremost and only in the aforementioned scenes did it achieve that relatability factor.

The fraught, complicated relationship between NJ and Sherry easily steals the show narratively speaking. Just following their on-and-off relationship and how the passage of time ruined their romance was emotionally powerful with the hotel scenes being particularly moving. The acting is strong across the board with these two easily being the standouts.

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Yi Yi is also solidly directed by Edward Young and very well shot with the outdoor cityscape sequences being particularly mesmerizing with some great framing shots. The score is simply lovely, especially in the first act as the tender pieces perfectly accompanied the heartwarming tone of the movie. Still, for a film that is so long, thematically speaking, it was rather empty and nothing of true substance was ever said here.