Yi Yi

Yi Yi feels less like a movie and more like an entire lifetime quietly unfolding in front of you. And that’s honestly what destroyed me the most about it: nothing “huge” really happens, but at the same time everything happens. Death, love, disappointment, routine, growing up, regret, emotional distance, nostalgia, loneliness, the terrifying feeling of becoming an adult and realizing you still have no idea what you’re doing… it’s all there. I genuinely thought the runtime would feel exhausting, but it was the complete opposite. It felt way too short. By the end, I had that horrible empty feeling you get when a film stops feeling like a film and starts feeling like a part of your life. Very few movies make time disappear like this. I wasn’t watching scenes, I was watching memories. It felt like the camera somehow captured the quiet sadness of simply existing. What I love most about Yi Yi is how deeply it understands that life usually doesn’t fall apart through huge dramatic moments. It falls apart slowly, almost invisibly. Through ordinary conversations, awkward silences, unanswered calls, small disappointments, people arriving too late into your life, realizing you became someone you never planned to become. And somehow, despite all of that, the film still finds tenderness in being alive. It’s one of the saddest movies I’ve ever seen, but it never feels manipulative. It never begs you to cry. It just observes people living, and that ends up being infinitely more devastating. Every single character feels painfully human. NJ is honestly one of the most realistic characters I’ve ever seen in cinema. That feeling of being trapped inside a life you’re no longer sure you chose for yourself, wanting to return to the past not because it was perfect but because you still had potential back then… it hurt too much. His scenes with Sherry completely destroyed me because they capture something so specific: realizing that even if you reconnect with someone you once loved, time has already changed both of you too much for things to ever truly return. Yi Yi is constantly haunted by alternate versions of people’s lives — the people they could’ve become if one thing had gone differently. And Yang-Yang might genuinely be one of the best-written children in film history. He never feels overly cute or unrealistically wise. He notices things adults stopped paying attention to a long time ago. The entire idea of him taking pictures of the backs of people’s heads because “they can’t see it themselves” is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard in a movie. It basically summarizes the entire film: nobody can fully see themselves. We all need other people to understand the parts of us we’ll never be able to reach alone. I also love how deeply lonely this movie is. Every character is isolated in their own way. The mother is spiritually lost, NJ is emotionally disconnected from his own existence, Ting-Ting carries guilt for things that were never her responsibility, Yang-Yang is trying to understand a world adults already gave up on understanding themselves. And yet they continue living together anyway. That’s what makes the film feel so human to me: it never gives easy answers. Nobody suddenly changes. Nobody learns a clean lesson. Life simply keeps moving. Visually, the movie is perfect. Everything feels so quiet and restrained, yet emotionally overwhelming at the same time. The reflections in windows, the massive buildings swallowing people whole, the cold city lights, the way characters constantly look trapped inside their environments… Edward Yang understood exactly how to make a city feel emotional. Taipei in Yi Yi doesn’t just feel like a setting, it feels like a state of mind. Modern life in this movie feels cold, exhausting, emotionally distant. Everyone is surrounded by noise and technology, yet nobody can fully communicate what they actually feel. One of the things that hurt me the most was the way the film understands time. There’s a very specific sadness in realizing life keeps moving forward even while you’re still confused. Adults are just children who learned how to hide their confusion better. Yi Yi constantly reminds you that growing up does not mean understanding life. Sometimes it just means becoming better at carrying emptiness. And that ending completely shattered me. Not in a dramatic or melodramatic way, but in that quiet, suffocating way where you just sit there staring at the credits without moving. I honestly think very few films have captured the sensitivity of being alive as perfectly as this one. Yi Yi doesn’t try to impress you with shocking twists or extreme tragedy; it destroys you through honesty. And somehow that hurts so much more. I genuinely feel like this movie changed something inside me. I can’t even fully explain what, but I know I’ll never forget it. It feels eternal, like it existed long before I watched it and will continue existing somewhere inside me forever. Without a doubt one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen. Beautiful, melancholic, warm, devastating, and painfully human. Three hours that somehow felt like ten minutes and an entire lifetime at the same time.