Yi Yi
It’s an impossible task to summarize human life in three hours. And that’s why Yi Yi is often considered one of the greatest films ever made: because Edward Yang tests the impossible.
Edward Yang’s eighth and final film, Yi Yi, takes on the enormous totality of human life: stale marriages and lost loves, youth and death, beauty and crime, wealth and poverty. The multi-generational Jian family household ranges from elementary-aged schoolchildren to dying grandparents and everyone in between. Every scene marks a major life event for one family member or another. The film even opens at a wedding and closes at a funeral.
It’s an impossible task to summarize human life in three hours. And that’s why Yi Yi is often considered one of the greatest films ever made: because Edward Yang tests the impossible.
Yang’s original vision followed a single character from birth to death before he recalibrated the scope to an entire family, allowing for the different ages and places in life to intersect or even cross-cut with each other more naturally and fluidly. Their contrast brings out greater dimensions of life’s ironies.
Continue reading on Beam from the Booth.