Yi Yi (2000): Review
Stub • 514 Words • Film, 2025 • 12/13/2025
⚠️ This post contains a rougher cut of my thoughts on the topic and may be updated in the future. Please forgive any mistakes or lack of polish!
A film that was a challenging watch not because of any particular content, but because I was waiting for someone to happen before I realized that it was already happening.
- Its a sweeping narrative that never picks up in pace, it just keeps on chugging along.
- In this way, it can feel somewhat stationary because there’s no acceleration.
- The film goes on whether or not you’re engaged, but I think there will be a different time for each person where they’re really able to lock into the film.
- For me, it was when they started to use speaking to the comatose grandmother as a sort of confessional. Prior to this, you didn’t really get a lot of the character’s inner feelings, so I liked this device to peer into the character’s minds.
To me, this was really a movie about love.
- Yang Yang’s first crush (thunder as creation of life)
- Ting-Ting dating her friend’s ex (matching shots with the dad and his lover), him taking her to his old spots déjà vu.
- The neighbor and her lovers
- NJ and his first love going a similar way except she left him this time instead
- The brother and his shotgun wedding and his relationship with his old classmate/friend.
This movie is also about time, or uses time to tell its story.
- Time and it being resistant to change (NJ’s second chance at love turning out the same)
- How so many things are happening all at the same time
- A lot of old friends and people from the past
- It is also about dawning modernity and how NJ’s team could be left in the past with video games
- Yi Yi: Time and Space
I really loved Yang Yang and what he represented, but I do feel like sometimes people really lean too much into the wise young person juxtaposition in a way that loses believability.
- “You can’t see it so I help you” – The Homebound Symphony
- I love how Yang Yang wants to show people things they’ve never seen before.
- wants to pay attention to things that others don’t or can’t
- Shots as proof (of mosquitos) or to show you how I see things.
- Your perspective, if not communicated well, can come off in a bad way. This is shown by Yang Yang apologizing to his grandmother after she dies that it wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to her, he just felt as if he didn’t have anything of worth to tell her.
- Self knowledge and seeing the backs of our heads
There wasn’t too much refrain to me, like there were some things that might have been repeated once or twice, but not a lot of motifs that I could notice.
- the little lines “excuse me…” “what did i come down here for?”
- surveillance camera shots
The world isn’t as it seems.
- this is good (The mother saying it isn’t as complicated as she thought after being at the temple)
- this is bad (Ting-Ting and love when speaking to Grandma)
I loved how it starts with a wedding and ends in a funeral.