Life is like a dyad-god, both finite and infinite. Your life is finite because it ends, but Life goes on regardless of how you live yours. Few things narrow as quickly as the infinite possibilities of a newborn’s life, except maybe the paths a teenager can choose for themself. Yi Yi (2000), the masterpiece from Edward Yang, is a majestic rendering of life’ s narrowings and broadenings among one Taiwanese family at the turn of the century. They should play it on loop in museums, but instead you can find it at the 90th spot on the Sight & Sound Top 100 or, now, in the Criterion Collection updated to 4K UHD.
L-R: Jonathan Chang as Yang-Yang and Wu Nien-jen as NJ Jian in Edward Yang’s 2000 Drama, YI YI. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
Yi Yi follows a family in Taipei through a series of formative events in their familial fabric. Opening at a shotgun wedding for an unreliable uncle, the evening’s coda is interrupted by the hospitalization of the matriarchal grandmother who falls into a coma. From this emotionally shattering day, the family scatters into their own existential concerns, individually walking the same paths without knowing it.
The father is NJ, and he is played by Wu Nien-jen (Taipei Story; A City of Sadness), a peer of director Edward Yang and one of the leading auteurs of the Taiwanese New Wave. It is a subtle, crushing performance for the ages as he plays the most reliable man in Taiwan who cannot trust himself. His story is the meatiest, crisscrossing between a reunion with his abandoned first love and his role as an executive at a computer game company trying to recruit the mysterious Mr. Ota from Japan. In NJ and Mr. Ota (Issey Ogata (Silence; Tony Takitani), Yang crafts two of the best performances of the year 2000, and they stand among the best ever since with NJ as a seeker and Mr. Ota as a kindred soul and spirit guide, discussing love, craft, and youth more than they do their contract. The film’s most poignant moment spins out of NJ’s confidence in Ota about his returned love and the parallels it draws with his daughter’s high school romance.
“It’s all crap, life’s not like your dreams!”
The children of Yi-Yi are above all, on their own. Their mother Min-Min, played by Elaine Jin Yan-Ling (A Brighter Summer Day), disappears on her own journey early in the film, leaving the children in the care of the distracted NJ. While NJ is distracted by the troubles of his brother-in-law, mother-in-law, and business partners, his son Yang Yan has taken custody of his photo camera, and his daughter Ting-Ting has fallen in love. Just eight-years-old and portrayed by Jonathan Yang (Good Man Dog; Before Summer Rain), Yang Yang is on a journey of self-actualization, wrestling quite literally with the idea that each individual is limited to their own perspective. He takes pictures around school, gets bullied by his teacher, and notices a girl for the first time. A rare revelatory performance from a child, Yang Yang is like a perfect base line in a great indie song. Yang Yang’s sister, in a thematic duet with her father, has a crush on her new neighbor’s boyfriend. Played by Kelly Lee, Ting-Ting is a sensitive kid surrounded by examples of failed love and common betrayal, trying and failing to break the pattern.
Yi Yi translates to “A One and a Two,” a musical title for a musical film — jazzy and breezy with a confident tempo. But it is also made up of sets of one and two. Infidelity runs rampant. NJ must choose whether or not to cheat on his wife. The brother-in-law, A-Di, played by Hsi-Sheng Chen (A Brighter Summer Day; The Cabbie), betrayed his fiancé/business partner and knocked up his secretary. And maybe he wants to cheat on her with said ex-fiancé. The other executives at NJ’s company are courting a knock-off competitor to Mr. Oda while NJ tries to stay true. Ting-Ting sinks into a twisting triangle with her neighbor Lili (Adriene Lin (Taipei Exchanges; Catch) and her boyfriend Fatty (Pang Chang Yu). Even Yang Yang is tormented by a pair — his teacher and the teacher’s pet. The two always want something from the one, and the decision one makes will affect the shape of all their lives. “The other side of their head,” as Yang Yang discerns with a child’s wisdom.
This Criterion release includes one disk for the film in 4K UHD and one disk for the Blu-ray which includes the film and just two extra features. The first is an audio commentary with critic Tony Rayns guiding his friend, director Edward Yang, through his own work. A renowned specialist in Asian cinema, Rayns assisted Yang with the translation of Yi Yi. This shared intimacy with the text lends special power to their discussions uncharacteristic of a critic’s commentary. Poignantly, they at one point discuss what Edward Yang sees as the oxymoron at the heart of the computer game industry (and all creative industry) — the medium’s inherent need for risk and the capitalist’s mortal fear of it.
The second extra is an interview with Rayns about the short-lived wave of New Taiwan cinema. As I watched this in the year that Netflix bought Warner Brothers, his final matter-of-fact declaration that the Taiwanese film industry “is gone” is a sobering one.
Why is the world so different from what we thought it was? …Now that you’re awake and see it again, has it changed at all?”
Edward Yang never allowed his films to screen in his native Taiwan, having rejected his native industry’s byzantine corporate exhibition structure. Yi Yi never goes so far as to portray the millenium New Year in its plot, but “the end of history” hangs over the film like a cloud. The film’s leads are a generation of workers who came of age in the decade of “greed is good” who are now navigating the cresting of the bell curve of global economics. Japan crashed, Yang Yang watches The Adventures of Batman & Robin (1992-1994), Clinton has thrown big government in the trash, and his free trade policies handed Hollywood the gun to kill the Taiwanese film industry, monopolizing their exhibition screens. Mr. Oda’s sales pitch about how artificial intelligence can be developed through video games is heard over the ultrasound of a gambling-addict’s wife. The new millennium is here, and the world is the worse for it.
Issey Ogata as Mr. Ota in Edward Yang’s 2000 Drama, YI YI. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
Regret oozes from the air itself in Yi Yi as old flames return, housewives buckle under monotony, and computer programmers face their own planned obsolescence. Everyone is trapped in a moment between emotional life and death, just like the grandmother. Risk. Loyalty. Newness. They all collide in a hazy dream, each frame composed by a master, worthy of a gallery. The first time I saw Yi Yi, the nearly three-hour film started on my 27th hour awake. I fell asleep maybe a dozen times, but one of the images, NJ on a dock at night, looking out at the sea, often came to me after dusk. When I popped in the new Criterion, I found I could quote almost a third of the scenes I thought I had slept through. With Yi Yi, Edward Yang tapped into the ether of human wonderings in a singular way, collapsing memory and dream into a shared refrain. A one and, yet, a two.
Yi Yi Special Features:
- *NEW* 4K digital restoration, with original theatrical 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- Alternate 5.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Audio commentary featuring writer-director Edward Yang and Asian-cinema critic Tony Rayns
- Interview with Rayns about Yang and the New Taiwan Cinema movement
- U.S. theatrical trailer
- Original English subtitle translation by Yang and Rayns
- PLUs: An essay by critic Kent Jones and notes from the director
- Cover design by Eric Skillman; photograph by Andre Constantini
Available on 4K UHD and Blu-ray January 13th, 2026.
For more information, head to the official The Criterion Collection Yi Yi webpage.
Share this:
Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
Leave a Reply