I haven’t sought out much of the ‘runaway acclaim’ that this magnificent film has generated, and I am a bit curious to know others’ take on it. With every viewing, I come closer to thinking that “Yi Yi” is one of the only films of the last decade destined to become a ‘classic’ , in all senses of the term. The shape of the story is flawless, as is the visual sensibility, which is occasionally breathtaking. The performances – most from non-actors – are perfectly suited to the material; the characters feel like family, mine or yours, in the most enlightening of ways. It’s a film that casually makes one think back over much of ones’ life – specifically, things that one might once have paid little attention to, or drawn little significance from. Yang has constructed a great film out of those sorts of moments – what such reconsiderations might be able to teach us.

In this, Yang constructed an intensely soulful film, built around the inner lives of individuals who might have once thought that success and stability could only be found down one path in life, only to realize that this may not be the case: here we have typical middle-class people, with typical types of jobs, who all seem to be poets and visionaries at heart, and much of the tension in this film is in how specific characters do – or don’t – develop an ability to trust where those instincts might be able to take them. This is not necessarily an original theme – many, many films explore this, but very few do so with the nonchalant agility expressed here. When I first saw this film, I identified with it’s perhaps-ordinary surface, only to realize that a typically ‘ordinary’ middle-class drama usually can’t knock me out the way that this film did.

An outstanding film that I expect will outlive the vast majority of other acclaimed contemporary films.