Yi Yi

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Audience Member A body that will not die lies at the center of Yi Yi. Grandma (Po Po), the family matriarch, collapses during the wedding that marked the start of the film, spending most of its 3-hour runtime suspended in a coma, neither alive nor dead, present nor absent, trapped in a mortal liminality sustained by modern medical technology. The doctor’s advice to the family: “treat her as if she were alive, talk to her, take her on walks, it’s good for her,” directs the Jian family into a charade, to speak to a body that cannot hear, to care for a flesh that cannot feel. Thus, grandma is the core around which the Jians’ paralysis is structured. A loss that cannot yet be acknowledged, a future that cannot arrive before the past has definitively gone. But the past refuses passing, it lingers, tubed and beeping, a grotesque fusion of plastic, metal, and flesh, demanding ritual, tribute, and confession. The Jians are trapped in a pre-mourning stasis, unable to complete the psychological labor of mourning described by Freud: withdrawing libidinal attraction from lost objects through repeated reality testing (Freud 89). The family cannot mourn because the object has not disappeared, yet they cannot forget because her absence saturates every room, demanding attention. Grief requires repeated confrontation with the fact of loss, that the object is irretrievably gone. But this is all but impossible within the house: one cannot grieve for someone who is technically still alive, whose return is medically possible. They are in a liminal space between denial and anticipatory grief, able to fully inhabit neither. The state of suspension surrounding the body that will not die is the central metaphor for the temporal and cultural structure of neoliberalism. Just as the Jian’s become structurally incapable of mourning because Grandma is not yet deceased, neoliberal subjects cannot mourn the symbols washed away by this epoch. Community, tradition, connection, all become elusive yet ever-present: commodified, lavishly displayed in public spaces, sold back to a public craving an object that this very system had taken from them. Perhaps the most obvious demonstration of this phenomenon is the wedding that the film opened to. A-Di, the erratic, wealthy uncle of the Jian family, is getting married. The banquet halls of the celebration are molded in the aesthetic of Chinese tradition: reds and golds, dragons and phoenixes, ornate porcelain, crimson silk banners. These symbols are rooted within the mystical and cosmological world views and kinship ties that permeated premodern Chinese society. Yet the bride and groom’s attire, white wedding dress, and black tuxedo are imported symbols from the West. What this contradiction reveals is that the traditionality of the banquet hall is not the embodiment of tradition but rather its empty reenactment, what Frederic Jameson terms Pastiche: the empty recycling of past aesthetics severed from the material and social conditions that once gave them coherence (Jameson 91). What the wedding represents is not tradition but rather its simulation. The hall was not emblazoned with the reds of past civilization because the ceremony itself belongs to that collective memory, but rather because of a sense of propriety that the wedding ought to feel traditional and offer the experience of traditionalness. Indeed, the couple was wedded without any traditional procedures: tea ceremonies, processions to pick up the bride, veils… Tradition becomes decor, cut off from the practices and conditions that rendered it legible. The absence of tradition is then substituted by its hollow reenactment, images of tradition advertised in brochures, TV ads, and movies to fuel a capitalist industrial machine that manufactures embroidered red silk decorations and elaborately painted crimson wallpaper. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 11/09/25 Full Review Zack D. A bit of a drawn out snoozefest, but depicts well the life of Asian folks living three generations under one roof. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 10/13/25 Full Review Stephen C Success in 2 hours and 53 minutes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dubbed and subtitled in worldwide studios!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The USA grossed over $111,900.00!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 10/04/25 Full Review Hao Ian L What's special about Yi Yi is that everyone, more or less, sees their own reflections here, the film doesn't rely on dramatic plot twists or flashy visuals, instead, its beauty lies in the subtle observations of life's small joys and heartbreaks. It's a film that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit, the enduring power of love, and the bittersweet beauty of fleeting moments. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/01/24 Full Review Johnathon W Superb if overly long family drama, interacting an extended family and their trials. The cast is superb across the board while director Yang inter connects them beautifully and in surprising ways, from a wedding to a kid with a camera. However, at three hours, it is a bit too long and could have benefited from being cut down a bit. Overall, one of the better family dramas in recent years. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 09/15/23 Full Review James S An extraordinary, beautifully paced drama that earns it's intimidating run time. The cinematography is a love letter to urban Taipei and no frame appears to have been left to chance. One or two scene transitions were a little jarring (what are we to think when an unsupervised eight year old jumps into a swimming pool and struggles, only for the scene to end seconds later and cut to two different characters?) but the film is thick with carefully considered moments of joy, tenderness, humour and drama. Each character is able to show us at least a little of their inner-workings. It was a rare joy to follow the numerous ups and downs of the Jian family and I gladly shed a tear during the final scene. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 07/19/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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