YI YI

 It begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral and you might say that inbetween all human life is there. Edward Yang's masterpiece "Yi Yi" is a film about family or families, each with their own set of problems, each with their own reasons for getting up in the mornings and getting on with life. Yang's genius is for taking what we think of as the mundane and showing us just how much real drama there is in what appears to be routine. Domesticity, business, religion, sex and education are all interlinked whether you're old and close to death, middle-aged and wondering if you've made the right decisions in life or very young and questioning all you see or perhaps don't see.

This is a funny, serious and often very moving picture where almost everything that happens is instantly recognizable. These are people we all know and have met at some stage in our lives. It has a large cast and it's beautifully acted, (and as the little Yang-Yang it has in Jonathan Chang one of the great child performances). Yes, there are story-lines here that we would call melodramatic when Yang borrows liberally from the kind of American films Sirk or Delmer Daves was giving us in the late fifties and early sixties yet this feels perfectly in keeping with his vision of cinema as a whole and at three hours it certainly has the feel of an epic but I wouldn't want it a moment shorter; if anything I could have spent another hour in the company of these amazing, everyday people. Great cinema and worthy of all the praise it's received.