Yi Yi is an “oeuvre-monde”, a work of art that builds its own world, like The Ceremony by Oshima, The Travelling Players by Angelopoulos and A City of Sadness by Hou Hsiao-hsien; one of those extremely rich tales that conjures up the story of a family and through that story, the contours of a society. The first thing that strikes us is the clarity of the direction and storyline, which makes the narrative threads criss-cross in a way that is almost musical. The repetition in the title is echoed in the names of the characters. There is NJ, an executive in an IT firm; his wife, Min-min, who is away on a spiritual retreat in a temple; their daughter, Ting-ting, who has her first stirrings of love with a neighbour’s son; and there’s Yang-yang, her kid brother. […] Into NJ’s life steps a lover from his youth whom he hasn’t seen for 30 years. […] It is the coma NJ’s mother-in-law falls into at the start of the film, when her son marries, that becomes the catalyst for the existential crisis that all the characters will go through to a greater or lesser extent. But Edward Yang never descends into pathos or doctrine. With the lightest of touches and an infinite sense of balance, he steers us through a series of incidents in which husbands, wives, children and friends are revealed alongside their attendant emotions: fear of death, anxiety, desire, tenderness, melancholy and euphoria. […] This fresco, both Pointillist and abstract, this multitude of strongly delineated silhouettes, prisoners of their solitude, this ultimately enigmatic atmosphere, brings to mind Seurat’s great painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte … In this film, Edward Yang brings together the rigour of the engineer he once was and the poet he has always been, paying special attention to the economic and social mutations of his country. There is a kind of magic in the way he moves the bodies that inhabit his fiction around, and a serenity in this blending of drama and comedy that the filmmaker presents to us as though holding up a mirror, lucidly.

Michel Ciment, “Positif ”, n. 473-474, July-August 2000