A wedding, a birth, and a funeral. These are the tent poles around which Edward Yang builds Yi Yi, his thoughtful and moving portrait of a family struggling to survive against the ordinary occurrences of life. It’s films like this one that remind you that the biggest budgets, the flashiest special effects, and the biggest stars still can’t trump a well told story or complex, beautifully explored characters. It is a truly wonderful cinematic experience.

The film opens with the wedding of Ah-Di (Hsi-Sheng Chen) and his already heavily pregnant bride, the ceremony having been delayed in order to fall on a “lucky day.” Just how lucky it is can be measured in what happens afterwards: not only does Ah-Di’s former girlfriend crash the reception and make a scene, claiming that she should have been the one to marry Ah-Di; but Ah-Di’s mother takes ill and later suffers a stroke which sends her into a coma. The mother is cared for at home by her daughter, Min-Min (Elaine Jin), son-in-law NJ (Nien-Jen Wu), and their children – teenage Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and 8-year-old Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang). Many films would make the mother’s convalescence central to the story, focusing on how the family cares for her, but Yi Yi uses it instead as a means of adding texture to the family’s life. The silence that surrounds the incapacitated matriarch underscores the ways that all the members of the family are isolated from each other and lonely.

It quickly becomes too much for Min-Min, who breaks down and confesses to NJ that she has nothing to say to her mother because there’s nothing to her life, just an endless repetition of events that can be summed up in a matter of minutes. She goes away to a monastery to find herself, though she ultimately finds the experience less fulfilling than she was hoping. While she’s away NJ reconnects with Sherry (Su-Yun Ko), his first love whom he had encountered by chance at the hotel where the wedding reception was held. They meet up again in Japan, where they spend a lot of time walking and talking about what they once shared and the way that they left things. They flirt with the idea of running off together, though they both seem to recognize (albeit not at the same time) that what they’re really trying to do is recapture their youth and change the course of their lives. That is, of course, impossible, and late in the film NJ sadly confesses that even if things had been different 30 years ago, they might have ended up much the same.

The children have their own problems. Ting-Ting has developed a friendship with the girl next door but also a crush on her new friend’s boyfriend. When the friend and boyfriend break up, it seems for a time that Ting-Ting may benefit from it, but the fallout is both painful and traumatic. For Yang-Yang, life is a mixture of torment and wonder. He’s picked on at school, both by classmates and a particularly nasty teacher, but his curiosity about the world around him is what gets him through. Using a camera given to him by his father, he sets about taking pictures of the backs of peoples’ heads, capturing what they themselves aren’t able to see. His unique perspective is seen as hopeful by the film – he might break the cycle of boredom and monotony that has enveloped everyone else.

Yi Yi moves slowly, unfolding at a natural and meditative pace. It is not afraid to simply watch the characters and trust that the audience will find them and their relationships engaging. Things happen, some of them life altering in their importance, but the film is less about those events than about how the characters deal with them. To emphasize this facet of the story, Yang often lets the camera observe the action from afar, putting a distance between the characters and the audience that, somehow, does not diminish the ultimate intimacy of the narrative. He also chooses not to show some of the major events that take place. We learn of the matriarch’s stroke, for example, well after the fact, when the family learns that she’s been taken to the hospital. Later there is an accident involving another character – we suspect that it will end in death because the wedding and the birth have already taken place and we know that death is looming, though we don’t know whose it will be – and the camera remains in another room so that we can only listen to the horror of the discovery. It is a surprisingly effective way to tell the story, distilling the emotions so that we can relate to them even if we cannot relate to the exact circumstances that inspire them.

The setting of Yi Yi is Taiwan, but the story is so universal that it could be about people anywhere in the world. The longing, disappointment, and hope of the characters is easy to connect with and understand and nothing about the film feels in any way forced. It is one of the great films of the last decade, a quiet masterpiece.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: