I had Yi-Yi at home for almost a week from Netflix. Such things happen when you are working 70 hours a week and you only have late evening hours to watch a movie and the movie happens to be 3 hours long. I actually started it two seperate times and got about 30 minutes in and realized I was not ready for the commitment of watching a 3 hour film at midnight. When I finally got around to watching it yesterday morning, uninterrupted and in it’s entirety it took me a while to figure out how I actually felt about it.

Yi-Yi is set in present day Taiwan and follows one family over the coure of what seems to be a month or a few weeks. The film starts out with a wedding. Before the wedding a grandmother falls ill and needs to be taken home. Shortly after we find out she has had a stroke, and falls into a coma, which sets strange things in motion for nearly every member of the family. The mother (and daughter of the grandmother) feels her life is empty after she feels she has nothing to say to her mother as she lies in a coma. She goes on a religuous retreat. NJ, the father of this family ran into his first love Shelly by chance at the wedding. As his wife is at the religious retreat he needs to go to Japan for business and takes that opportunity to meet up with Shelly again to examine the “what if?” Ting-Ting, the daughter can not sleep as she feels Grandma’s stroke is her fault since she did not take out the trash.

Source: 64 and Broadway