This is one of those movies where it’s just like, fuck, I can’t really describe this one in a way that does it any justice. It’s a three-hour family drama, following three generations of a family over like a year. It’s quiet and slow, but also dramatic and urgent. It’s about how we end up being who we are, I suppose; or about how we learn to be who we have become.

Edward Yang, the director, had another film just recently on the list (A Brighter Summer Day), but what this actually reminds me of the most is Tokyo Story, not because it has anything in common with it — the family dynamics here aren’t at all a mirror of those in Ozu’s movie — but because it’s so damn good at capturing the subtlety and importance of small moments as well as larger ones, and the way that the present is inexorably formed minute-by-minute out of the past.

On a tangential point, a thing I am curious about is the doubled names in the movie: There are characters named Yang-Yang, Li-Li, Min-Min, Ting-Ting, and Yun-Yun. But none of the actors and actresses’ names follow that kind of pattern. Is that like an “affectionate nickname” thing, is the director doing something intentional with names, or something else?