Beginning with a wedding and ending with a funeral, Edward Yang's beautifully directed and acted Taipei-set domestic drama is as rich in the mesmerizing details of day-to-day life as it is overflowing with the kind of humanist feeling that separates great films from the merely good. And Yang's film is much more than merely good-it manages to show life as the mixed-up mélange of comedy, drama and tragedy that it really is without giving in to sentimentality or cynicism.

Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes last year as well as the Best Picture awards from both the (American) National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle, Yi Yi focuses on one fairly successful extended family headed by patriarch NJ (Wu Nienjen, a noted Taiwanese screenwriter), co-owner of a high-tech firm recently fallen on hard times. NJ's wife, Min-Min (Elaine Jin) is undergoing a spiritual crisis and is considering going on a religious retreat, while daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) is about to feel the weight of first love. Eight-year-old son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang, a natural) embarks on a campaign to photograph the backs of people's heads in order "to show them what they cannot see." Things begin to go wrong for the Jian clan at Min-Min's brother's wedding, an occasion that leads to Grandma having a stroke and lapsing into a coma, and to NJ accidentally running into his first love for the first time in 30 years.

If this minimalist plot description (it barely scratches the surface of this wonderfully detailed story) makes Yi Yi sound like a melodrama, don't be put off. Yang uses the trappings of melodrama to get at some profound truths about modern existence without ever letting things get overblown. (There is a scene involving Yang-Yang and a swimming pool that acknowledges the film's debt to melodrama before completely undercutting typical melodramatic conventions, but I don't want to spoil it for you).

The film is breathtaking in how it manages to both convey real emotion and combine it with strokes of bravura filmmaking. The genuine torment that Ting-Ting feels when she mistakenly (or perhaps not-it's a credit to the film that we never really find out) feels that she is the cause of Grandma's stroke; NJ and his first love reminiscing about their first date as Yang cross-cuts beautifully between them and daughter Ting-Ting's own first date; young Yang-Yang becoming aware for the first time of the power of the opposite sex while watching an audio-visual presentation on cloud formations; director Yang's refusal to use the "road not taken" cliché (regarding NJ and his first love) to move the film into the realm of stock tragedy, thereby giving the film a resonance not found in lesser films... I could list a dozen more instances where the script, the acting and Yang's brilliant visual sense perfectly come together to give the viewer moments of pure transcendence. If that sounds hyperbolic, well, it isn't.

Simply put, Yi Yi is a movie that asks all the right questions but, thankfully, doesn't pretend to know all the answers. It manages to be funny and sad, heartbreaking and uplifting, rueful and optimistic, all at the same time. Yang even manages to slip in a sly and subtle critique of the Americanization of everything in contemporary Taipei. Yi Yi is so good that even at three hours long I wanted it to go on longer. Much longer... (Yi Yi means, literally, "one-one" but more generally translates into "individually"-as in how the film portrays the complexity of modern life through the fate of the individuals it chronicles.)