It’s common to read a director’s final film as a grand culmination and summation of their tics, their thematic concerns, and ultimately their cinematic ethos. Think of the way L’Argent is the apotheosis of the steady, ascetic style of Robert Bresson, or the way Sirk is able to push his melodramatic filmmaking as far as it could go with Imitation of Life. Even more recently, think of the way The Other Side of the Wind is able to unexpectedly unify the inflated grandeur of the mise-en-scene in Welles’ early works with the hyperactive-yet-shaggy montage of his later works. Yi Yi, the final film from Taiwanese cinema giant Edward Yang, certainly scans as a summation of Yang’s formal and thematic preoccupations, but for me, it adds up to nothing less than the sum of 20th-century cinema itself.

That’s not really all too hyperbolic. It’s a story that’s as grand as D.W. Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance, cross-cutting four storylines together and framing them in mind-bogglingly massive compositions. Yet for all its grandeur the film remains minute, nearly as naturalistic and minor as those Actuality Films the Lumiere brothers used to make about parents feeding babies, gardeners working, and boats leaving the harbour. There are echoes of the city symphony (all those roaming, lonely shots of Taipei and Tokyo), and the American melodrama (notably involving Ting Ting and her love triangle, and NJ’s romance with Sherry, an old flame from high school). Yet for all of the film history contained within it, the film still unmistakably belongs to Edward Yang. Nobody else could have made it.

Yang has stated that his aim with Yi Yi was to chart the course of an entire life, from birth until death. This proved impossible, but he came pretty close: the film begins with a wedding (the beginning of a new life) and ends with a funeral. It stays focused on three members of the Jian family: NJ and his two children, Yang Yang and Ting Ting. There’s not much of a plot to describe, just many elements that come in and out of focus, interacting and reverberating through different members of the family. There are the teenage romantic trials of Ting Ting, which contrast with the muted, potential romance of NJ meeting up with Sherry, an old flame, in Tokyo. There is the social dissatisfaction of all three main characters, with NJ feeling just as out of place in Tokyo as his children do in their own country. There is the punishment of one’s good nature, which occurs with Yang Yang at school, and also with NJ’s experiences in the new video game industry that he hopes to join. Finally, there is the reckoning with absence, as all three must do when their grandmother slips into a coma. Thus this film contains the entire life cycle: there is infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death, all of which are not just metaphorically represented by the film’s characters, but examined in the ways that they clash with each other.

All over, there is the sense of things converging and transforming, and it’s only reinforced by Yang’s nonchalantly brilliant filmmaking. Yang’s shots are grand and roomy, paying special attention to the clutter that surrounds the Jian house, the trees along Taipei streets, and the empty office spaces that dot his setting. In one masterful shot, he tracks Yang Yang running through a playground by following him through three different security cameras on three different corners of a computer screen, bending the laws of space and finding a way to make his compositions even grander. In another, he juxtaposes a documentary of a lightning storm with a young girl standing up and walking out, her face framed by the billowing clouds behind her, emphasizing the perspective of Yang Yang, who hadn’t taken an interest in girls before this moment. These two moments look forward to the cinema of the 21st century, mining new forms of media – diegetic screens within screens, digitized video which distorts and exaggerates – for their dramatic and thematic capabilities, uniting in a single shot the cinema of the century past and the century to come. This also goes for his coup-de-grace, perhaps the greatest match cut (if it can be called a match cut) of the decade: during a news report about the stabbing of a character we have come to know, Yang cuts to a shot of the stabbing occurring during the gameplay of the video game that the character was working on. We see real life literally converging with digital entertainment, Yang’s 35mm compositions transform into digital news broadcasts and those into CGI, life exiting the image as a man’s life exits the world. In this moment, the cinema of the 20th century truly enters the 21st, perhaps for the very first time.

The victim of the aforementioned stabbing is played by fellow Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao Hsien, who carried the torch of Taiwanese cinema into the 21st century with Millennium Mambo, Three Times, and most recently The Assassin. In the role of NJ, there is famous screenwriter Nien Jen Wu, who wrote films not just for Yang and Hou, but for another master filmmaker, Tsai Ming Liang. Also, famous concert pianist Kaili Peng (Yang’s wife) performs the score that bookends the film’s emotional content so well. The film is a crowning achievement for its respective movement, sometimes called the Taiwanese New Wave but more often New Taiwanese Cinema, one of its most celebrated and revered works internationally. It contains not just many artists of the genre, but many of the themes they work with: those themes of death, of family, of the slow passage of time, and of the rapid and unknowable transformation of the city of Taipei, so atomized and fast moving it becomes nearly impossible to document, let alone comprehend.

In that regard, we might say that Yi Yi is just as much a period piece as Yang’s previous crowning achievement, A Brighter Summer Day. Both films work with similar themes, and both are similarly leisurely despite the latter having a more conventional gangster plot as well as a clear main character (which is not to say that it doesn’t diverge from that main character frequently). Both films are about slow-moving time, about slow-moving characters through liminal spaces, and both films document the pain of choosing one’s identity, whether that’s Yang or Si’r or the city of Taipei itself. Both films are also at once minute, intimate character studies about small feelings, and yet incredibly grand in runtime (Yi Yi is three hours while A Brighter Summer Day is four[!!!]) and in their presentations of Taipei environments. Both also feature two of the greatest child performances in film history: Chang Chen in A Brighter Summer Day and Jonathan Chang in Yi Yi. If Yi Yi is superior, it’s only a matter of Yang fully committing to making a film without a main character or even a main plot. This is a film about which you could say “the plot really is just life” and not be the least incorrect.

No matter what the intent is, the final shot of a final film is always just a bit devastating. I’m thinking specifically of the final shot in L’argent, a simple shot of a crowd of people looking into a room to see a criminal be escorted out, and then still looking in the empty room after he has gone. Or perhaps the final frame in Kiarostami’s posthumous 24 Frames, a woman asleep at her computer while a Hollywood movie ends with a kiss and a title in slow motion, the trees blowing in the breeze in the background, as the song “Love Never Dies” croons along. To watch these shots knowing that they’re the last things that their directors would ever put to film, you have to wonder if they knew also. In Yang’s case, he didn’t know: he was planning to make an animated film with Jackie Chan up until his tragic death in 2007, after a battle with colon cancer that began soon after the completion of Yi Yi.

Back to that funeral. The final shots of the film are dedicated to Yang Yang, reading a letter he has written to his grandmother, who has passed away. He talks to her about his quest to show people new things and to find out where she has gone. Little Yang’s last words are: “Grandma, I miss you, especially when I see my newborn cousin, who doesn’t yet have a name. He reminds me that you always said you felt old. I want to tell him that I feel I am old too.” Big Yang’s last words are the same: he ends the film on a simple shot of Yang Yang in a suit, standing in front of empty chairs in an empty room, looking at his grandma’s picture. To see this simple and devastating shot, knowing it was the last thing that Edward Yang would ever put to film, is so unbearably sad that it’s downright lifelike.