The mystery lies in how such a deceptively simple movie -- less a story than a collection of acutely observed moments -- achieves full-scale elation. At just seven minutes shy of three hours (a running time that flies by), "Yi Yi" is the length usually reserved for epics, and yet the feel of the movie is never less than intimate. It encompasses life's primal passages, birth and death, youthful optimism and middle-aged regret, and its characters are engaged in the terrifying prospect of questioning the seemingly unshakable foundations of their lives. Yang never strains for profundity.

"Yi Yi" is quietly overwhelming, but it's restorative rather than devastating. Yang has the rare ability of allowing us to savor the texture and weight of the moments that slide by us hour after hour, day after day without ever becoming ponderous or boring. And so when we reach the end of the film, it feels as if we've been modestly presented with what turns out to be a precious gift.

As in real life, it's a calamity that allows us to start taking notice of those moments: a stroke that leaves an elderly woman in a coma. She lives in a Taipei high-rise with her daughter, Min Min (Elaine Jin); Min Min's husband, N.J. (Nien-Jen Wu); and the pair's two kids, the teenage Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and 8-year-old Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang, the sweetest little scene stealer imaginable).

After the doctors have done what they can for her, the old woman is transferred home, where her family waits for her to awaken. It will help, the doctors tell them, if they talk to her. And as each takes a daily turn talking to this woman who can't respond, it's as if they hear themselves for the first time. They become awkward, self-conscious. N.J. comes home one day to find his wife in tears. She has continued talking to her mother, as she always has, about her daily routine. But now she doesn't think it means anything to either her mother or herself.

Ting-Ting, racked with guilt that her carelessness may have caused her grandmother's stroke, sneaks into the old woman's room when everyone else is asleep to unburden her guilt and ask for forgiveness. Min Min's brother Ah-Di (Hsi-Sheng Cheng), a big baby with his own baby on the way (he's just married the younger woman he got pregnant), tries to tell his comatose mother not to worry by boasting of his success.

One of the reasons that "Yi Yi" is so refreshing is that it doesn't subscribe to the lie that dysfunction is the norm. Movies need some conflict to get our attention, but sometimes at the movies I get the feeling that the people who've made them think that the more screwed-up the characters, the truer they are. The characters in "Yi Yi" are average people at a crossroads who are suddenly face to face with the ways in which their lives have let them down. (This subject was treated earlier this year -- and just as sympathetically -- in "Judy Berlin.")

Most of the crises that force us to face where our lives have led us are things that nearly everyone goes through -- a parent's illness, a job that seems like a dead end, a day-to-day routine that suddenly seems purposeless. And "Yi Yi" is all the more poignant because we recognize that the younger characters, like Ting-Ting beginning a tentative romance that could threaten her friendship with the new schoolmate who's moved in next door or Yang-Yang being made the butt of a bully teacher's piddling little shows of power, still have these adult crises ahead of them, even though their own troubles seem earthshaking.

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