We’ve reached the part of “Yi Yi” where one scene after another is memorable and striking, so I should probably put the superlatives aside for a bit — just assume that these are all essential segments of the movie until notified otherwise.

NJ returns from that energizing night out — one where he made a new friend and conjured up the courage to reach out to Sherry. He returns home on a high, but is greeted with unusually powerful emotions.

Min-Min is in the bedroom when he gets home in tears. She begins her monologue immediately — all performed in a single take by Elaine Jin Yan-Ling. She’s a wonderful actress who had roles in Yang’s final four films — and often played roles where she was simply known as mother or auntie. And up until now in the movie, Min-Min hasn’t had much important to say.

But here she brings to life a speech that could come across as banal without her deep emotional attachment to the text. Min-Min is a woman who feels rudderless. She starts by noting that she has nothing to say to her mother. Every day it’s the same recitation — what she did that morning, what she did in the afternoon — and it’s all the same. It adds up to nothing.

We see all of this in a static medium shot. The camera never moves away from her during the speech. And there’s an extremely important detail in the shot’s composition: we see the back of Min-Min’s head through a mirror. As I mentioned in the opening essays, the backs of heads are very important in “Yi Yi.” I theorized earlier that they might be the character’s souls — and to that score, no one in the film bares his or her soul more nakedly than Min-Min does here. But the back of the head also indicates a person going away, fleeing the scene, often without notice.

This is a foreshadow of what is about to come with Min-Min. But now, she is simply laying it out for her husband in the most vulnerable manner possible. She is facing a spiritual crisis.

NJ responds to this speech by quietly shutting the door to the bedroom, for a brief moment exposing the back of his own head (maybe symbolizing his desire to flee), then he kind of shuffles, Chaplin-like back towards his crying wife. Then, as he blinks furiously, NJ demonstrates to us where Yang-Yang got his stoic nature.

He calmly tells Min-Min that he’ll instruct the nurse to read the newspaper to her mother every day, that way she’ll have something new to hear. It’s just about the most tone deaf answer he could have given in that context.

This is a good time to note that NJ is clearly feeling disconnected from his marriage at this point in the story. His head and heart have clearly been focused on Sherry of late, so this crisis from Min-Min lands at precisely the wrong time for him to be of help to her. It’s easy to judge him in this context, but it’s also important to point out that his blank response is emotionally honest and perhaps better for Min-Min. She can react to him as he really is, not how he’s pretending to be for her benefit.

Before we can even absorb the lack of understanding NJ just demonstrated, we start to hear screaming from the adults next door. The camera shifts outside the apartment, as if placed on the balcony, and we see shadows of the screaming couple next door. At one point it appears that someone is thrown against a wall. Real, raw emotions are spilling out, in marked contrast to the quiet sorrow Min-Min is expressing and NJ absorbing. But even though it looks and sounds so different, it’s another echo of a relationship in crisis. The atmosphere is charged with intensity.

The camera briefly comes back into the apartment. We can now see the Taipei traffic reflecting on Min-Min, as if her tale is being drowned out by the busy-ness of the metropolis. The criss-crossing cars absorb the two family dramas into the quickening flow of Taipei life. How many of these cars are heading home to parallel scenes?

Min-Min closes this segment quietly sobbing. NJ is there, befuddled and helpless.