The movie is roughly halfway through at this point, so it’s a good time to take a step back and look at the film’s structure. “Yi Yi” begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. Here at the halfway point, we get a baby shower. Compared to wedding and funerals, baby showers are fairly simple, happy events.

But nothing in A-Di’s life is ever simple. It starts off pleasant enough. We see Xiao-Yan and A-Di with the baby. The camera is stationary in a medium-to-long shot. Friends come by and tell them that the baby looks like A-Di. Someone asks about the baby’s horoscope and name — A-Di dodges the subject.

But then we see A-Di’s friend Migo come through and loudly proclaim that the party has arrived. He declares that he is so happy that Xiao-Yan has “made up with Yunyun” and we see her enter the party as well. This is obviously awkward, and I assume that Xiao-Yan has no idea that A-Di slept over at her place recently, otherwise her head might explode.

We get a little backstory here: A-Di, Migo, Yunyun and several other party attendees went to school together, and all of them seem to have an agenda — to repair any rift that might damage their group cohesion. Yunyun feeds off this energy and acts like nothing is wrong. She declares that the baby looks more like Yunyun that A-Di, and — this is pure speculation on my part — I have to wonder if this isn’t a backhanded way of expressing doubt about the child’s paternity. Yunyun orders A-Di at this point to “go get the baby pictures.”

While he steps away, Yunyun drops another truth bomb. She says, to Xiao-Yan, I had a great eye, you should congratulate me. I hired you right out of school. This gets Migo to proclaim that yes, Xiao-Yan should congratulate her.

If we pick this apart a bit, he already knew that Yunyun and A-Di were a couple, and now we know they knew each other all the way back in high school. But Yunyun is also making clear that Xiao-Yan never would have met A-Di if she hadn’t hired her, because we can assume that he met her this way (either because he too worked with Yunyun or he was around enough to notice her.)

What a dastardly thing for Yunyun to say at a woman’s baby shower — that Xiao-Yan should be thanking her, the ex girlfriend, for making all of this possible. There’s so much subtext here, lines she hides behind the passive aggression.

Finally Xiao-Yan has heard enough and goes to find A-Di, insisting that he throw her out of the party. This creates a civil war among attendees and soon enough, fists start flying. Yes, a baby shower where punches are thrown. Edward Yang earns this big crazy scene by being so understated in much of the film.

The scene ends with A-Di going to the banquet entrance to meet NJ, holding a gift, stunned at what he is witnessing. Just to cap it all, Xiao-Yan’s father then comes by the scold A-Di and tell him that he’s going to take his daughter away from him and he hopes he never sees them again.

But, of courses, A-Di is much luckier than that. He will recover from this, even as he has more melodramatic storms to weather.