I could walk step by step, shot by shot through this Edward Yang masterclass of juxtaposition, but I don’t wish to get in its way or to over-explain. More than any other film I’ve examined, I hope my readers are watching “Yi YI” section by section with my descriptions. I cannot interpret Yang’s visual poetry, you’ll need to feel it yourself.

These scenes are doing something very simple, but also delicate. Placing the second first-date of NJ and Sherry next to that of Ting-Ting and Fatty risks over-equating the two experiences, stripping away the uniqueness of the characters, turning life into pattern.

Yang sets them up as happening at the exact same moment, one date a walk through Tokyo, creating memories of old Taipei. The other through familiar scenes in Ting-Ting’s life — the same movie theater she walked by with Lily, the same bagel shop they stopped by. In a sense, Ting-Ting is also reliving a date, her friend date with Lily that led to no movie and no conversation.

With Fatty, she gets the chance to finally talk. And what’s wonderful about the bagel shop scene is that Ting-Ting becomes someone different on the date, someone with real opinions, a point of view. She’s not trying to please Fatty. If anything, she’s resisting. Fatty, it turns out, is an interesting young man with provocative thoughts and a wise perspective on life. Ting-Ting seems skeptical of it all — but doesn’t play the know-it-all teen. She’s quietly impressed.

Sherry and NJ share nostalgic happiness of their youthful romance, then discuss their adult lives. We find out that Sherry had a one-year marriage that led to a child but ended in divorce. And this is where the pain comes out, a return to the story of Sherry left waiting. We again see the back of NJ’s head. We anticipate his leaving — that urge of his that emerges in his everyday life through silence or withdrawal.

But finally we get NJ’s reasons for leaving. It’s raw and honest. Sherry kept pressing him to become a certain type of person — an engineer — the same definition of success his parents created for him. He felt suffocated by her ideas for him. And this caused him pain because he loved her more than anyone. He just wasn’t willing to surrender himself for her.

This is a crucial moment in NJ’s life, but Yang treats it just like any other. There’s no swelling music behind it, no dramatic cut to underscore it. We see NJ find truth and his movie just continues. Only later will we hear NJ say something that recalls this moment and only then do we fully realize what he was saying.

At this point the camera has left Ting-Ting and Fatty and it could have ended the scene for the second-chance lovers as well. But Yang returns to his motif, the way Tokyo stands in for Taipei, an inversion of the usual trick of cinema where a smaller, less expensive city stands in for the metropolis.

The scene ends not with heartache or disappointment, but on a long shot of the pair walking down a trail, NJ lost in a reverie about being in love with her since grammar school, remembering the way she looked, not with details of dress or looks, just the soft glow of radiance.

No one ever looked like that to NJ. No one ever will.