A One And A Two
(2000)
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Focusing on a typical family--parents, two children, and an elderly grandmother--living in a small apartment in Taipei, YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO) is about the patterns of daily life. It includes a wedding, a funeral, a first date, a last date, a birth, and a death. The film follows each member of the Jian family carefully, giving each one equal time, completely developing each character. NJ (Wu Nienjen), the father of the family, struggles with a dead-end job at a technology firm while reexamining his marriage when he meets his high school sweetheart, Sherry (Ke Suyun), after 30 years. NJ's teenage daughter, Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), has a selfless demeanor and a naive interest in everything, which diffuses the complexity of her high school life. Her little brother, Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), is an adorable five-year-old troublemaker who's in love with a pesky girl in his class. And Yang-Yang's mother, Min-Min (Elaine Jin), grieves for her dying mother (Tang Runyun) while coping with her own middle age in a rapidly maturing family. |
Notable for their complex structure, arresting visuals, measured pace and spare dialogue, Edward Yang's films have always provided a humanist insight into the modern urban experience. But rarely has he exhibited such poetry and precision as in this engrossing domestic epic. With his nerve-frazzled wife dabbling in religion and his kids experiencing growing pains, a bourgeois partner in a computer firm (Wu Nianzhen) hits a midlife crisis that not only proves the unpredictability of life, but also slyly mirrors Taiwan's current sociopolitical insecurity. The performances are superb and the narrative deceptively simple in its workaday naturalism. But this is much more than soap gone art house.
Halliwell's Film Guide
A cool dissection of three generations of a family, at different but similar points in their trajectories, this wry, detailed narrative, circling at a distance around its protagonists, provides many pleasures, as well as insights into the human condition