YI YI (A ONE AND A TWO) (2000) ****

Reviewed 10/4/00

It is with no hyperbole that I say Edward Yang is one of the greatest filmmakers working today. He is also one of the least known, but hopefully his seventh feature film and first to be commercially distributed in the United States, Yi Yi (aka A One and a Two), will change that. The title in Chinese simply means "one one," but has a double meaning in appearance that makes it possible to read it as "two," the Chinese character for "two" simply being a doubling of the single slash that means "one." This double way of seeing is one of the central themes in Yi Yi.

Neither the plot -- following the lives of various members of a family -- nor the theme -- balancing the pursuit of the material and the spiritual -- are particularly new, but the way Yang presents them are. Rarely has a film seemed as full as life as this one. Life bursts forth from every corner of the frame with strangers in the backgrounds of hospitals, bagel shops, and sidewalks beckoning whole other worlds. Yang shows how his characters’ lives are interwoven with millions of others by frequently shooting through windows. The glass allows us to see simultaneously what’s going on with the character and also what's reflected on the other side, what’s off-screen. This is people passing by, people eating, talking, fighting, and their environment, the city lights, the traffic, the weather. The story isn’t simply about individuals, but an entire urban community going through the problems of connecting and disconnecting.

At a hotel in Taipei during the wedding of his brother-in-law, N.J. (Nien-Jen Wu), runs into his first love, Sherry (Su-Yun Ko), for the first time in nearly 30 years. He sees her again on a business trip to Japan during which he is trying to save the computer company he works for by making a deal with software guru, Ota (Issey Ogata). Sherry looks impossibly beautiful and youthful for her age, but perhaps Yang shows her to us as N.J. has kept her in his imagination all these years. Now though, N.J. and Sherry don’t know whether they want to change the present into the future they never had or to let go of the past. Meanwhile, N.J. and Ota find an instant bond in each other’s essential decency in the pitiless business world.

N.J.’s wife, Min-Min (Elaine Jin), seeks solace in a cult after suffering stress at work and dealing with her mother's coma that results from a stroke. Unfortunately, Min-Min disappears half-way through the movie to enter a mountain retreat, and the terrific actress that plays her, Elaine Jin, is missed. (Her story however is presumably covered in the second half of Todd Haynes’ Safe.)

Min-Min and N.J.’s daughter, pretty 15-year old Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), feels guilty for her possible contribution to her grandmother's illness. She cannot remember if she took down the trash, and her grandmother was found nearby the dump when she suffered her stroke, perhaps doing Ting-Ting’s chore for her. Ting-Ting gradually becomes involved with the sometime boyfriend of her friend and neighbor, Lili (Adrian Lin), a cellist. The thin boy, ironically nicknamed Fatty (Pang Chang Yu), however is more than meets the eye.

Ting-Ting’s little brother, 8-year old Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang), is frequently teased by girls and just as frequently gets into trouble at school, but inside his little body is a budding philosopher, scientist, and artist. When his father lets him use his camera, Yang-Yang takes photographs of the backs of people’s heads because he wants them to see what they cannot. This sounds pretentious, but is not in the simple, nonchalant way Yang presents it.

A couple of other characters dally about the fringes of the story. Lili constantly rages against her promiscuous mother while Min-Min’s superstitious, always in-debt brother, Ah-Di (Hsi-Sheng Chen), has trouble with an ex-girlfriend after marrying his very pregnant wife.

Doctors tell the family members to talk to the comatose grandmother (Ru-Yun Tang) to keep her senses active, and they all take turns making personal revelations to her that they cannot to one another. When the film is through, Yi Yi leaves us with a feeling of having lived through these people’s lives and their personal revelations in some ways become our own.