Yi Yi (A One and a Two…)
2000
Director: Edward Yang
Starring: Nien-Jen Wu, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang
Yi Yi focuses on the life of a Taiwanese family living in Taipei in 1999. The father NJ (Wu) has two children, a teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Lee) and a young son Yang-Yang (Chang). Around them swirls the extended family and neighborhood: a broke and bumbling brother-in-law and his young pregnant wife, the grandmother who starts the film by falling into a coma, and the apartment neighbors who argue loudly and often. The movie takes place over the course of about one year as we watch this family go through the typical trials and tribulations of life.
In a film as rambling as this, filled with many small moments but no overall narrative direction, it practically invites the viewer to interpolate their own meaning. For me, throughout nearly all the vignettes, I got the feeling of the sorrow of banality. Is life really meant to be simply a series of repeated days, one exactly like the other? The mother’s speech when she is in the throes of an existential crisis nicely sums up this particular point. There is so much of the mundane in this film; the father’s work seems utterly boring and life-draining, as does the mother’s. The wedding that opens the film seems less a celebration and more a strange party at which drunkards, fools, and bullies waste their time. I don’t see Yang as delineating the joy of the little things, but more the pathos of them.
