Review: Yi Yi: A One and a Two… (2000)

The late Edward Yang’s final film, Yi Yi: A One and a Two…, is often considered his most accessible work: not quite as esoteric as The Terrorizers (1986), depressing as Taipei Story (1985), or long as A Brighter Summer Day (1991). The 173-minute family drama is warm and emotional, more akin to the films of Yasujiro Ozu than some of the other more difficult works of the Taiwanese New Wave. Some critics mention the film’s accessibility as if it’s a shortcoming, but Yi Yi is a film where it’s impossible to find any shortcomings since they simply may not exist. Much like a modern version of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), Yi Yi is a lovely exploration of the generational dynamics of a single family.

However, Yang is not simply parroting the quiet character detail and patient camerawork of Ozu to create a facsimile of his most famous work. He is examining the personal lives of the film’s characters, but also using those characters as symbols of Taiwanese society as a whole. Thus, the film gains a metaphorical weight beyond the narrative itself. Often, such an approach ends up shrinking the humanity of a film’s characters—you need only look at the characters of Yang’s own The Terrorizers or the entire body of work of Tsai Ming-liang to see how this approach can turn characters into ciphers. But Yang doesn’t reduce the characters to mere symbols—their lives hold implications for Taiwanese society as a whole, but are still fascinating individuals in their own right. Thus, in Yi Yi, Yang presents a perfect balance between character drama and metaphorical subtext, creating one of cinema’s all-time great historical romances in the process.

Yi Yi follows a Taipei family, the Jians, over the course of one year at the end of the last millennium. The film starts with a wedding and ends with a funeral, and so within that framework, we can assume that the film is attempting to capture the full arc of a life within its year-long timeline. The central characters are the father NJ (Wu Nien-jen), teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), and eight-year-old son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang). At the beginning of the film, on the night of Ting-Ting and Yang-Yang’s uncle’s wedding, their grandmother suffers an accident and ends up in a coma. In the aftermath, their mother Min-Min (Elaine Jin) escapes to a monastery to deal with her grief, leaving NJ, Ting-Ting, and Yang-Yang to cope in the aftermath.

The film cuts between the lives of the remaining family members, charting their growth and the ways that their paths interact and reflect upon each other’s journeys. While caring for his family alone, NJ grows dissatisfied with the crass consumerism of his business partners and reconnects with his first love, Sherry (Su-Yun Ko), reevaluating his life priorities in the process. Ting-Ting experiences her first love with Fatty (Chang Yu Pang), the ex-boyfriend of her friend and neighbour. And young Yang-Yang deals with bullying at school by purchasing a camera, which becomes his newfound obsession.

Each character represents middle age, adolescence, and childhood, respectively, and Yang uses their lives to show changes in Taiwanese society. NJ’s dissatisfaction with his job speaks to the crisis of Taiwan’s capitalist economy in the late years of the twentieth century. Yang further develops this portrayal of capitalistic malaise in NJ’s friendship with a radical Japanese game designer, Ota (Issey Ogata), who suggests the possibility of finding meaning in work. 

In Ota’s introductory scene, Yang defamiliarizes language and imagery to illustrate how Ota offers NJ a radically-different way of engaging with the world. We first watch an ultrasound and as the image of a fetus fills the screen, we hear a woman discussing the potential of creation. We assume it is the ultrasound technician talking, but Yang immediately cuts to a scene of a boardroom where Ota speaks through a female translator about the potential for his video games. By overlaying the sound of the boardroom scene onto the images of the ultrasound, delaying the reveal of the speech’s context, Yang cues us onto the topic of creation and new life just as he changes the context of its presentation. In essence, he offers us a new perspective, just as Ota offers NJ one.

For her part, Ting-Ting shows the developing role for women within a world of eroding tradition, where romance is transactional. And Yang-Yang’s engagement with pop culture and photography shows the proliferation of western pop-culture in the East and how artistic creativity can offer an escape from life. None of these characters alone captures the sum essence of life in Taiwan in 1999, but taken together, they provide a portrait of middle-class life in a culture stuck between East and West, tradition and modernity. 

Furthermore, Yang explores generational dynamics and the cyclical nature of life in the family’s paralleling lives. In the film’s most stunning sequence, Yang cuts back and forth between NJ and Sherry on a trip to Japan and Yang-Yang on a date with Fatty. At one point, NJ and Sherry discuss the first time they intended to sleep together, when NJ ended up fleeing the hotel room and refusing to consummate their relationship. Immediately after NJ and Sherry reflect on this past action and what it says about their lives in the here-and-now, Yang cuts to Yang-Yang in a hotel room with Fatty, where she silently acquiesces to whatever will happen in the room, only for Fatty to flee, wracked with guilt.

In this cross-cutting sequence, Yang demonstrates how each generation repeats what came before, but in their own unique way, showing that each experience of a person’s life is wholly unique and wholly banal—a blend of the personal and the universal. Thus, there’s no generational conflict in Yi Yi, but instead, a seamless conversation between generations. This scene epitomizes the film’s metaphorical approach. Just as Yang-Yang repeats her father and Sherry’s experience, she is living her own distinct moment of growth. It just happens to be a moment of growth that is experienced by almost everyone. This simultaneous approach is how Yang approaches the film as a whole. The characters are distinct people, but they stand in for the culture and speak to universal truths about people’s experiences in this specific culture at the turn of the millennium. 

Yang’s treatment of the story of the Jian family as a personal drama and a microcosm of Taiwanese society as a whole is what makes Yi Yi so satisfying. It speaks to social tensions through the particular dramas of ordinary people. Thus, even for a person living two decades later and a half a world away, it remains full of profound wisdom and imagery that seems ripped from lived experience. It epitomizes the universal truth of good drama.

9 out of 10

Yi Yi: A One and a Two… (2000, Taiwan/Japan)

Written and directed by Edward Yang; starring Wu Nien-jen, Elaine Jin, Issey Ogata, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang, Hsi-Sheng Chen, Su-Yun Ko, Lawrence Ko.

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