Well Deserved Praise

Really Surprised!

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Just as South-Korea so has Taiwan risen to the world of cinema in the beginning of the 21st century and Yi yi (A One and a Two) by Edward Yang is one of the top films of Taiwan. Many critics, magazines and sites have listed Yi yi in the lists of the best films of the decade and due to that the film has gained quite a reputation. But the reputation doesn't mean that this would be an easy treat or a pretentious art-house flick. Win of the best director at Cannes and plenty of other trophies for Edward Yang have just proved how talented he is. Just as in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) in Yi yi the situations build around family rituals; weddings, funerals, births and divorces. But at once I must say that one cannot even compare Yi yi with Magnolia, many have but I think they're competing on very different calibers. Yi yi is much more insightful, impressionistic and intimate compared to its western companion.An honest man, who is the shareholder of an IT company hears that his mother in law has sunk into a coma the same day his brother in law is getting married. This shakes his family, which includes his wife, his 8-year-old son and a teenage daughter. The doctor recommends them to keep company for her and different kind of confessions and explanations bond the stories of the characters together.Yi yi is a family saga, a chronicle and a study of the agony caused by performance pressures. Most of the story is set near a high block of flats and the halls of it, which is full of rich residents. Edward Yang's film is a fascination of impressionistic imagery; the reflections on the windows, the precisely considered pictures to the silhouette of high buildings and the traffic jams. His 'mise-en-scene' is amazingly well handled and he comes close to Bressonian geographic perfection where each image has a meaning. As Eric Rohmer has said film is art of state and the state of Yang's film tells us about rootlessness and agony. The visuality of Yi yi is very subtle - Yang uses a lot of inappropriate long shots when he shows us the chores of his characters, outside the room, behind the window filled with distressing reflections of the city and the traffic. So the postmodern architecture works as a way for Yang to tell us something about the lives of the characters.Edward Yang's film is a quality film for its style, but also for its purpose and contents. It's quite a philosophical film filled with ontological riddles: How can we see the whole truth, why am I me and not you. Yi yi is a film about generations and it forces the middle-aged characters to stop for a while and think about their lives; the choices made and the consequences to come. It challenges its viewer to think about the eternal question, the meaning of life and in an unique way.The urban aesthetics of Yi yi is gorgeous and the fascination Edward Yang feels for the high buildings, traffic and reflections is astonishing. At times the way he uses the state of film, resembles me of Jacques Tati's Play Time (1967). Filled with beautiful, gorgeous images Yi yi is a film about life and reality. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Yi yi truly is an 'Imitation of Life' and sometimes an imitation can be greater than life itself.One and a two.. what does the easy dilemma of one plus two equal. It certainly sounds easy but perhaps it's not. The meaning of life - the eternal dilemma. Edward Yang doesn't offer any answers for his audience but he does give a lot of thinking to do, while he is studying the dilemma himself. Yi yi is without a doubt a great film for its content, style, philosophy and purpose.

Three light-on-its-feet hours long, the film starts with a wedding, ends with a funeral and in between captures what seems like a lifetime of experience. The story is about the emotional struggles of a businessman and the lives of his middle-class Taiwanese family in Taipei seen through three generations.Yi Yi: A One And A Two is a marvellous multi-generational drama from one of the leading lights of Taiwanese cinema Edward Yang, hovering at a delicate remove from its characters but conveying volumes about their hopes and disappointments. The film won for Yang the Best Director Award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where it also debuted.

The family may (or may) not speak another language than you do, and they may or may not have a different color skin, but this family is the 21st family complete with the joy of a young child throwing water balloons off of buildings; a loving husband who loves his wife enough not to cheat on her with an old flame, yet wonders what might have been; a wife lost in depression and lack of purpose, a grandmother's death, a wedding, and a mall with a food court with lonely teenagers trying to connect, two of which do, and yet don't. There is something in this film I can describe only with one word: humanism. No, I can't relate every actors name, but when I saw this film years ago, and I was stressed out, I went to a theater in another to see it, and after the three hours -- which flies by like a summer breeze -- I saw real people both on the screen and in the theater. It's a relaxing, human film, well worth the time to rent or screen for another time.Sadly, the director of this film left this life too prematurely, but he and everyone associated with this film left us a real family and the joy of being human, despite all our faults, and all of life's cruelties, in a film set in a corporate world with lots of reflecting, cold windows (one of the recurring images of the films) and loneliness, but this world also a real family that has love and hope in it.

Just as NJ in the film, I am a sales man that was not so successful. This film led me to thinking my experience of my life, my marriage, my job... I never thought of I was wasting time in the past, but now I couldn't say so. I am working day and day, doing the similar job, walking on the same road, but I don't know what I want ...I am thinking to change some thing. But what will happen if some thing changed? Will it be better? Will it be easier? What if it's the same as now? ...I don't know who can tell me about it.Maybe the god know.