Yi Yi
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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N.J.–the middle-aged father, who’s working for a failing computer company that’s bankrolled by a mogul with the style of a gangster–doesn’t seem ever to have loved his wife, Min-min (Elaine Jin), who seems even more alienated than he is working in her own nondescript office. He’s the closest thing this movie has to a protagonist–though he can’t be fully understood without his wife and kids, and his usual lack of awareness of what they’re going through prevents him from being a hero. N.J. is played by the charismatic Wu Nien-jen, one of the most talented people in Taiwan–a major TV talk-show host; a major screenwriter for Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Ann Hui; and a major filmmaker in his own right, judging from his first two features, A Borrowed Life (1994) and Buddha Bless America (1996). His almost Keaton-esque melancholy is never allowed to obscure our realization that his character, even as a principled idealist, is in a cocoon of his own making.
The only character N.J. looks up to is a Japanese games designer named Mr. Ota (Issey Ogata), whom N.J.’s company wants him to court (N.J. and Ota converse only in English, and Yang may be drawing on the seven years he spent in America working as a computer-systems designer). Ota seems to play the same role in relation to N.J.–catering to him and soliciting his admiration–that a Buddhist guru plays in relation to N.J.’s wife. It’s ambiguous whether Yang regards Ota with equivalent awe, though it seems doubtful that he does.
This doesn’t exhaust the film’s cast of central characters–which also includes Min-min’s excitable and superstitious brother, his equally vulgar wife, and Lili’s mother–but it suggests the sort of displacements most of Yang’s characters experience. In his earlier films, such displacements are made to seem characteristic of Taiwan itself–a country in an existential crisis, not knowing how much its identity belongs to other countries that have occupied or otherwise dominated it, such as Japan, China, and the U.S.–but here they seem a more general condition of contemporary urban living.
Lili, the teenager who lives next door to Ting-ting, plays the cello, and at one point Ting-ting plays Gershwin’s “Summertime” on the piano. Each character in the film is partially conceived as a solo instrument that on occasion joins another in a duet, and Yang translates the film’s Chinese title as “one one,” which also means “individually.” (His suggested English title for the film, which hasn’t caught on, is A One and a Two, referring to a jazz musician’s count-off before starting a jam session.) “Nothing’s changed here,” N.J. remarks to Min-min when she returns from her guru’s mountain retreat. “The kids are both fine.” On the face of it, no statement could be blander; yet considering what we’ve just seen over the past two and a half hours of Ting-ting, Yang-yang, and N.J. himself, it might be the saddest single moment in the whole film–a kind of condensation of all the things N.J. fails or refuses to cope with into a single platitude.
