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A-One and a-Two

Family viewing with Yi Yi director Edward Yang

Making movies, scoring 30 points in a pick-up basketball game, drawing comics, designing hardware and writing code — all these things translate as “fun” for Shanghai-born, Taiwanese director and writer Edward Yang. His hobby-horsing has zig-zagged him across the Pacific and up and down the Pacific Northwest for the past 28 years.

“I went to USC for one semester to study filmmaking in 1973 or 1974. I didn’t survive. After one semester, I realized I couldn’t hack it, and so I thought, ‘that’s not for me,’ and I dropped out and found a job in Seattle at a research lab associated with defense-related projects,” recalls the one-time computer scientist and electrical engineer with a chuckle. “Microcomputers had just come out and I was playing with chips and coding, hardware design. That was fun…that was fun.”

The word “fun” gets flung around frequently in conversation with Yang, 53, who wrote and directed Yi Yi (A One and a Two), a nearly three-hour exploration of an upper-middle-class Taiwanese family that was recently named the best film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics. Not that he appears to be a “live fast, die young,” heat-seeking type at first glance; he looks more like a tenured professor with his tidy, silvery Beatles bangs, black-framed glasses, neat wool sweater and endearing stammer. It must be his unorthodox background — Yang started writing screenplays and making films after spending seven years toiling on the front lines of information technology as a computer scientist.

Quick to laugh and eager to debate, Yang perks up talking about his favorite team, the Portland Trail Blazers, and his latest basketball score, as opposed to his fellow filmmakers. Yang still resembles those playful and analytical first-wavers — more Steve Jobs than Jean-Luc Godard — 20 years after he left his first career in the Pacific Northwest to write a screenplay for a friend in Hong Kong. Consequently, the director made his name — if not millions — as part of a new wave of Taiwanese filmmakers that includes Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Yang’s prize-winning films also demand serious attention; they range from A Brighter Summer Day and A Confucian Confusion to Mahjong and Yi Yi, which was named the best foreign language film of 2000 by the New York Film Critics Circle and won Yang the best director prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Yi Yi reflects Yang’s continuing interest in technology, multimedia and the Internet. After all, he changed the job of the family’s patriarch N.J. (Wu Nienjen) from architect to high tech entrepreneur to better reflect the times. N.J. is just one of the many characters searching for a second chance in life, with an old love (Ke Suyun) and a new Japanese business partner (Issey Ogata).

Following the raucous wedding of brother-in-law A-Di (Chen Xisheng), N.J.’s elderly mother-in-law (Tang Ruyun) has a stroke and slips into a coma. Family members are encouraged to talk to her, an ancestor ensconced in N.J. and his wife Min-Min’s apartment like a silent ghost. The event sends most of the family out into the world either in denial or in a search for meaning: Min-Min (Elaine Jin) joins a Buddhist group in the country; teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) becomes friends with Lili, the glamorous yet troubled girl next door (Adrian Lee) and begins dating Lili’s former boyfriend (Yupang Chang); while 10-year-old son and budding philosopher Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) starts to explore the problems of perception as well as a romance of his own.

The city of Taipei is yet another character in Yi Yi; as it looms above or spreads below the actors reflected in windows and mirrors, the city becomes one of the most striking visual elements in the film. Shooting the actors in mostly medium or long shots with the detachment of European filmmakers such as Godard, Eric Rohmer and Michelangelo Antonioni, Yang foregrounds the environment and social milieu.

But Yang says he wasn’t interested in the distinctive qualities of Taipei; instead he sees the city as one of many urban economic zones that have emerged, seemingly independent of national borders, at the end of the 20th century. “That’s why all these big cities all have so much in common, and all these populations are doing similar things. Whether it’s Taipei or Seoul or Tokyo or Hong Kong or Seattle, it’s almost as if they’re closer together than places outside cities,” says Yang, who keeps up with U.S. politics as well as sports. “That’s why this year’s [presidential] election really reflects things so clearly. All the urbanized states voted for Gore and the ‘peasant’ states voted for Bush. That’s the way the whole world is going. In other words, this opposition or this antagonism is not going to come from another country, it’s going to come from within, inside yourself.”

Yi Yi (A One and a Two ) was named after a musical count-off and at times resembles an orchestral composition in its complex interplay of storylines. Yang resisted improvisation in the tightly scripted film. Instead he worked off a set of ideas — one of which emerged 15 years ago after a friend’s father was hit by a car. He fell into a coma and was brought home.

“I was just overwhelmed by the fact that the doctor asked the family members to talk to the father,” Yang remembers. “To me it was just overwhelming, because, when you think, if the father is dead, all you have to do is cry and be sad. And if the father is alive, they’d probably just lie to him — ‘we’re going to study.’ Instead, we just go to the movies. When the father is right between life and death, then that’s the toughest part, because you have to be very honest with him, and at the same time, you have to be very honest with yourself.”

“Other than the confessional aspect, the structure of the story I found very interesting,” says Yang, divulging another idea working in the film. “[It’s] like classic Russian literature, when you put someone’s name as the title and you have to tell some guy’s story from his birth to his death in 800 pages. I focus on a family. Each family member represents an age, and they intimately relate to each other. This in itself is the process of life span.”

In the end, the goal for Yi Yi was simple and intimate, surprisingly so for such a multitalented and ambitious auteur. “When a viewer sees this film,” Yang says, “they should feel like they have just read a letter by a very close friend.”