A One and a Two
The film of the week could be the film of the year. This spacious family drama, written and directed by Edward Yang, is exquisitely considered, richly textured, beautifully acted, moving, funny and wise. Encountering this movie after the dreck and dross of most of the globalised Hollywood product sloshing about at the moment is like being allowed to drink Dom Perignon after being force-fed gallons of flat Vimto. It was a deserved hit at Cannes last year, winning the best director prize, and a second viewing deepens and enriches the impression that this outstanding movie leaves.
Much has already been made critically of the "novelistic" quality of A One and a Two, a film about the interconnecting tribulations of one extended family in contemporary Taipei. It revolves around a man whose computer firm is failing, whose wife is deeply depressed, whose mother-in-law is gravely ill, whose children are beset with problems, whose dodgy brother-in-law owes him cash. To top it all off, he has just met the person he jilted when she was a schoolgirl 30 years before: now a beautiful and elegant woman who, in a blaze of passion, reveals that her teenage angst and vulnerability are still as fresh as a daisy and demands to know why he left her all those years ago.
A One and a Two's literary quality resides in the easy yet thoughtful way Yang manages all the narrative strands, while having the confidence to go off on tangents and intriguing byways. Yang succeeds in inserting all sorts of footnotes and diverting appendices about the human condition - and modern Taiwan's relationship with Japan and the US - and yet never loses his thread, or allows us to lose the desire to know what happens to everyone in the end.
From these elements, Yang conjures the effect of what in a novel would be a narrative voice: a humorous, if sad and shrewdly careworn voice, in whose presence we gain access to the mind of Yang's reticent hero, NJ Jian. He is splendidly played by Nien-Jen Wu, an actor who is also a distinguished screenwriter and director in his own right.
Even the title, based as it is on an idiosyncratic allusion, sounds bookish. The karmic oneness of the universe divided in two, maybe? The paradox of two lovers and one love? No - all it means is how jazz musicians count themselves in for a live number: it's a happy introduction to the laid-back ensemble style of which Yang shows such mastery, and which acts as a solvent to the intensity, and occasionally the melodrama that his movie acts out.
It starts at a raucous, rowdy wedding reception: that of the corpulent, giggling A-Di (Hsi-Sheng Chen) and the heavily pregnant Xiao Yan (Shu-shen Hsiao). The event is immediately poisoned by the sudden, hysterical appearance of the groom's old girlfriend Yun-Yun (Hsin-Yi Tseng), who behaves like the spectre at the feast. Her calculated malice is of a piece with her unwelcome arrival some months later at a small party to celebrate the birth of Xiao Yan's baby, which she appraises with cool detachment before saying sweetly, "It looks more like the mother than the father!" - a deliciously subtle, vicious stab at Xiao Yan's sexual continence.
It's all part of the headache for NJ, who is thunderstruck by an accidental meeting at the hotel where the reception is taking place with Sherry (Su-Yun Ko), his first love and, as he and we are to realise in the course of the film, very probably his only love. They exchange halting pleasantries, laden with a Brief Encounters poignancy, and Sherry walks away. Then she turns on her heel, comes back, and demands to know why NJ stood her up for what was to be their final, non-existent date. It is the beginning of an unsentimental journey into the past for both of them, bringing revelations about the terrible choices that life and love force on us all.
Yang and his cinematographer Wei-han Yang capture the interlocking human dramas coolly and unassumingly, often filming the principals in long shot, as if noticed from a high window, as they stroll together through the streets or chat in cafes. The director has a particular feel for the daylit interiors of apartments: either the chintzy and rather cramped haute-bourgeois home of NJ, or A-Di's glossy, flashy pad. It creates an overwhelmingly plausible habitat for real lives and real emotions: a stunningly empathetic transcription of so many feelings - those of an eight-year-old boy, a teenage girl and a dying old woman. It is a feat of storytelling which is carried off with tremendous poise and unobtrusive artistic integrity.
When people talk about today's new golden age of "arthouse cinema", this is the kind of film they mean, and Edward Yang is the kind of director they mean - although confining A One and a Two to the ghetto of "arthouse" is obtuse. It is unmistakably the work of an artist, but it is still vastly entertaining. It demands to be seen.