Cherise Fong

Opening April 6th in London, Dublin and Manchester.

Awarded Best Director at Cannes 2000, its unique screening at last Autumn's London Film Festival sold out well in advance... As "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" continues to conquer the western world, Taiwanese director Edward Yang's three-hour opus "A One and a Two..." finally made a sneak preview at the ICA on February 4th.

The intrigue involves the members of a family spanning three generations in modern-day Taipei, from the grandmother fallen in a coma to the little boy full of questions on life, but the beauty of the film lies in Yang's discreet and elegant portrayal of human emotions in common situations. Recreating the spellbinding tempo of his four-hour masterpiece "A Brighter Summer Day" (which introduced current Ang Lee star Chang Chen in 1991 as the adolescent gang leader S'ir), each scene of "Yi Yi" is framed with photographic precision and composed with a cinematic humour and sensibility which penetrate beyond any need for explicit dialogues or voyeuristic close-ups. Here any superficial sense of Chinese "inscrutability" would be an impoverished vision of the camera's attentive distance, for it is precisely this conscientious window to each character's soul, and not the incidental English subtitles, which moves us emotionally.

The film closes with the modesty of eight-year-old Yang-Yang (charming Takeshi Kitano look-alike Jonathan Chang) reading a letter he wrote the night before to his Pau-Pau at her funeral. So the insolent young photographer of the back of people's heads ("to show you something you can't see") confides to his deceased grandmother that he wishes he knew where she has gone, in order "to tell people something they don't know".