Yi Yi (A One And A Two ... )

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

"Why is the world so different from what we thought it was?" a tearful teenager asks her grandmother during one of the quietly wrenching moments which stud this beautifully observed family drama.

It might be an epigraph to the film, the first by veteran Taiwanese director Yang to get a commercial release here. The movie, epic in length but intimate in focus, is an anatomy of the small disappointments and frustrated hopes that make up the life of the middle-class Taipei family at its centre.

The film is bookended by two of the seismic moments of family life - a marriage and a death - which provide the frame for the story.

Its principal, N.J., is a partner in a small and financially floundering computer firm who, at his brother-in-law's wedding, bumps into a childhood sweetheart and begins to wonder at the course his life might have taken.

The depiction of his superficially contented family life is not alien to Western eyes and Yang, who wrote it, quietly sets about aggregating small incidents into a rich and rounded portrait.

When N.J.'s mother-in-law falls into a coma after a stroke, she becomes a silent confessional presence for a family in slow meltdown.

N.J.'s wife, in mid-life crisis, decamps to a religious retreat, his teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Lee) struggles with the perils of adolescence and 8-year-old Yang-Yang (Chang's wide-eyed, artless performance avoids even a trace of saccharine cuteness) deals with bullying at school and his puzzlement at how people can never see the backs of their own heads.

Yang has big ideas about the clash of tradition and modern capitalism but the film's subtext never intrudes into what would be a soap opera if the performances weren't so heartfelt and authentic.

N.J. (Wu, one of Taiwan's best-known writer-directors) is the sheet anchor of a marvellous ensemble whose stories unravel at a contemplative pace and the three-hour running time races by.

It is deeply pleasurable to watch the deftness and elegance with which Yang interlaces the various plotlines: on a trip to Japan to rescue his business, he confronts the possibility of his personal and professional failure and when Yang intercuts a street scene of N.J. and his daughter in different cities at the same time, the film achieves an almost symphonic grandeur.

It is visually arresting, too. Often using long, stationary shots, Yang and his cinematographer Yang Weihan frame urban tableaux with an almost Zen precision.

Ultimately it is a movie which impresses for its powerful sense of humanity. We emerge from it deeply enriched. This is bound to be among the best of the year.

Cast: Wu Nianzhen, Elaine Jin, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang, Issey Ogata

Director: Edward Yang

Running time: 173 mins

Rating: M (offensive language)

Screening: Rialto, from Thursday.