A One and a Two…

Yang's most fully achieved film since A Brighter Summer Day offers a detailed and very moving account across three generations of a family of the ways people cope with crises and emotional setbacks. The problems, it humorously suggests, may change as one grows older, but the means of coping don't change much. The central focus is on family head NJ (Wu, a fine screenwriter and director in his own right), who bumps into his long-lost first love on the very day his mother-in-law goes into a coma, and finds himself wondering if he can erase the last 20 years and start over. This is one film which justifies a three-hour running time: each character is drawn with warmth and complexity, and each has to deal with issues which are all too recognisably real. The interweaving of story threads and the ability to keep larger perspectives in sight while not stinting on specifics both bespeak a true mastery.