First, take a look at the official 4K restoration trailer.
A Three-Hour Film About Nothing in Which Someone Is Murdered
Here is the pitch that sold Yi Yi: A One and a Two 一一 (2000) to the world's art houses: a middle-class family in Taipei. A wedding at the start, a funeral at the end, and one ordinary year in between. Nobody is a gangster. Nobody flies. There is no sword, no chase, no scene that would look good on a poster. It runs 173 minutes — nearly three hours — and the director's own wife plays most of the piano.
And then, somewhere in the third hour, without a musical cue or a raised voice, a teenage boy stabs a man to death in a stairwell.
That is the trick of this movie, and it is why it has quietly outlived almost everything that came out the same year. Edward Yang's final feature won Best Director at Cannes in 2000, was voted Best Film of 2000 by the National Society of Film Critics in the United States, and then — the part nobody predicted — kept climbing. A quarter-century later it sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, 94 on Metacritic, and inside the top 100 of Sight & Sound's once-a-decade poll of the greatest films ever made. It grossed about $2 million worldwide. Very few movies have ever meant so much to so many people while earning so little.
What Is It About?
The Jian family lives in an apartment in Taipei: NJ (Wu Nien-jen), an engineer and partner in a struggling computer-game company; his wife Min-Min (Elaine Jin); their teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee); their eight-year-old son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang); and Min-Min's mother, the grandmother (Tang Ru-Yun), who lives with them.
The film opens at the wedding of Min-Min's younger brother A-Di (Hsi-Sheng Chen) — a shotgun wedding, interrupted by his ex-girlfriend shouting in the lobby. In the same evening, on the stairs outside the reception, NJ bumps into Sherry (Su-Yun Ko), the girlfriend he walked away from thirty years ago. That night the grandmother collapses taking out the trash that Ting-Ting forgot to take out, and falls into a coma.
The doctor's prescription is the engine of the whole film: someone must talk to her every day, because hearing is said to be the last sense to go. So each family member, in turn, sits beside a woman who cannot answer and reports on their day. It is a confession booth. Min-Min lasts a few rounds before realising she has nothing to say — that her days are identical, that she is living the same one over and over — and she leaves for a Buddhist retreat in the mountains. NJ is left holding the family.
From there the film fans out into four parallel lives, and this is the part worth paying attention to, because Yang cuts between them as if they were variations on one melody:
- NJ flies to Tokyo to court a Japanese game designer, Mr. Ota (Issey Ogata). They barely discuss business. They sit in a bar, Ota plays piano and sings, and they talk about music, and about why the first time through something is always the only time that counts. Meanwhile NJ is quietly rekindling Sherry — and then refusing, gently and permanently, to start over.
- Ting-Ting blames herself for the grandmother's collapse, and falls into a triangle with her new neighbour Lili (Adriene Lin) and Lili's older boyfriend Fatty (Pang Chang Yu). It ends the way I mentioned at the top.
- Yang-Yang gets a camera. He has worked out that a person can only see half of everything — the front, never the back — so he photographs the backs of people's heads and hands the prints to them, so they can finally see what they cannot see. His headmaster punishes him for it. He is eight.
- A-Di borrows money, loses money, gets thrown out, attempts suicide by gas, and is welcomed home because his wife just had a baby.
Then the grandmother dies, and Yang-Yang reads her a letter: he says he misses her, and that he thinks he has gotten old too.
The Team Behind and in Front of the Camera
Edward Yang wrote it, directed it, and — by every account — had been carrying it for about fifteen years. It was made under a curious industrial arrangement: a Japanese "Y2K" commission that asked three Asian directors (Yang, Stanley Kwan and Shunji Iwai) to each make a film on one element of rock-paper-scissors. Yang drew scissors. His joke: scissors cut a rope, and what is left is 一一.
The title does double duty. Written vertically, the two strokes of 一一 form the character for "two" (二). And the English subtitle, A One and a Two, is the count-in a jazz bandleader mutters before the downbeat — "a one, and a two, and..." — which is precisely how the film is scored: no swells, no climaxes, just a tempo you settle into.
The cast is a roll-call of the Taiwanese New Wave, which matters, because these are not actors pretending to be a family:
- Wu Nien-jen as NJ. In real life he is one of the great Taiwanese screenwriters and novelists — he wrote A City of Sadness and Taipei Story — and he is not a performer by trade. Yang put a non-actor with the face of an exhausted accountant at the centre of a three-hour film and got the quietest, saddest male performance of the decade.
- Elaine Jin as Min-Min, who had already played a mother in Yang's A Brighter Summer Day. Her breakdown — when she realises she has nothing new to tell a comatose woman — is done almost entirely in one long take.
- Issey Ogata as Mr. Ota, the Japanese designer. A famous stage actor in Japan, later seen in the West in Silence and Tony Takitani. The film's warmth lives in his scenes.
- Jonathan Chang as Yang-Yang. Child actors usually sink a film this long. He is the reason it floats.
- Kelly Lee as Ting-Ting, carrying the film's only genre material.
Behind the camera: Yang Wei-han and Li Long-yu on cinematography, who shoot Taipei in glass, reflections and doorways so that you are always aware of a life happening behind someone's back — a visual rhyme for Yang-Yang's photography. Chen Bo-Wen edited. Du Du-Che, the most respected sound recordist in Chinese-language cinema, did the sound. And the score is by Kaili Peng (Peng Kai-Li), Yang's wife, playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and Bach's Toccata in E minor (BWV 914). She also appears on screen as a concert cellist, with Yang himself sitting in as her pianist.
The Numbers, and the Scene Everyone Remembers
By the metrics Western readers know:
- Runtime: 173 minutes. Countries: Taiwan and Japan. Languages: Mandarin, Taiwanese Hokkien, English and Japanese.
- Cannes, 53rd edition, May 2000: world premiere on 14 May in competition, and Best Director for Edward Yang. Also nominated for the Palme d'Or.
- US critics' season 2000–01: Best Film from the National Society of Film Critics (with Yang runner-up for Best Director), Best Foreign Language Film from both the New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association — that is, it won the foreign-language prize from all three major American critics' bodies in the same year.
- France: Best Foreign Film from the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics, and a César nomination. Cahiers du Cinéma placed it 7th on its annual top ten.
- Other festivals: the NETPAC Prize at Karlovy Vary, the Chief Dan George Humanitarian Award at Vancouver, the Panorama Jury Prize at Sarajevo (shared with Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy), and the Grand Prix at Fribourg. Nominated for Best Asian Film at the 2002 Hong Kong Film Awards.
- Scores: Rotten Tomatoes 97% from 91 reviews; Metacritic 94 from 25 reviews; IMDb 8.1; Letterboxd averaging around 4.5/5; Douban roughly 9.0 — one of the highest-rated Chinese-language films on the site.
- Money: about $2 million worldwide. That is the whole number. It is less than what a mid-budget Hollywood film makes on a slow Friday.
The scene everyone remembers is not the murder. It is NJ and Sherry in Tokyo. They are two people in their fifties who were each other's first love, walking through a Japanese city, and she is furious with him because he will not run away with her and he will not lie about why. He tells her he has never loved anyone else. She says, in effect: then why did you leave? And he has no answer that is not an insult to the life he has lived since. They stand at the hotel door. She cries. He does not follow her. The next morning they are on separate flights.
It is the least cinematic scene you can imagine — two middle-aged people failing to ruin their lives — and it is more devastating than anything in the films that copied its reputation.
Then there is the legacy list, which is where the real box office is. BBC, 2016 poll of the best films of the 21st century: #8. The Guardian, 2019: #26. Rolling Stone, 2025: #8. The New York Times, 2025: #40 (and #69 in its readers' poll). Sight & Sound, 2022 critics' poll of the greatest films of all time: inside the top 100, in the same bracket as Parasite and Ugetsu. In 2009, both the Village Voice and IndieWire critics' polls put it third among the best films of the 2000s — for a movie that most of the world had not been able to see.
Why It Matters
Because it is a three-hour argument that an ordinary life is a sufficient subject for a great film, and because it wins that argument without once raising its voice.
Yang made it as the third part of what people call his "New Taipei trilogy," after A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong — satires of ambition and money in a rapidly modernising city. Yi Yi is what happens when the satire cools into pity. There is no villain. A-Di is a fool but not a bad man. NJ's business partners are cowards, and you understand exactly why. Ting-Ting's tragedy is that she is kind and innocent at the wrong moment. The movie's moral centre is a grandmother in a coma who never speaks a word and who reorganises an entire family by falling silent.
It matters structurally too. Nearly every frame is shot through glass, a doorway, or a reflection, and the film is built on pairs — two women NJ loves, two generations of the same romance (his and his daughter's, running on parallel tracks to opposite endings), two cities, Taipei and Tokyo, edited so that the same conversation seems to happen in both. Yang-Yang's camera is the thesis: you cannot see the back of your own head, so someone has to show you. The film is that someone.
And it matters because of what happened next, which is genuinely strange. Yang never released it in Taiwan. He was openly disgusted with the local distribution system and said, in effect, that he would rather it not be dumped into cinemas and lost. So the most acclaimed Taiwanese film of its era did not play theatrically in Taiwan until 28 July 2017 — seventeen years later, nine years after Yang died of cancer in 2007, and the last feature he ever completed. If you want to understand why a country's greatest director ends up refusing his own country's cinemas, this is the film to start with.
The afterlife has made up for it. Pony Canyon carried out a new 4K restoration, with Imagica Entertainment Media Services handling the film work; it premiered in Cannes Classics in 2025 — twenty-five years after its Cannes competition premiere — and Janus Films put it back in American cinemas from 5 September 2025, opening at Film at Lincoln Center. The Criterion Collection issued the restoration on 4K in January 2026. A quarter-century on, it is still gaining ground, which is not something you can say about most films that made $2 million.
Final Thought
The reason the murder works is that the film has spent three hours teaching you to look at people from behind. When it happens, you are not shocked by the violence; you are shocked that you have been watching a boy that sad and nobody in the film noticed. That is Yang's whole method in one gesture.
NJ tells Sherry he has never loved anyone else, and then goes home to the life he chose, and the movie does not call him a coward or a hero. Min-Min comes down from the mountain and finds that nothing has changed, and the movie treats that as a mercy rather than a defeat. Yang-Yang apologises to a woman who cannot hear him. Then the film ends.
Nobody in it is punished. Nobody in it is saved. They just go on, one after another — which is what 一一 means, and what the count-in is counting.
One question for you: Yang-Yang photographs the backs of people's heads so they can see the half of their life they are missing. If someone handed you those photographs of yourself — the parts of your own life you have never been able to see — would you want to look?
Tom De · The Movie Prince 🎬
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