The endpoint, the same.

Yi Yi: A One and A Two (Taiwan; 2000)

Thought provoking movie that tells about the simplicity of life and how it is made complicated. Life from the time immemorial has been birth, marriage, merry making along the way and death. Somewhere in the turn of time, we have made it perplexing and had created problems for ourselves.

It tells the perspective of life from the eyes of three generations and three couples at the prime of their lives.

There is NJ, the main protagonist, an engineer who did engineering not by choice but by pressure. He is a high-flying executive but still something is not fulfilled in his life. By chance, he bumps into an old school flame at a wedding and later during his business trip to Japan. His ex, Sherry, is now in the US after two unhappy marriages and imagines how life would have been if she had instead settled down with NJ.

NJ’s wife, on the other hand, has a mid-life crisis. She goes on a spiritual retreat trying to understand the meaning of life and tries to find peace in Buddhism.

NJ’s teenage daughter has boyfriend issues that she tries to sort out herself. NJ’s son, an awkward preteen, has issues with girl bullies and problems with his teachers who think he is a rebel.

NJ’s neighbour, a single parent lady, has an affair with her daughter’s teacher. The daughter herself fall in love with a boy who two times with NJ’s daughter.

NJ’s friend is shown in the early part of the movie, marrying a fully pregnant demanding socialite. Amidst all that is NJ’s mother-in-law who is affiliated with stroke.

After going through the trial and tribulation of our own made lives, marked by expectations and disappointments, we eventually have to lick our self-inflicted wounds and just be contented with what life and the world have to offer to us. We scream, we demand, we acquire, only to realise that the endpoint, the destination, is all but the same.

N.B. Different generations speak different dialects in this film. Mandarin seems to be popular amongst the young and is the formal form of speech in offices. The informal speech has Hokkien words in it. A Penang kia like me can appreciate many of its words.