Yi Yi (A One And A Two) denotes a change of style for Taiwanese master director Edward Yang. According to Yang, this time round he's decided to drop the complex analysis of Taiwanese identity that underlies films like A Brighter Summer Day and A Confucian Confusion. Instead, he's decided to focus on some individual characters in a simple tale about everyday folk.

"It's basically a story about people," Yang told Moving Pictures exclusively by telephone from Paris. "This time it's not about city life or what's going on in Taipei. It's about human beings, about some simple lives. I've focused on things that happen to a family ­ about how the individual members react and respond to things that happen to the others. It's a simple slice of life from the 20th century."

Family is a traditional subject for Chinese film-makers, but Yang has generally avoided it up to now. It was the technical demands of the story he wanted to tell which initially led him to the subject matter. "I chose the family unit because every character has to be a different age," Yang says. "So it allowed me to easily explore a number of different lives and situations." The film's theme came later: "Then I realised that all these lives are interactive. Each life is inextricably linked with all the lives around it. In the wider sense, that's how the world holds together."

The plot sounds suitably multi-layered. NJ is the manager of a computer company in the midst of an overhaul. His wife, Ming Ming, is a career woman who's too busy to take care of herself, let alone her family. Then Granny becomes critically ill and the whole family must take care of her.

As the parents strive to make time for their ailing parent, their daughter Ting Ting, a junior high schooler, has a crisis of her own. She's enviously eyeing her neighbour Lily's flourishing love life ­ something which pushes the young girl headlong into adolescent turmoil. The matriarch's critical illness pulls everyone up short and makes them reassess their relationships with one another.

The film has been a long time coming ­ Yang started the script 15 years ago, around the time of Taipei Story. "I knew I was too young to do it then. It was just the skeleton of a concept," he says. "I let it sit on the shelf and just mature, like the way you put food in the cellar."

Eagle-eyed Taiwanese cinema buffs may notice that the leading male role is played by prolific Taiwanese scripter-turned-director Wu Nien-jen. "If he hadn't been around, I probably wouldn't have started writing the story," says Yang. "There aren't an amazing amount of actors in Taiwan ­ it's not like there a lot of faces to choose from. We have very few mature actors of around 40 to 50 years old. I knew that Wu was actually a very good actor, but few others did. So I wrote the character for him. He did a great job with it." The rest of the cast is made up of a combination of experienced actors and new talent who Yang trained especially for this film.

"There were no major problems during the shoot," says Yang. "It took four-and-a-half months, but we weren't shooting all the time. We had some scheduling problems with the new actors ­ they're all school age, so we had to schedule around their schooling." The new actors also needed to learn their craft: "I spent a couple of months before the shoot teaching them how to act," the director adds.

Yang had spent time working in theatre during the 1990s, and both A Confucian Confusion and Mah-Jong were informed by theatre techniques. But he's abandoned any hint of theatrical style for this movie. "I want to do something different every time. I used a lot of theatre people for A Confucian Confusion, as I was doing theatre at the time. But this is totally different."

Richard James Havis