SYLVIA CHANG IN DAUGHTER'S DAUGHTER

HUANG XI: DAUGHTER'S DAUGHTER (2024) - New York Asian Film Fesival 2025

A woman faces the consequences of her life

It would be hard for this film not to be a success. The director studied film at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, and worked with Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien as crew member in producing his Goodbye, South, Goodbye and The Assassin/. The magnificent Sylvia Chang, who's at the center of this film, is not only a superb actress but a filmmaker who has directed three notable films. And the handling of the issues of loss and confronting the questionable choices of one's youth is fresh and original, chiefly thhrough the use of a sudden, dramatic shift from Taipei to New York, where most of the acttion transpires - a New York that seems at once down to earth and like another planet.

The filmmaker, whose second feature this is, makes wonderful use here of her familiarity with a wintry New York whose funkiness somehow seems comforting, with its comfortable, warm-coloroed Chinatown and functional mess contrasting with a gray, austerely modern and asceptic Taipei. Xi, Chang's character, is a fraught, complicated woman who comes to America to cope with tragedy, and the funk seems both a reflecton of the moral chaos and sorrow she confronts, and a kind of relief. Because this is a film about figuring out your life and how to reframe it.

The plot, with its multiple female generations (men figure only minorly), its abandoned daughter in New York and its cherished one in Taipei who didn't even know each other until they were grown, is a complicated one. But we should not get hung up on that or the issue of how to deal with inheriting a frozen in vitro embryo. Those are important details, but this is mainly the portrait of Sylvia Chang's character, the sixty-four-year-old Jin Alixa.

An opening sequence shows Jin with the main women around her. She's in Taipei, with a broken leg. Showing her own strong will, she refuses to have surgery for it, or even a cast. Present are her mother, Shen Yan-hua (Alannah Ong), who has the beginnings of dementia; her two daughters, Emma (Karena Kar-Yan Lam), who she left in New York at the age of sixteen, with a guy called Johnny (Winston Chao) who has started a dim sum restaurant; and the colorful and distinctive and not so ssuprprisingly gay younger daughter Fan Zuer (a very well cast Eugenie Liu). With Fan Zuer is Jaiyi (Tracy Chou), her "friend," or "colleague," who's obviously her girlfriend.

A thoroughly modern setup, but also a traditional one: caring for Shen is something the responsiblity-shirking Jin is nonetheless going to shoulder. She is going to reject things, but wind up taking them on or accepting the reality of them. Fan Zuer and Jaiyi, six years later, take on the responsiblilty of raising a child through in vitro fertilization. They go to New York for this, and work hard at it. But then to her shock Jin gets a call from Johnny telling her that the two young women have had a car accident, driving into a deer, and both are dead. Jin cannot believe it; but she almost immefiately packs her bags.

This is when the movie essentially begins, when Jin goes to New York to retrieve the remains of her favorite daughter and decide what to do with the contents of the flat she has shared with Jaiyi, then confront the hardest issue of all, inherited custody of a very healthy frozen embriyo. Watch Sylvia Chang's face to see how Jin deals with all the complex challenges she now encounters, how she tries to deny and reject and then wryly and wisely confronts the consequences of her actions going back many decades. The performance and the film itself are elegant, unexpected, smart, and thought-provoking. A terrific Taiwanese study of a modern woman and a multigenerational family divided between East and West. Some have thought the run-time is a bit long; but others, with whom I agree, think they could watch Sylvia Chang all day.

Daughter's Daughter (Chinese: 女兒的女兒; pinyin: Nǚ'ér de nǚ'ér) 126 mins., in Mandarin and English, premiered at Toronto Sept. 5, 2024, showing also at Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Udine, Sydney and Taipei. Screened as part of the New York Asian Film Festival Jul. 11-27, 2025.
SCHEDULE:
Friday July 18, 5:30pm
LOOK Cinemas W57

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.