On Criterion, I watched the 1994 Canadian drama Double Happiness, written and directed by Mina Shum. The film starred Sandra Oh in one of her earliest screen performances (and for which she won a Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role) as Jade Li, a Chinese-Canadian woman who lives at home with her traditional Chinese family, and is struggling with wanting to be an actress and a creative artist, while also wanting to please her parents, who want her to marry a Chinese man and uphold their values. Her older brother Winston has been disowned and lives in the States, and she fears disappointing her parents and facing the same fate.
She switches between speaking English and Cantonese with her family, and is close with her younger sister Pearl (Frances You). Her family is concerned with putting on a good public persona to their friends, like when her father's (Stephen Chang) childhood friend Ah Hong (Donald Fong) comes to visit and the mother (Alannah Ong) makes her daughters wish him luck and a happy new year in rehearsed Cantonese unison. Jade's family sets her up on dates with the Chinese sons of their friends, including one, Andrew (Johnny Mah), who is secretly gay and just goes along with the dates once a year to appease his mother. For the dates, her family makes her dress up in pearls and an overly coiffed hairdo, to which her mom approvingly tells her that she looks like Connie Chung.
The "double happiness" of the title is from Jade trying to live both her paths in life, as an aspiring actress and hanging out with her friend Lisa (Claudette Carracedo), and being in deference to her parents, who scold her for any mistake she makes and treat her like a child despite that she is a grown woman in her twenties. She wants to move out, but is afraid to confront her parents about it, not wanting to be cast out like Winston was.
Through a chance meeting and brief hookup, she meets Mark (Callum Keith Rennie), a shy but cute nerd who had awkwardly flirted with her outside of a nightclub they were both denied entry to, and while Jade is hesitant to date him because he is white and her parents wouldn't approve, she still feels drawn to him, and they see each other casually, with her feeling torn between her desires for him and her duties towards her family. Their chemistry is really sweet and adorable, and their romance was one of my favorite parts of the movie.
There's a lot of talk about a conflicting pressure to assimilate while still upholding her family's culture, like being expected to be fluent in English and Cantonese at the same time, and being held to Asian stereotypes when auditioning, or being told by an Asian woman that she's not really Chinese if she can't read Chinese in a script.
I really liked this film a lot. I liked how it felt relatable to me in feeling family obligations, and wanting to be free to do things while not wanting to feel controlled by parental influence and being shamed for it. Sandra Oh was excellent in this film, and I especially liked the sequences when she is in her room practicing monologues and going into abstract worlds, with the colors and costumes changing, before one of her family members would be calling for her from downstairs and interrupting her inner world, it had a very dreamlike feel to it.
There's an excellent sequence where Jade is escaping one of her dates (whose face is never shown, he's meant to be representative of the generic Chinese white collar men she is set up with by her parents) by running down the street, throwing off her coat and mussing up her Connie Chung hairdo, crying and literally breaking free while Sonic Youth's "Sugar Kane" plays, it's very emotional and thrilling to watch.
The film will also have confessional sequences, done documentary film style, where the characters will talk to an unknown person, and there's a great scene where Alannah Ong as Jade's mother talks about being a child and joining in on the bullying of a mute woman, calling her "Dumb Dumb," then only after being a mother herself learning about the trauma that was inflicted on that woman that caused her to never speak again, and feeling shame for her ignorance and cruelty towards her.
Some of the film score is by the Toronto-based band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, who are best known for doing the theme song to the TV show The Kids in the Hall.
I really liked how the film is more about holding onto a sense of self and not giving up one's identity just to satisfy family expectations, as it can feel good in the short-term to appease what parents want but isn't good for someone's long-term mental health. The film is dated as a 1990s Canadian independent film, but still holds up a lot with its messages about family and identity and being a first generation child of immigrant parents.
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