Sylvia Chang has been one of the more under-appreciated forces in international film for almost 50 years now. Beginning her career as an actress in the mid-70s in films by King Hu and Li Han-hsiang, she moved into producing in her native Taiwan, where she was instrumental in the launching of the New Taiwan Cinema, where she gave Edward Yang one of his first TV directing jobs and lent her stardom to the omnibus project In Our Time and Yang’s first feature That Day on the Beach. At the same time, she was also an early star for the Hong Kong New Wave, leading Ann Hui’s first feature The Secret, and later serving as a Taiwanese producer for the upstart production company Cinema City, whose first major hit, the Aces Go Places series she also starred in. For that company, she also starred in key early works by Tsui Hark (she convinced him to pay more attention to his female characters) and Johnnie To. In the late ‘80s, she began directing her own films, an intermittent series of smart and meticulous comedies and melodramas, and though she hasn’t directed a film of her own since 2017’s Love Education, at the 2024 edition of TIFF, she is starring in (and executive producing alongside Hou Hsiao-hsien) the second film from Taiwanese director Huang Xi.
Daughter’s Daughter is a family melodrama centered almost entirely on Chang’s performance as Jin Aixia, a woman in late middle age juggling a mother with dementia and two more or less estranged daughters. The eldest, Emma (Karena Lam), was given up for adoption and raised in New York’s Chinatown when Jin was a teen. The younger, Zuer (Eugenie Liu), grew up with her mother in Taipei. An early prologue deftly introduces the family and their complicated relationships in 2018 before skipping into the present, when Zuer and her wife are attempting in vitro fertilization in New York. A car accident kills them both, and Jin is left to decide what to do with their one surviving embryo.
Huang spends most of the film lingering on Chang’s exploration of her character, rather than on the various moral and legal complications of the scenario. Grieving deeply over the death, Jin is an uneasy mix of stubborn and guilty. Righteous in her belief that what she did (in giving up one daughter for adoption, in being strict and demanding with the other) was correct, but profoundly regretful over her actions nonetheless. Jin’s psychological struggle plays out over a series of flashbacks, fleshing out the various mother-daughter relationships, while the debate about the present takes place in a series of discussions between Jin and Emma. Huang captures all this in warm, drifting long takes, indebted to the approach of Hou and his longtime DP Mark Lee Ping-bing, which gives the actors plenty of space to burrow into their character’s impossible contradictions. These occasionally strike a false note, as Lam’s performance veers toward the theatrical, in rough contrast to Chang’s more internalized acting. A late film revelation interestingly undermines the reality of these scenes, situating us even more inside Jin’s head than we had suspected.
Daughter’s Daughter also offers a fascinating performance from Chang, the kind of broad but nuanced work she hasn’t done in years, perhaps since her own 20 30 40 in 2004 or maybe even Stanley Kwan’s 1989 Full Moon in New York. She’s always been a five-tool actor, equally at home in romance, drama, and comedy, and she gets to flex all of those muscles here, with big dramatic outbursts, heartbreaking monologues, and silent moments of stillness, where her big expressive eyes explain the character far better than any dialogue could. Simply put, Huang’s movie would fall apart without her: the narrative is otherwise a bit too tangled and too many of the other actresses are short-changed (the role of the dementia-ridden grandmother, in particular, seems underutilized). But it’s nonetheless a promising second feature: Huang’s commitment to the study of one particular character is an admirable and somewhat unique approach. But most importantly, she’s smart enough to simply let Sylvia Chang work.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
