‘Daughter’s Daughter’: Tokyo Review

Dir/scr: Huang Xi. Taiwan. 2024. 126mins

Sixty four-year-old Taiwanese divorcee Jin (Sylvia Chang) has a sophisticated relationship with motherhood; she’s sceptical and barely disapproving when her lesbian daughter Zuer (Eugenie Liu) travels to New York to embark on IVF therapy together with her girlfriend. However when tragedy strikes and Jin finds herself the authorized guardian of her daughter’s frozen embryo, she should come to phrases together with her personal previous whereas wrestling with a monumental resolution relating to the longer term. The result’s a chic and affecting Taipei and New York-set sophomore image from Taiwan-based director Huang Xi (Lacking Johnny).

Elegant and affecting 

The movie screens in Tokyo’s major competitors, having first premiered within the Platform part at Toronto the place it earned an honourable point out. It can subsequent present on the Taipei Golden Horse Movie Competition, the place Chang took dwelling the Greatest Actress prize final yr for her efficiency within the Hong Kong drama A Gentle By no means Goes Out. Chang, who government produced this movie together with Hou Hsiao-Hsien, is terrific – her mixture of steeliness and vulnerability makes Jin an attractive and sometimes enraging information by the loving however turbulent relationships between three generations of ladies in a single fractured household.

The knotty dynamics between Jin, Zuer, Jin’s mom Shen Yan-hua (Alannah Ong) and Emma (Karena Lam), the daughter that Jin gave up for adoption following a teenage being pregnant in New York, are deftly launched in a gap prologue that performs out in Taipei within the winter of 2018. Jin is in hospital with a damaged leg; at her bedside is her mom, whose thoughts is beginning to cloud with dementia and who, till not too long ago, was residing in New York.

The serene and self-possessed Emma accompanied her grandmother again to Taiwan, however her presence has aggravated the already testy relationship between Jin and Zuer, who solely not too long ago discovered that she had an older American half-sister. “She’s not my sister. She’s my mom’s daughter,” snarls Zuer, her hair twisted into punky spikes and a stripe of electric-blue glitter daubed beneath her eyes. At Zuer’s facet is Jaiyi (Tracy Chou) – it’s an open secret that she is Zuer’s girlfriend, however neither Zuer nor her mom are but able to have that dialog.

The meat of the story takes place six years later. The dementia has gnawed away at Jin’s mom’s reminiscence: she barely recognises her daughter, and when she does, she nonetheless sees her as a pregnant 16-year-old. And though Jin is settling comfortably into retirement, the reminiscence of her youthful self hasn’t pale. With the surprising information of the deaths of Zuer and Jaiyi in a automobile accident in New York, Jin finds that she should decide concerning the destiny of Zuer’s embryo – a heavy duty that uncomfortably remembers her teenage disaster.

The emotional depth of this sudden swerve in Jin’s life is mirrored within the color palette, which switches from the demure restraint of her life in Taiwan to a richly saturated mixture of reds, blues and greens when she heads to New York. Jin strikes into the scuzzy however welcoming hipster Chinatown rental condo that Zuer shared with Jaiyi whereas they underwent IVF therapy. The partitions are scrawled with messages from earlier tenants – Jin scours them for an indication of her daughter’s voice.

Initially, she’s ailing comfortable within the cluttered, womb-like area the place her daughter had made a house, however more and more it seems like a refuge from the nippiness of grief and the bruising blue New York winter mild exterior. Emma is current too, each as an imaginary determine who acts as a sounding board for Jin’s ethical quandary and, in actuality, in a robust scene in direction of the tip of the movie, during which Jin lastly involves phrases together with her guilt and perceived failures as a mom.