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Film Notes:
DOUBLE HAPPINESS
DOUBLE HAPPINESS (Canada 1995, 87 min, in English and Cantonese
with English subtitles) A Fine Line Features release of a First
Generation Film Inc./New Views Films production.
Director: Mina Shum; producer: Steve Hegyes and Rose Lam Waddell;
screenplay: Mina Shum; director of photography: Peter Wunstorf;
editor: Alison Grace; music: Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet; casting:
Ann Anderson and Carmen Ruiz-Laza; production designer: Michael
Bjornson; art director: Candice Dickens and Jill haras; set decorator:
Francois Milly; costumes: Cynthia Summers. CAST: Sandra Oh (Jade
Li); Alannah Ong (Mom Li); Stephen Chang (Dad Li); Frances You (Pearl
Li); Johnny Mah (Andrew Chau); Callum Rennie (Mark); Donald Fong
(Sau Wan Chin); Claudette Carracedo (Lisa Chan); Barbara Tse (Mrs.
Mar); Nathan Fong (Robert Chu); Lesey Ewen (Carmen); So Yee Shum
(Auntie Bing); Greg Chan (Uncle Bing). Winner of Jury Prize at the
1994 Turino (Italy) Film Festival and several Genies, Canada's equivalent
of the Oscar.
Double Happiness is Hong Kong-born, Canadian-bred Mina Shum's
first feature, a lively, wry, semi-autobiographical comedy about
the travails of asserting one's independence within a conservative
Asian emigrŽ family. Shum begins on a light note as she acquaints
us with Oh's Jade Li, a twenty-two-year-old aspiring actress struggling
to balance the traditional expectations of her Chinese family with
the realities of living in Canada. When Jade's parents abandoned
Hong Kong for Vancouver, B.C. years earlier, one of their goals
was to find a place that provided broader opportunities for their
children. It is one of the ironies in the film that it is just those
opportunities that erode the tightknit family.
Jade is an irreverant, cheeky Chinese Canadian still living at
home with her parents and younger sister Pearl. When the family
decides she's old enough to date, the matchmaking begins and Jade
is set up with Andrew, a handsome Chinese lawyer. Loyal to her family
and afraid of being disowned by the father like her brother Winston,
Jade agrees to this arrangement, especially if it means that her
family will leave her alone to pursue her passion for acting. But
complications arise when she meets Mark, a white university student.
As their relationship grows, Jade struggles to keep Mark at arm's
length, trying to walk a line between her two worlds. Outside the
home she's freewheeling, liberated and ambitious, yet when she returns
she finds herself reverting to the dutiful traditional Chinese daughter
role with her parents, most especially her very strict father who
has become more rigid since he has been uprooted from a society
where his own father, in pre-revolutionary China, was "always sure
and always right."
The title, Double Happiness, is the Chinese character for
marriage but the film concerns the irony born of paradox: pleasing
the Old World parents while succeeding in the New, when neither
aim is easily reconcilable with the other. "The family is your first
love," director Shum says, "and thus ultimately they must be your
first heartbreak." Asian-American culture has been explored recently,
and well, by other directors, such as Ang Lee in The Wedding Banquet
and Pushing Hands, who also take a seriocomic view of the conflict
between traditional Chinese culture and the vicissitudes of Western
freedoms. But Shum uses ethnic characters in her own particular
way, commenting self-consciously on the ways in which ethnic identity
is performed. Mina Shum has both a keen eye for color and a smart
sense of how to use it; her palette is vibrant and corresponds in
wonderful ways to the rhythm and texture of the story. Even though
the story slows down in the second half, just as the narrative darkens
a bit, she is not afraid to be playful and adventurous. The opening
scene, in which the audience meets the family at dinner--from the
point of view of a rotating lazy susan--works as both visual mischief
and a symbol of the family members's conflicting orbits. Jade's
several fantasy sequences, in which she becomes Joan of Arc or Blanche
Dubois (with Pearl's voice interrupting the soliloquy by calling
her sister to dinner), delivers the bitter with the sweet: All actors
may try to become someone else, but the talented Jade must also
jump the hurdle of the "invisibility" of minorities in film and
television.
[These film notes were compiled from various reviews (Los Angeles
Times, New York Post, Newsday and The Village
Voice) collected in the Film Review Annual 1995.]
Questions for journal entries and class discussion:
1. A native Chinese character speaks the following words to his
Chinese American great-nephew in David Henry Hwang's play Family
Devotions: "Study your face and you will see--the shape of your
face is the shape of faces back many generations--across an ocean,
in another soil. You must become one with your family before you
can hope to live away from it." Here Chinese American playwright
Hwang defines the central problems of identity that have perenially
vexed immigrants and children of immigrants, namely the dilemma
of how to honor one's ethnic heritage while at the same time making
a new life in a new land. Discuss the ways in which director Mina
Shum visualizes and dramatizes Jade Li's negotation of living in
two worlds, of constructing and mainting her identity in an Asian
and Canadian context.
2. Comment on Jade's complex relationship with her father and mother.
3. What is the ironic significance of Jade pursuing an acting career
in the context of the film's treatment of immigrant life and assimilation?
Discuss particular self-reflexive scenes that concern Jade's "performance"
of an ethnic identity within her family and the wider social context,
vis-a-vis casting directors and friends/lovers. To what extent are
all characters playing a social role in this film?
4. Analyze the importance of Jade's relationship with her sister
Pearl and the absent family "ghost," her brother Winston, in the
framework of intergenerational conflict.
5. Critic Jeff Brown of The Village Voice has written in
his review of Double Happiness: "To Shum's credit, there
are no villains here. She's especially effective in conveying Jade's
love for her parents (a double-edged knife) as well as the need
to escape managed care." How does Mina Shum elicit sympathy and
understanding for both the parents/older generation and their children
who wish to escape the strictures of their ethnic/ancestral heritage?
6. How does Shum employ humor to treat painful truths about the
ethnic family drama?
Additional Resources:
For interviews with Mina Shum, reviews and other information related
to Double Happiness, consult the Fine
Line Features homepage.
Check out the National Asian
American Telecommunication Association Homepage for information
about independent Asian American film- and videomakers and their
work.
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