Xi Huang showed a lot of technical skill in making Daughter’s Daughter. The composition of every shot was impeccable, right down to the wardrobe of the background actors. I was constantly stunned by the look of the shots, the framing, and the colour composition. This is the work of a filmmaker who understands film and how to communicate with every department to enact his vision. So much so that, Sylvia Chang, who leads the film as Aixia “Ai” Jin, delivered an emotional performance that got her an Honourable Mention at the TIFF Awards Ceremony from the Platform jury. However, there is an exception to this great attention to detail and that is how Huang either doesn’t understand the history of queer people dying in cinema or doesn’t care.
I’m referring to the “bury your gays” trope, in which one of the major issues is that very often gay characters are killed to advance the plot for cishet characters, the queer characters and their death are used only in service of non-queer characters. While some believe in order to not fall into the trope you can’t kill your gay character(s), that is not true, you just have to give the gay character(s) agency (aka really represent their life and not just use them as tools for the other character’s growth. Fan Zuer (played by Eugenie Liu) and Chow Jia-Yi (played by Tracy Chou) were not characters we got to know the life of, having seen the movie I could only tell you the most basic things about them and most of it is in relation to Ai. The first time we met them, while it was obvious they were a couple and not the colleagues they were presenting themselves as, the scene wasn’t about them but rather to give the backstory about Ai and how she had previously had another daughter Emma (played by Karena Ka-Yan Lam) but kept it a secret for years. There is only one other scene of the pair, which falls into another failing of the trope because it shows them happy as a couple right before they are killed. But we never actually get to know them as a couple or live in their happiness. We don’t get to know their community in Taiwan or New York before or after their deaths, and even when Zuer is meeting with her OBGYN, she is with Ai, making it about how Ai reacts rather than about Zuer and Jia-Yi’s relationship or their hopes for their baby. Everything is centered on Ai. Zuer, her sexuality, and their deaths are just tools for Ai to grieve and deal with the questions of whether she’ll raise her daughter’s daughter.
I looked up rules around LGBTQ+ IVF in Taiwan. I concluded that the reason Zuer was in a same-sex relationship was because in Taiwan, while same-sex marriage is legal there, IVF still needs to be done abroad, so it was Huang’s “tool” to get Ai in the same city as Emma, the daughter she gave away. That was the mother/daughter relationship he was more interested in exploring.
The film is at its best when it’s living in Ai’s grief, as she struggles with her next steps, and questions her previous ones. Ai is someone who doesn’t think she was a good mom or a good daughter and the death of Zuer while her own mother is in Taiwan with dementia and she is forced to lean on the daughter she gave up when she was 16 brings these emotions to the forefront. I thought Sylvia Chang was exceptional, I cried with her as she sent various voice messages. Karena Ka-Yan Lam also did a great job opposite her as someone carrying the hurt from someone who is a stranger to you.
Daughter’s Daughter had its World Premiere at the 49th annual Toronto International Film Festival in the Platform section, before the festival Taiwan-based Andrews Film has picked up international sales rights to the film.
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