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‘Double Happiness’
By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
August 11, 1995
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Chinese Canadian filmmaker Mina Shum explores her dual heritage in "Double Happiness," an appealing, uneventful family comedy about an aspiring actress's attempt to fulfill her traditional Chinese parents' expectations while pursuing her own Westernized life. This bittersweet first film, like Wayne Wang's similarly themed "Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart," relies less on a plot-driven story line than a gradual accumulation of small but significant domestic minutiae.Though the film's pace is downright leisurely—and at times even lethargic—Shum quickly illustrates the gap between 22-year-old Jade Li (Sandra Oh) and her stern middle-aged parents. At dinner, the conversation is bilingual: Jade and her teenage sister, Pearl (Frances You), speak only English and their parents only Chinese. And every time Pearl says, "It's a fact that . . . ," Dad Li (Stephen Chang) mistakes "fact" for another four-letter word and scolds Pearl to stop cursing. Jade, who still lives at home lest she be disowned like her older brother, plays the obedient old-fashioned daughter for her parents, especially for her inflexible father. But she discards the demure personality along with her frumpy clothes when she's auditioning for parts she never seems to get—and when she's out partying with her girlfriends. It becomes increasingly difficult for Jade to maintain her double life when well-meaning members of her extended family start setting her up with suitable suitors of Chinese ancestry. In the meantime, a Caucasian graduate student, Mark (Callum Rennie), insists on getting better acquainted after she leaves him still snoring the morning after a one-night stand. Faced with giving up Mark and her dreams of winning an Oscar "for some really hard role, something I had to gain weight for," Jade is obliged to choose between living her own life or making her parents happy. Her conundrum, of course, is universal to all children, albeit exacerbated here by the old generation's nostalgia for what it left behind and the new generation's hurry to assimilate. Rich in character, "Double Happiness" is primarily a showcase for Oh, the Korean Canadian actress who plays the cultural chameleon Jade. Oh won a 1994 Best Actress Genie (the Canadian Oscar) for this role—and that was without gaining any weight. "Double Happiness" is rated PG-13 for profanity.
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