Daughter’s Daughter (2024) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: every time New York comes up in conversation
Take a Drink: for every slip from Chinese into English
Take a Drink: for talk of fertility treatments or embryos
Do a Shot: for heartbreakingly frank conversations
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d be surprised to hear that there’s any major film festival out there that does a better job of highlighting work from filmmakers of all sexes, races, and creeds than TIFF. In particular, if you want to see what the best female filmmakers working today are doing, this is the place.
Daughter’s Daughter is actually about relationships between not just two, but eventually four generations of mothers and daughters across two continents, even if it’s years and not decades it spans.
A Toast
This is first and foremost a movie about women, by women. Writer/director Haung Xi commands a cast of superb actresses led by Taiwanese titan Sylvia Chang. There’s not a man to be seen for nearly an hour, and possibly not even mentioned for the first 30 minutes. This may be the closest I’ve ever seen to a film scoring 100% on the Bechdel Test.
At first you wonder if you’re going to be treated to a simple yet engrossing slice of life drama of Taiwanese women across generations living their complicated yet undoubtedly loving relationships with each other (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
However, this rather quiet film driven entirely by dialogue sketching out the connections between these characters takes a turn when tragedy strikes, recasting and driving inquiry further into the small faultlines we’ve witnessed, and how the past created them and threatens now to widen them. Sometimes our understanding and acceptance of someone only comes after they are already gone, when it’s too late to show them, but it’s never too late to learn from it in how you interact with those who remain.
Beer Two
This is a film that takes its time introducing its characters to us before really setting the plot wheels in motion. It takes a patience most Hollywood movies don’t demand to really get into.
Verdict
Daughter’s Daughter is a complex and emotional story of overcoming the sins of the past to create a future beyond them.
