Drew Burnett Gregory is back at TIFF, reporting daily with queer movie reviews from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. Follow along for her coverage of the best in LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond.
Every story can be told if it’s told well. Even if film history is overwhelmed with narratives of queer people dying so cis and straight people can learn lessons, it doesn’t mean that can’t still occur in a new movie. But if that trope is utilized and not done well, the burden of that history feels heavy. Daughter’s Daughter utilizes that trope — it does not do it well.
The hook of Daughter’s Daughter is in its plot summary. Jin Aixia (Sylvia Chang) must decide what to do with her lesbian daughter Fan Zuer’s embryo after Zuer and her partner die in a car accident. But the film is far more interested in — and far more successful in portraying — Aixia’s other daughter, Emma (Karena Lam), who she had at 16 and gave up for adoption.
In its over two hour runtime, the film spends time with Zuer and her partner, both before the accident and in flashback. These scenes feel superfluous, empty even, the characters never feeling developed beyond Zuer’s conflict with her casually homophobic mom and Zuer and her partner’s desire to have a child. While Zuer’s absence altogether would’ve held different problems, her presence adds little to the story being told.
With a powerful performance from screen legend Sylvia Chang and a strong supporting performance from Karena Lam, the scenes focusing on Aixia and Emma point toward a better movie, and one more in line with the filmmakers’ apparent interests. The embryo once again places Aixia in a situation where she has to decide whether or not to keep a child as she’s reckoning with the decision she made at 16. But there were other ways to place a character in that situation other than giving her a lesbian daughter for her to be briefly bigoted towards and then killing the lesbian and the wife.
I’m not someone who is usually sensitive about the dead lesbian trope. I just think — especially when a filmmaker is not a queer woman — there should be some understanding of the history you’re working within. It’s especially frustrating when the use of the trope is the least compelling part of a story.
Maybe that should be expected. The issue with tropes isn’t just that we’ve seen them before or even their possible offense — it’s that they’re boring. Too often this film with so much heightened drama felt exactly that: boring.
Levan Akin’s recent film Crossing was another work that focused on the regretful straight relative to an absent queer person. It is similarly a film for straight and cis people, but it does right by its missing queer person by accurately representing her life and community. In Daughter’s Daughter, we don’t get a glimpse of Zuer’s life beyond her (also dead) partner. Even though she’d only been in New York for a short time, had she and her partner made friends and community? What did their community look like back in Taipei? It doesn’t have to be the focus of the film, but it should be felt. Otherwise Zuer just feels like a prop, a character meant to show up in flamboyant eye makeup, go through IVF, and then die.
Because the narrative thread between Aixia and Emma is compelling, I could push past these critiques if the film felt worthy. Unfortunately, the craft is competent yet unremarkable. The writing is blunt and forced with minimal depth. It’s unclear whether the film is pointedly a melodrama and simply not finding its tone or if it’s trying to be a grounded drama but failing to trust the emotion of its already big conflicts.
I understand this isn’t a movie made for queer audiences. I just think straight audiences also deserve better.
