LGM Film Club, Part 546: Daughter’s Daughter

I haven’t blogged a lot in Chile, but I have watched a ton of movies at night, enough for a lot of LGM Film Club posts, so I should start this again.

Daughter’s Daughter, directed by Huang Xi, is an excellent 2024 film that went totally under the radar, not even reviewed in the Times. But it’s on Criterion and I highly recommend it as an excellent character study film. Sylvia Chang, long a major actor in Taiwan, stars as the mother of two daughters. The first she gave up for adoption to friends of her own mother’s when she was a teenager. At that time, she lived in Chinatown in New York. The second she raised. Relations with both are not great. The oldest has reconnected but only sort of and there’s a lot of, understandably, hostility there. The second has moved to New York with her partner. She’s a lesbian and a punk (in the punk-rock sense of the word). Relations there aren’t great either. The second daughter and her partner are around 40 and they decide to have a child through IVF. The embryo belongs to the daughter. But shorty after fertilizing the embryo, she and her partner die in a car accident.

What does an aging woman who has made some bad decisions in her life but is fundamentally a decent person do with this embryo? How does one deal with grief in any scenario, but especially this one, and have that kind of decision on top of it? What choices does one make when they don’t know if they will live enough to even raise such a child if a surrogate can be found? These are the fundamental questions asked by Xi’s excellent film. Chang is amazing here as well. Some reviews found it a bit slow, but I disagree. I think it moves plenty fast enough for this kind of film, the sort of movie that is for adults and in a different era may well have had a bit of an arthouse run. It’s definitely worth your 2 hours and it does not drag at all. A fine piece of work.