{"id":110436,"date":"2025-11-01T22:54:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T22:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/110436\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T22:54:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T22:54:08","slug":"double-happiness-review-a-messy-taiwanese-comedy-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/110436\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Double Happiness’ Review: A Messy Taiwanese Comedy-Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn Chinese culture, \u201cdouble happiness<\/a>\u201d refers to an ornamental design commonly found festooned across wedding ceremonies, formed by placing two copies of the Chinese character for joy next to each other. In doing so, it forms a kind of hybrid character, one that literally doesn\u2019t mean anything, but is accorded a certain significance for how it handily represents the intended satisfaction of both bride and groom, and by extension their families. Such a conundrum is clearly on the mind of Taiwanese director Joseph Chen-Chieh Hsu<\/a>, whose film \u201cDouble Happiness\u201d uses an absurd premise \u2014 a couple holds two weddings at the same time in order to appease the groom\u2019s parents \u2014 as a means of bringing out all manner of familial tensions, with decidedly mixed results.<\/p>\n

\n\tTim Kao (Kuang-Ting Liu) is the high-strung head chef at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, who is about to be married to Daisy Wu (Jennifer Yu). Having experienced his parents\u2019 divorce at a young age, he has constantly tried to appease and cater to both sides of his family for many years, which has resulted in his most ambitious and foolhardy plan to date. <\/p>\n

\n\tAfter Tim\u2019s dentist father Frank (Chung Hua Tou) refuses to allow his ex-wife, successful CEO Carina Bai (Kuei-Mei Yang), to attend the wedding ceremony and reception, the groom resolves \u2014 with the extensive coordination of Daisy, her family, his coworkers and wedding planner Regina (singer-turned-actor 9m88) \u2014 to hold two weddings on the same day at the hotel, with bride, groom and father-in-law (Tenky Tin) shuttling back and forth between the two while the guests remain none the wiser.<\/p>\n

\n\tAside from a brief prologue establishing Tim\u2019s first literal inklings of his love of food in the midst of his grief over his parents\u2019 separation, this surprisingly long film takes place over the course of this single chaotic day. It initially operates in a pseudo-\u201cBirdman\u201d vein, using a percussive score and long tracking shots following people through hallways as they attempt to solve the latest crisis: the last-minute addition of a champagne tower, a typhoon delaying a key member of the wedding ceremony, and the difficulties of obtaining fresh cuttlefish ink, the pasta dish that initially brought Tim and Daisy together at his restaurant. <\/p>\n

\n\tHsu, who made his directorial debut with the well-received drama \u201cLittle Big Women\u201d in 2020, handles the comparative frothiness of these scenes ably, though the constant introduction of new characters into the maelstrom tends to flatten them out into types rather than shedding additional light onto the supposed loved ones of the bride and groom.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDouble Happiness\u201d certainly has its share of more overtly manufactured acts of stupidity, though some of it can be chalked up to the film\u2019s seemingly comic aims. Where it truly runs into trouble, however, is in its gradual infusion of drama until it completely overwhelms the proceedings. The memories stirred up by the momentous occasions of the day begin to manifest for Tim as flashbacks where he sees and interacts with his younger self (Robinson Yang), reliving an especially traumatic day when he went to the hotel and tried to pry his mother away from an important meeting. This heart-tugging mode quickly becomes the main emotional tenor of the film in its last 45 minutes, as Tim becomes more and more morose during the dueling receptions, with an especially ill-advised move into surrealism. <\/p>\n

\n\tThough Liu \u2014 who previously won a Golden Horse award for Chung Mong-hong\u2019s melodrama \u201cA Sun\u201d
(2019) \u2014 acquits himself in some of the comic setpieces, his screen presence is generally recessive in a way that favors drama, and the effort only serves to highlight how much Daisy\u2019s role is ultimately downplayed in favor of Tim\u2019s reveries and attempts to come to terms with his parental relationships.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the most interesting aspects of \u201cDouble Happiness\u201d comes courtesy of its sometimes
counterproductive yet cinephile-minded casting. Kuei-Mei Yang, one of Tsai Ming-liang\u2019s greatest actresses, brings a natural, pained warmth to proceedings that counterbalances some of Liu\u2019s more forced moments. Tenky Tin, so memorable in Stephen Chow\u2019s \u201cShaolin Soccer\u201d and \u201cKung Fu Hustle,\u201d appears here as Daisy\u2019s well-meaning, astrology-obsessed father. But the most significant of all comes in the form of the Grand Hotel itself which, in addition to its real-life glamor, is the workplace of the master chef father in the Yang-starring \u201cEat Drink Man Woman\u201d and the site of the wedding reception in Edward Yang\u2019s masterpiece \u201cYi Yi.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThe staircase used so prominently in that latter film \u2014 which also featured a pregnant bride, superstitions surrounding the day of the wedding, and a title formed by combining two Chinese characters \u2014 is seen time and again here, and the invocation of such a daringly modern film, one in which sentimentality is balanced by a rigor of form and lived-in portraiture of each generation\u2019s failings and hopes, makes the plot machinations and attempted pathos of \u201cDouble Happiness\u201d feel all the more limited by comparison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Chinese culture, \u201cdouble happiness\u201d refers to an ornamental design commonly found festooned across wedding ceremonies, formed by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[71669,146,85,46,71670,397,71671],"class_list":["post-110436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-double-happiness","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-joseph-chen-chieh-hsu","tag-movies","tag-tokyo-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110436\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}