Double Happiness First Draft

Complete first draft for Variety.

In Chinese culture, "double happiness" refers to an ornamental design commonly found festooned across wedding ceremonies, formed by placing two copies of the Chinese character for joy next to one another. In doing so, it forms a kind of hybrid character, one which literally doesn't mean anything, but which 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, whose film “Double Happiness” uses the absurd premise of a couple holding two weddings at the same time in order to appease the groom's parents as a means of bringing out all manner of familial tensions, with decidedly mixed results. Tim 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 undergone his parents' 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. After his dentist father Frank (Chung Hua Tou) refuses to allow his birth mother, successful CEO Carina Bai (Kuei-Mei Yang), to attend the wedding ceremony and reception, Tim resolves—with the extensive coordination of Daisy, her family, his coworkers, and wedding planner Regina (9m88)—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. Aside from a brief prologue establishing Tim's first literal inklings of his love of food in the midst of his grief over his parents' separation, the surprisingly long “Double Happiness” takes place during the course of this single chaotic day and initially operates in a pseudo-“Birdman” 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. Hsu, who made his directorial debut with the well-received drama “Little Big Women” 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. “Double Happiness” certainly has its share of more overtly manufactured acts of stupidity, though some of it can be chalked up to the film's seemingly comic aims. Where the film 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 forty-five minutes, as Tim becomes more and more morose during the dueling receptions, including an especially ill-advised move into surrealism. Though Liu—who previously won a Golden Horse award for Chung Mong-hong's melodrama “A Sun” (2019)—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's role is ultimately downplayed in favor of Tim's reveries and attempts to come to terms with his parental relationships. One of the most interesting aspects of “Double Happiness” comes courtesy of its sometimes counterproductive yet cinephilic casting. Kuei-Mei Yang, one of Tsai Ming-liang's greatest actresses, brings a natural, pained warmth that counterbalances some of Liu's more forced moments. Tenky Tin, so memorable in Stephen Chow's “Shaolin Soccer” and “Kung Fu Hustle,” appears here as Daisy's astrology-obsessed but well-meaning 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 “Eat Drink Man Woman” and the site of the wedding reception in Edward Yang's masterpiece “Yi Yi.” The staircase used so prominently in that latter film—which also featured a pregnant bride, superstitions surrounding the day of the wedding, and a title formed by combining two Chinese characters—is seen time and again in “Double Happiness,” and the invocation of such a daringly modern film, one whose sentimentality is balanced by a rigor of form and lived-in portraits of each generation's failings and hopes, makes the plot machinations and attempted pathos of this film feel all the more limited.

We Are the Fruits of the Forest First Draft

Complete first draft for Variety.

Rithy Panh can credibly hold the title of both Cambodia's most important film director and one of the greatest documentarians alive. A survivor of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime that claimed the lives of his family members, he began studying filmmaking in France before returning to his native country in the late 1980s. Though he has made a number of fiction features—including his most recent work “Meeting with Pol Pot” (2024), which stars noted French actors Irène Jacob and Grégoire Colin—he is best known for his prolific nonfiction output. It largely focuses on the aftermath of the genocide he and his country survived and moves fluidly between brutally direct vérité (“S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” 2003), archival material (“Irradiated,” 2020), and, in the case of his most celebrated film “The Missing Picture” (2013), clay animation. With his most recent film, “We Are the Fruits of the Forest,” Panh opts for a more restrained but still incisive approach to the plight of a specific group of downtrodden people in his nation's present. After a brief drone shot over the trees, “We Are the Fruits of the Forest” begins with Panh's main recurring formal gambit for this particular project: a split screen presentation of silent black-and-white archival footage. The subject in both that found material and his film at large is the Bunong people, an indigenous ethnic group living in the highlands of northeastern Cambodia. Historically, they have grown large-grain rice in mountain forests, clearing sections of trees to create fields according to their ancestral ceremonies and offerings. By the 21st century, the Bunong have become beholden to the demands of companies seeking to access their cultivations, forcing them to harvest and clear forests at a much more rapid pace and take on additional products like cassava, rubber, and honey. Panh's contemporaneously shot footage forms the bulk of “We Are the Fruits of the Forest,” remaining focused on the inhabitants of what appears to be one unnamed village as they cycle through the various duties needed to maintain their already precarious status. Though there are a few scenes in common with a more relaxed way of life, including a few of the village children watching an action movie on a cell phone, the vast majority of sequences take place without any obvious visual signifiers of a more putatively modern world. To convey that, “We Are the Fruits of the Forest” relies equally on extensive voiceover. Though no specific credits are provided, it seems that one single male voice is used to represent the anxieties of his village, if not his entire people as a whole. It is his words that are used to contextualize the images of work onscreen, explaining various customs and the animist beliefs that govern their society, whether it be the various classifications of forests that the Bunong may or may not work in, the increasingly predatory bank loans that they must rely on as their crop yields become ever poorer, or the racist insults that wider Cambodian society uses to refer to them. The man occasionally mentions his father, but his words are generally used in an explanatory manner, informed by a deserved pride in his people's work and understandable concerns about their future. Such a monovocal approach, especially considering that little of the frequently heard conversations between the village people is actually subtitled, does run the risk of being repetitive as the same problems surrounding each facet of the Bunong people's lives are evoked time and again. But there's an elegance to Panh's rhythms and his focus on the many faces of the village that continually proves of interest. Even as this might be Panh's first nonfiction film to avoid even a glancing reference to the Khmer Rouge, the numerous references to modern capitalism's erosion of Bunong customs (including some of their people's adoption of Christianity) ensures that this new focus for Panh is by no means a lighter or less urgent topic. All this, of course, is tied back into Panh's use of archival footage. While past and present are juxtaposed less frequently than might be expected, the material is used in an overtly poetic manner, offering brief glimpses of a previous way of life. Most strikingly, the same image is often displayed in both frames, as if to suggest a double vision that seeks to divine a greater understanding of these long-gone figures and landscapes. Woven throughout “We Are the Fruits of the Forest” is an image of a topless Bunong woman, often shown in a brief flash that intrudes into the present. Whether this is meant as a literalization of the spirits of the forest or (as suggested by the voiceover) a bad omen is left up to interpretation, but it captures the vivid past and present lives of these people, and how quickly modern forces can cause them to fade away.