‘Double Happiness’ Review: A Messy Taiwanese Comedy-Drama

In Chinese tradition, “double happiness” refers to a decorative design generally discovered festooned across wedding ceremony ceremonies, fashioned by putting two copies of the Chinese character for pleasure next to each other. In doing so, it varieties a form of hybrid character, one that actually doesn’t imply something, however is accorded a sure significance for the way it handily represents the meant satisfaction of each bride and groom, and by extension their households. Such a conundrum is clearly on the thoughts of Taiwanese director Joseph Chen-Chieh Hsu, whose movie “Double Happiness” makes use of an absurd premise — a pair holds two weddings at the same time with the intention to appease the groom’s dad and mom — as a way of bringing out all method of familial tensions, with decidedly blended outcomes.

Tim Kao (Kuang-Ting Liu) is the high-strung head chef at the Grand Hotel in Taipei, who’s about to be married to Daisy Wu (Jennifer Yu). Having skilled his dad and mom’ divorce at a younger age, he has always tried to appease and cater to either side of his household for many years, which has resulted in his most bold and foolhardy plan up to now.

After Tim’s dentist father Frank (Chung Hua Tou) refuses to permit his ex-wife, profitable CEO Carina Bai (Kuei-Mei Yang), to attend the wedding ceremony ceremony and reception, the groom resolves — with the intensive coordination of Daisy, her household, his coworkers and wedding ceremony planner Regina (singer-turned-actor 9m88) — to carry two weddings on the same day at the lodge, with bride, groom and father-in-law (Tenky Tin) shuttling backwards and forwards between the two while the visitors stay none the wiser.

Aside from a short prologue establishing Tim’s first literal inklings of his love of meals in the midst of his grief over his dad and mom’ separation, this surprisingly lengthy movie takes place over the course of this single chaotic day. It initially operates in a pseudo-“Birdman” vein, utilizing a percussive score and lengthy monitoring pictures following people by means of hallways as they try to unravel the latest disaster: the last-minute addition of a champagne tower, a hurricane delaying a key member of the wedding ceremony ceremony, and the difficulties of acquiring contemporary cuttlefish ink, the pasta dish that initially introduced 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 fixed introduction of new characters into the maelstrom tends to flatten them out into varieties slightly than shedding extra light onto the supposed family members of the bride and groom.

“Double Happiness” actually has its share of more overtly manufactured acts of stupidity, though some of it may be chalked as much as the movie’s seemingly comedian goals. Where it actually runs into bother, however, is in its gradual infusion of drama until it fully overwhelms the proceedings. The recollections stirred up by the momentous events of the day start to manifest for Tim as flashbacks the place he sees and interacts along with his youthful self (Robinson Yang), reliving an particularly traumatic day when he went to the lodge and tried to pry his mom away from an important assembly. This heart-tugging mode shortly turns into the main emotional tenor of the movie in its last 45 minutes, as Tim turns into more and more morose during the dueling receptions, with an particularly ill-advised transfer into surrealism.

Though Liu — who beforehand gained a Golden Horse award for Chung Mong-hong’s melodrama “A Sun”
(2019) — acquits himself in some of the comedian setpieces, his display screen presence is mostly recessive in a method that favors drama, and the effort only serves to highlight how a lot Daisy’s position is in the end downplayed in favor of Tim’s reveries and makes an attempt to come back to phrases along with his parental relationships.

One of the most fascinating points of “Double Happiness” comes courtesy of its sometimes
counterproductive yet cinephile-minded casting. Kuei-Mei Yang, certainly one of Tsai Ming-liang’s biggest actresses, brings a pure, pained heat to proceedings that counterbalances some of Liu’s more pressured moments. Tenky Tin, so memorable in Stephen Chow’s “Shaolin Soccer” and “Kung Fu Hustle,” seems right here as Daisy’s well-meaning, astrology-obsessed father. But the most important of all is available in the type of the Grand Hotel itself which, along with its real-life glamor, is the office of the grasp chef father in the Yang-starring “Eat Drink Man Woman” and the website of the wedding ceremony reception in Edward Yang’s masterpiece “Yi Yi.”

The staircase used so prominently in that latter movie — which also featured a pregnant bride, superstitions surrounding the day of the wedding ceremony, and a title fashioned by combining two Chinese characters — is seen time and again right here, and the invocation of such a daringly fashionable movie, one by which sentimentality is balanced by a rigor of type and lived-in portraiture of each technology’s failings and hopes, makes the plot machinations and tried pathos of “Double Happiness” really feel all the more restricted by comparability.