Double Happiness

Réalisé par Mina Shum

Canada, 1994 (fiction, 87 minutes, couleurs, chinois cantonais / anglais)

Autre titre : « Bonheur aigre-doux »

Image : © First Generation Films

Description du film [en anglais] :
« Irreverent, cheeky and daring, Jade Li is a twenty-two-year-old aspiring actress looking for love and her place in the world. Like so many members of Generation X, she's culture bound. What's worse is she still lives at home with her Chinese family. Jade seeks Double Happiness, a way to keep loving her family deeply, while exploring the possibilities and the pain of a young woman growing up in the nineties. As Jade struggles to maintain the balance of her two worlds, she must answer the question she's been trying to avoid: you've got one life to live, what's it gonna be? »
-- Office national du film du Canada (source)

Générique (partiel) :
Scénario :	Mina Shum
Produit par :	Stephen Hegyes, Rose Lam Waddell
Interprètes principaux :	Sandra Oh, Stephen Chang, Allanah Ong, Frances You, Callum Keith Rennie
Images :	Peter Wunstorf
Montage images :	Alison Grace
Musique :	Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet
Société de production :	First Generation Films, National Film Board of Canada / Office national du film du Canada

(sources)

Prix décernés à Double Happiness

Prix Génie : Meilleure interprétation féminine dans un premier rôle -- décerné à Sandra Oh
Prix Génie : Meilleur montage -- décerné à Alison Grace

Notes sur Double Happiness

Tourné à Vancouver.
Présenté au Toronto International Film Festival en 1994.
Nominé pour un Prix Génie dans la catégorie Meilleur réalisateur.

(sources)

Citations de la réalisatrice [en anglais]

« A lot of men have come up to me and told me they can relate to Double Happiness, which is one woman's journey. If you can just get your work to the consumer and let them judge. It's just that some people in marketing, and they are often not women, tend to categorize towards gender. »
-- Mina Shum (source)

« I went and watched Double Happiness with the first paid audience [...], and I noticed the Asian population who were in the theatre laughed that much harder, related that much deeper to this movie that I made, and it's because they're just dying to see themselves, we're just dying to see an honest representation of us. And I think that's one of the reasons I made movies in the first place. »
-- Mina Shum (source)

« If I'd made this film [Double Happiness] when I was 18, the dad would have been a bad guy. But I've come to understand the difficulty of coming to a new country where your education means nothing, humbling yourself, dealing with racism. He has to deal with that and he has to raise his family with a sure hand. I wanted to show the complexities of the situation rather than pretend I have any answers. »
-- Mina Shum (source)

Citation sur Double Happiness

« Stylisé et anti-naturaliste, ce premier long métrage [Double Happiness] fait preuve de beaucoup d'assurance, tant au niveau de la direction d'acteurs que de la mise en scène. Privilégiant les couleurs saturées et les apartés des personnages à la caméra, Mina Shum trace un portrait à la fois personnel et distancié, sans la lourdeur des premières oeuvres, d'une famille chinoise qui aurait sans doute pu être la sienne. »
-- Mario Cloutier (source)

Citations sur Double Happiness [en anglais]

« Double Happiness visits the familiar 'caught between two cultures' genre that aestheticized migrant tales often rehearse. This film, however, revitalizes expectations of the 'struggle for happiness'—cultural conflict between traditional parents and their modern 'Canadianized' children—and combines it with a coming-of-age tale. »
-- Kass Banning (source)

« [Mina] Shum's auto-referential aesthetic, her self-reflexive play with cinematic and televisual technologies of representation that have produced stereotypes of Chinese in North America, and constructed the dominant mythology of the white family as a norm in their failure to represent families of colour, is signalled to the viewer in the film's establishing shots. »
-- Christopher Gittings (source)

« In Double Happiness, the device that most overtly breaks the narrative flow is direct address to the camera. The film begins with Jade (Sandra Oh) holding a clapperboard and describing her family, and later her parents and sister also describe their feelings to the camera. As Jade points out, her family is not quite the Brady Bunch, but her allusion invites us to consider the similarities as well as the differences. »
-- Jim Leach (source)

« Stephen Chang, who plays my father, is a Rambo guy, a kung-fu guy. [...] You can't speak to him with metaphors. [Mina Shum] would talk to him very physically, literally block his every action in a very Hitchcockian way. 'Turn you head a little bit. Don't open your eyes too much. Just say the lines.' With me, she'd speak on a very, very broad emotional level, about memories, colors, feelings. Mina has an astute sensibility about how people respond to direction. »
-- Sandra Oh (source)

« Mina Shum's debut feature, Double Happiness, is a film that challenges the scopic drive of mainstream Hollywood films by intervening in what Ann Kaplan calls 'dominant looking relations'. The film, the first feature produced by a Chinese Canadian woman, self-consciously plays with its North American audience's expectations of cinematic gaze, narrative voice, subjectivity, and racial stereotypes. »
-- Eleanor Ty (source)

Bibliographie sur Double Happiness

Chapitres de livres

BANNING, Kass. « Playing in the Light: Canadianizing Race and Nation » , dans Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema, sous la direction de Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow et Janine Marchessault, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1999, pp. 291-310. [en anglais]
MARCHETTI, Gina. « Guests at The Wedding Banquet: The Cinema of the Chinese Diaspora and the Rise of the American Independents » , dans Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream, sous la direction de Chris Holmlund et Justin Wyatt, London, Routledge, 2005, pp. 211-225. [en anglais]
MELNYK, George. « The City of Dysfunction: Race and Relations in Vancouver from Shum's Double Happiness (1994) to Sweeney's Last Wedding (2001) and McDonald's The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess (2004) » , dans Film and the City: The Urban Imaginary in Canadian Cinema, Edmonton, AU Press, 2014, pp. 229-253. [en anglais]
RUESCHMANN, Eva. « Mediating Worlds / Migrating Identities: Representing Home, Diaspora and Identity in Recent Asian American and Asian Canadian Women's Films » , dans Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities, sous la direction de Eva Rueschmann, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 180-194. [en anglais]
TY, Eleanor. « Rescripting Hollywood: Performativity and Ethnic Identity in Mina Shum's Double Happiness » , dans The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004, pp. 69-81. [en anglais]

Brèves parties de livres

GITTINGS, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation, London, Routledge, 2002. [en anglais] (pp. 239-241)
MONK, Katherine. Weird Sex and Snowshoes: And Other Canadian Film Phenomena, Vancouver, Raincoast Books, 2001. [en anglais] (pp. 290-291)

Articles de revues scientifiques

O'NEILL, Edward R. « Asian American Filmmakers: The Next Generation?: Identity, Mimicry and Transtextuality in Mina Shum's Double Happiness and Quentin Lee and Justin Lin's Shopping for Fangs », CineAction, no. 42 (février 1997), pp. 50-62. [en anglais]
POSPÍSIL, Tomás. « Sam and Me, Masala and Double Happiness: Multicultural Experience in Canadian Film of the Early 1990s », Brno Studies in English, vol. 33 (2007), pp. 185-198. [en anglais]

Articles de journaux, de revues grand public ou de sites d'information en ligne

BENSON, Sheila. « Chinese but not Chinese, and revealing the difference », Migration World, janvier-février 1996. [en anglais]
BILODEAU, Martin. « Casse-tête chinois : Maladresses de débutante et audaces de néophyte », critique de Double Happiness, Le Devoir, 29 juillet 1995.
CHIOSE, Simona. « Double Happiness », critique de Double Happiness, Globe and Mail, 28 juillet 1995. [en anglais]
CLOUTIER, Mario. « Double Happiness, un coup d'envoi réussi pour Mina Shum », critique de Double Happiness, La Presse, 12 juin 1995.
DAFOE, Chris. « Happiness hasn't spoiled Mina Shum; Like the lead character in her critically—and popularly—acclaimed Double Happiness, Chinese-Canadian filmmaker has struggled against the disapproval of her family in the search for success », entretien avec Mina Shum, Globe and Mail, 6 octobre 1994. [en anglais]
DUSSAULT, Serge. « Bonheur aigre-doux : Une petite comédie qui a le drame à fleur de peau », La Presse, 5 août 1995.
KLADY, Leonard. « Double Happiness », critique de Double Happiness, Variety, 19 septembre 1994. [en anglais]
LEE, Edmund. « Double daring », entretien avec Mina Shum, The Village Voice, 15 août 1995. [en anglais]
MASLIN, Janet. « A delicate Asian flower in a motorcycle jacket », critique de Double Happiness, New York Times, 28 juillet 1995. [en anglais]
TANNER, Louise. « Chinese girl leaves home », entretien avec Mina Shum, Films in Review, novembre-décembre 1995. [en anglais]
TREMBLAY, Odile. « Sandra Oh dans Double Happiness : Un rôle sur mesure », Le Devoir, 12 juin 1995.
VERMEE, Alison. « Mina Shum and Kathy Garneau: Identification marks », entretien avec Mina Shum, Kathy Garneau, Take One (Toronto), automne 1994. [en anglais]

Sites Web sur Double Happiness

« IMDb: Double Happiness », Internet Movie Database, Inc, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109655/combined. [en anglais]
NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA. « NFB -- Double Happiness », National Film Board of Canada, http://www3.nfb.ca/collection/films/fiche/?id=32491. [en anglais]