Sandra Oh

  • Double Happiness (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) As someone who’s had a movie crush on Ottawa-homegirl Sandra Oh for a while, it naturally took about half a second for me to record Double Happiness on the DVR, considering that it’s one of the few films in which she holds the leading role, and if often considered her breakthrough performance. Here she plays a Chinese-Canadian young woman (never mind that Oh is of Korean ethnicity) torn between her traditional upbringing and more western cultural values, trying to please her parents and find her own way. This isn’t groundbreaking material — although it was considerably more novel back in 1994—but the affectionate execution makes it all worthwhile. Writer-director Mina Shum clearly knows what she’s going for, and manages to deliver a film that still feels reasonably fresh even decades and many similar movies later. Oh herself is the film’s biggest asset, delivering a great performance that asks a lot in presenting a double life. If you’re one of her fans, this ranks as one of her essential performances — fairly early in her career, and yet already self-assured.

  • Last Night (1998)

    Last Night (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) I can name at least three “the end of the world is coming and here is how the characters react” movies in recent memory—Melancholia, These Final Hours and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World—but Last Night predates all of them, and still offers its own unique take on the premise. Shot and set in debris-strewn Toronto streets, writer-director Don McKellar’s film feels like an exceptionally Canadian take on cozy catastrophes: the rioting and panic having taken place earlier and offstage (aside from a few brief moments of crowd craziness midway through the film), we’re left with characters reacting with dignity and black humour to the impending apocalypse as the clock counts down to the end. Some indulge in hedonism, checking off their bucket lists, while others retire home to pray. Meanwhile, our lead couple (McKellar and a captivating Sandra Oh) improbably connects despite very different plans. Add TTC streetcars, some French-Canadian dialogue with Geneviève Bujold, the eye-catching Sarah Polley and a rare (but dignified) acting performance by director David Cronenberg and you’ve got one of the most Canadian of all 1990s Canadian movies. I enjoyed Last Night far more than I thought I would, but then again, I have a soft spot for that exact premise, and it’s substantially funnier than I expected. The only thing that marred my experience is that Canadian Cable TV channel Encore must have dredged their copy of the film from their old TMN/Moviepix archives because the transfer here is markedly low-resolution with faded colours and standard aspect ratio—not a good way to present a good film.

  • Le violon rouge [The Red Violin] (1998)

    Le violon rouge [The Red Violin] (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2018) As someone who like cinematic form experimentation, there’s no way I wasn’t going to be interested in Le Violon Rouge, a Canadian film tacking not a single character, but a single object through centuries. Here, the story begins in the late seventeenth century, as a grieving violin-maker coats a new violin with a substance of particular meaning. From that dramatic starting point, we follow the violin through Vienna (1793), Oxford (1890s), Shanghai (1960s) and Montréal (1997) as the violin changes hands, creates passions and undergoes surprising changes in fate. As a concept, it’s quite lovely—there are a lot of novels of the sort (or close to it—see the bibliography of James A. Michener and Edward Rutherfurd) but for obvious reasons it’s a much harder form to do as a film—juggling several time periods is a nightmare in itself, not to mention the added production costs. As a result, I can’t help but compare the potential of Le violon rouge with its execution and being slightly disappointed—more time periods, stronger dramatic ironies, perhaps a longer running time in the form of a miniseries could have done the best justice to the idea. Still, what we do have with the finished film in 131 minutes isn’t negligible—the editing hopping back and forth between 1997 Montréal and earlier time period is admirable enough, but writer/director François Girard’s juggling of a large cast of character and five separate languages is an amazing feat in itself. Samuel L. Jackson, Colm Feore, Sandra Oh, French-Canadian cinema fixture Remy Girard and none other than Canadian director Don McKellar (who also co-wrote the film) are only some of the names in the ensemble cast. While Le violon rouge does have flaws, it’s also quite an interesting experiment in cinema itself and does warrant a look if that’s the kind of thing that interests you.