Daddy Issues is about forty five minutes too long, borrows heavily from the Freaky Friday premise long ago tested and retested, and the ways that it updates that story do not necessarily translate well to American sensibilities at this moment, which is not to say that there aren’t some funny gags and charming moments overall.
This was the last in a three-movie run at Cinequest (RIP) Thursday night last week and it had to live up to Burnt Orange Heresy, but I was taken enough with the premise of Vietnamese Freaky Friday to plan on staying six hours in. As I see it, there’s really one big problem that you run into when taking the Freaky Friday formula into the present day culture, which is the creepiness of the romance plot for both parties involved (the Tvtropes page is required reading for going down the rabbit hole on this one). The body swap movie is a self-imposed genre challenge, like writing with a rhyme scheme. These stories come off as erotically creepy in one of two ways: the audience knows the mother is taking advantage of underage erotic interest by developing feelings for him or showing him affection, which feels bad, and when she expresses interest in men her own age, we see an underage girl doing it, which feels bad. On the other side, the underage girl inhabiting the mother’s body is forced in a healthy family situation to reject the natural affection of the husband character to avoid incestuous vibes, and in the case of the dead father proviso, the girl-in-mother-matryoshka is engaging in a taboo age gap relationship without partner’s consent or knowledge. I wish that I could say that these movies tie themselves into knots trying to avoid these problems, but they don’t.
Disney and Hallmark has been attempting to make bank with this formula for a lot longer with three iterations of Freaky Friday from 1975 (Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster), 1995 (Shelley Long and Gaby Hoffmann–the one dearest to my heart), and 2003 (Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan). Josh Baskin’s Big (1988) tries to resolve the issue adult inhabiting a child’s body by eliminating the swap altogether, but in doing so, the film forces Tom Hanks’s character engage in some pretty grim child abuse in the form of normal adult dating. I kind of wish I had seen the 2019 spin on Big, Little, staring Issa Rae, Regina Hall, and Marsai Martin, since the trailer creates an even bigger headache for itself by reversing Big’s age taboo conundrum in the other direction, by substituting a swap for a reverse-aging story:
There’s another body swap TV Disney movie called Wish Upon A Star, staring Katherine Heigl–released only a year after the 1995 Disney remake of Freaky Friday–which tries to resolve the age gap issue by swapping the bodies of two similarly-aged sisters. The gender swap in Daddy Issues cleverly resolves the creepy age-gap issue, because now when approached by romantic partner’s of their counterpart, they resist advances because of their gender and sexuality, rather than on account of impulses of age. But we still run into grim child abuse issues, which is kind of shocking, considering how much of a buffer the movie built for itself.
Of course, gender-body swap movies have elements of erotic creepiness themselves. The award-winning and dazzlingly dumb anime Your Name (2016) makes reference to this issue in the horniest of ways, by having its male protagonist feel up his female penpal’s body when he first inhabits it. By solving one issue, the age-gap problem, they create a new problem, being sexually attracted/interested in the gender-swapped body you inhabit. In Daddy Issues, the familial connection neutralizes this awkwardness as well, but it’s still an awkwardness, in fact, though one that goes unmentioned and unremarked upon despite the crudeness of the humor in other directions.
Daddy Issues takes a conventional pass by heavy handedly killing off the mother character in the first few minutes, but not without making sure to fit her into a very, very tight box as a perfectionist ballet dancer whose other words of wisdom or living relatives have long since faded with time in the year(?) since she’s passed away. Not to worry, there are lots of suitors clambering their way into the father’s (Hai) pants, making it sufficiently awkward for any body swap. The movie does a fine job of setting up the way that the death of Hai’s wife and Chau’s mother has caught the two in stasis and forced them into unnatural roles: Hai has reverted to an irresponsible man-child who “forgets to be a father,” while Chau is stuck in the shadow of her perfect mother, whose death “took your carefree girl with you.” Chau’s grandfather is the first to suggest that the long-hidden study abroad program that Chau has been agonizing over might be just the thing that helps her dad grow up, something she never really has a chance to articulate in the film. In fact, when she receives similar advice for the second time, it feels a little out of left field. It has mutated into, “you will learn so much about yourself if you leave,” which doesn’t actually address Hai’s acerbic comment about the purpose of studying abroad at the time, which is that it’s a means by which Chau, Hai thinks, can be rid of her deadbeat father. Hai’s suitor gives Hai-in-Chau’s-body the line that feels like it should have been Chau’s line all along (and maybe is, but we never hear her vocalize it herself, in either body). The only time Chau ever really mentions it is in the Big Fight, when she validates Hai’s fears (arguing against the theory that the suitor is vocalizing subtext) by saying its a means by which she can escape his poor custody. The advice is further undercut by the fact that it’s being given by the woman who has just abused an underage girl in a man’s body–and even considering no swap at all, she’s done a piss poor job of acquiring his consent for any of their shenanigans in the first place anyway.
The entire decision to include a non-consensual sexual foreplay scene, which is actually more of a low-key scary child abuse scene from the perspective of Chau, feels a little puzzling. Chau, in the smallest defense of the decision, seems like she’s at least bicurious, when she kisses Nhung after one too many beers at dinner, but then again, the intoxicated minor doesn’t really have a lot of ability to give consent in that situation. Similarly, but on a smaller scale of seemingly forced errors, the bi-straight creepy kiss at the end with the dad and ex doesn’t feel great or earned.
Aside from these moments, Daddy Issues has some genuinely original, funny scenes. The gross out humor on the floor of the jungle after their first swap puts on display Thái Hòa’s full emotional range. The Japanese translation/math problem scene is an unexpected (bilingual!) delight. Even the twist around the halfway mark when Chau decides to present #Winning over #TrueColor, despite her arrangement with her father, and the subsequent reveal that Chau has only been admitted into the Miss Vietnam competition because of her father’s quirky (in her eyes, humiliating) adaptation of her dance routine is excellent. It’s nice to see Chau call her father on his hypocrisy in championing a beauty campaign for young women without employing that same thoughtfulness in his own parenting–that moment actually feels like a moment when the movie gets real. And that’s the moment when things fly off the rails.
I’m not giving away anything if I tell you that the climax of this movie features a minor smoking a LOT from a vape pen while dancing like a drunken kung fu master. It’s a pretty jarring crescendo for a movie that really didn’t ask for that moment and didn’t require it to have been funny and heart-warming. It doesn’t really do a good job of incorporating elements of Chau’s choreography, and the foreshadowing at Hai’s office early in the movie feels like this dance at the end is mostly, if not entirely, of Hai’s making and very little of the muscle memory he’s hoping for.
Daddy Problems has more than a few problems. It is not really satisfied with being a neat and well-contained body swap story and despite the inventive ways that it could have prevented itself from creating awkward and squicky situations for the minors in the film, it actually doubles down a little on humor that feels a little tone deaf in 2000, let alone 2020. It’s also full of joy and energy and unusual characters and a wealth of weird and cool cultural jokes that fit this movie in a time and place that feels very special and certain to make this into a time capsule of a movie.
