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Film
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Saving Face
Once known as ‘The Elizabeth Taylor of China,’ actress Joan Chen towers above the rest of this formulaic romantic comedy as the mother of a conflicted daughter.
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
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Sony Pictures Classics
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The formidable Joan Chen
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Apparently, there are some things that white people are never meant to understand, or at least that’s what the new movie Saving Face would seem to suggest. The world of Chinese culture inhabited by the characters in Alice Wu’s directorial debut is the same, but different; and it’s in that difference that a fairly conventional romantic comedy occasionally becomes more than the sum of its staunchly formulaic parts.
Michelle Krusiec (Cursed, Duplex) plays Wil, a successful doctor at a New York hospital who falls into a tenuous relationship with Vivian (Lynn Chen), much to the consternation of her mother (Joan Chen), who has some relationship woes of her own. Namely, she’s pregnant he’s pregnant, and unwilling to reveal the identity of the father.
These two relationships dovetail into one another rather nicely as two generations of women who are too afraid of disapproval still try to be true to themselves. But the broad strokes of the plot more closely resemble Kissing Jessica Stein or any of a hundred other romantic comedies. For better or worse, The Joy Luck Club has set the bar high all such films that follow.
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Sony Pictures Classics
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Co-star Lynn Chen (no relation)
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Joan Chen, having departed the screen for directing films like Autumn in New York, is a revelation as Ma, a 47-year old who, like Susan Sarandon or Jane Fonda, has enough sex appeal to blow younger starlet counterparts off the screen. Speaking only Mandarin for most of the film, Chen (who in real life just turned 44) wields maternal gravitas and comedic whimsy in equal measure, giving Krusiec a run for rule of the film’s serpentine storylines. Krusiec, meanwhile, attempts and mostly fails to uplift her fledgling lesbian encounter with Lynn Chen’s Vivian beyond feel-good platitudes and cutesy plot interruptions, relegating what should have been the film’s centerpiece relationship to a subordinate position.
The larger problem is that while writer-director Vivian Wu’s screenplay is steeped almost too well in Chinese cultural lore, it is anchored all the more so in romantic clichés. For example, when Ma reveals her pregnancy to her parents, her father kvetches about his loss of face in the Chinese community, and about how much shame a 47-year old mother brings upon their family; pride, and more specifically, public perception, is an important part of Asian culture that survived in modern Asian-American families, and feels authentic.
But what does not feel authentic, to either Asian audiences or simply those familiar with rom-com formula, is director Wu’s indelicate efforts to help Wil avoid talking about her feelings, which includes a barrage of perfectly-timed cell phone calls and the opportune intrusion of other people into private conversations. Such conventions invariably take viewers out of the moment and undermine Wu’s urgent and legitimate need to get her stories told.
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Sony Pictures Classics
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With director Alice Wu (r)
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Nevertheless, there are a lot of recognizable moments and folks familiar with Asian culture in particular will find much to laugh at. But what really stands out in this film - as it did in Crash a few weeks ago and in Diary of a Mad Black Woman before that - is the fact that each individual race tends to project its own cultural biases and expectations on other people.
Thus, Asians are generally all lumped into a single category, and because they have largely succeeded in assimilating to mainstream American culture, we assume they will adopt our cultural norms such as ignoring familial obligation and become ‘individuals,’ even though their sense of ‘family’ is still tied to old but not necessarily outdated modes of communal connection. In Saving Face, no matter how important a conversation may be, there’s always going to be a ringing cell phone that needs to be answered. But maybe if they could all be switched off and a conversation could actually be finished, we would have wound up with more than simply another formulaic romantic comedy about an oft-neglected cinematic ethnic group.
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