A New Old Story in Old New York

Someone ought to come up with a name for the genre in which a young gay protagonist has to deal with various dramas in their extended Chinese-American family because there seems to be an awful lot of these. Last night I watched 2004's Saving Face which, like The Wedding Banquet before it and Everything Everywhere All at Once after it, features a young Chinese homosexual who must deal with a conservative parent and other family members living in America during a time of crisis. So far, I would say Saving Face is the most generic of the genre but it's not exactly bad.

Michelle Krusiec plays Wilhelmina Pang, a surgeon and a lesbian whose mother, Hwei-Lan, played by Joan Chen, comes to live with her. Around the same time, Wilhelmina falls for a beautiful ballerina named Vivian (Lynn Chen, no relation to Joan).

I fear this is one of those movies so caught up in proving gay people and Chinese-Americans are normal that it forgets to make them interesting. The romance between Wilhelmina and Vivian is particularly disappointing. The actresses have decent chemistry but they're written like a daytime sitcom in which Wilhelmina is the clumsy normal guy and Vivian is the self-assured, obvious epitome of all desirous feminine qualities and she calmly knows it. So her mild smirk at Wilhelmina across the room isn't meant to be creepy but an unexpected ray of light from heaven.

The movie labours under the assumption that we all want Wilhelmina and Vivian to live happily ever after but Vivian's kind of a terrible girlfriend. Wilhelmina is a surgeon and although she promises Vivian she will come to her birthday party she ends up having to do multiple emergency surgeries and comes to Vivian's apartment only after it's all over. Despite the fact that Wilhelmina had managed to send Vivian an expensive bouquet of red roses, Vivian is still sulky and hints that she may never want to see Wilhelmina again. At which point, I would have advised Wilhelmina to seek other fish in the sea. But Wilhelmina gratefully accepts when Vivian reluctantly invites her in.

Director Alice Wu doesn't seem aware of the co-dependent relationship she portrays between the two in which Vivian can do no wrong and every problem is due to Wilhelmina's clumsiness and inadequacies.

Meanwhile, Wilhelmina's mother is pregnant. Gossip quickly spreads around the Chinese community in New York and the elder woman in mortified but stalwart. Joan Chen doesn't show any reluctance playing a nagging matriarch after years of playing enigmatic young beauties. At least she's not trapped in a drawer pull.

Saving Face is available on The Criterion Channel until the end of the month.