Saving Face

Saving Face is adorable. It should be sold as a 2-for-one deal with He's Just Not That Into You, as an antidote for a truly terrible romantic comedy. Wil is an ambitious surgeon, who makes the pilgrimage to a community dance in Flushings every weekend so that her mother can fix her up with suitable Chinese men. When her mom, a widow, gets pregnant, the family patriarch throws her out of the house until she can produce the father of her baby and regain the family's honor. Because Wil's mom is in deep, deep denial about her daughter's homosexuality--she walked in on Wil and another woman once, and started setting her up with Chinese boys the next day--Wil needs to get her mom married off to a nice, middle-aged Chinese man so that she can persue a relationship with Vivian, a free-spirited Chinese-American ballerina.

Both Ma and Wil live in fear of their parents' disapproval. Wil's grandfather sees Ma's pregnancy as a reflection of his failures as a father, and Wil's mother sees Wil's homosexuality as a reflection on her as a mother. Wil finally forces her mom to acknowledge the truth about her in this scene which is apparently based on writer/director Alice Wu's own life:

Wil: Ma. I love you. And I'm gay.
Ma: How can you say those two things at once? How can you tell me you love me, and throw that in my face? I am not a bad mother. My daughter is not gay.
Wil: Then maybe I shouldn't be your daughter anymore.

Of course, it's a romantic comedy, so everything works out. Both Wil and Ma learn to shake off familial and community disapproval and follow their hearts. Wil winds up with Vivian, and Ma gets back together with her baby's father, but refuses to marry him because, it turns out, she likes having her own place. Wil's grandfather grudgingly accepts that kids these days are the worst, but looks forward to his grandchild's birth so he can be a good influence in her life. Most importantly, Wil and Ma realize they don't have to live in fear of other people's prejudices.

One of the great things about this movie is that it's a light, sweet, gay romantic comedy that lives pretty much in the real world. When Wil and Vivian dance together at the Chinese dance at the end of the movie, some people walk out in disgust. Wil's triumph isn't that her entire community embraces her for who she really is, but that over the course of the film, she learns that her own happiness is more important. Admirably, Wu doesn't write racism out of the world of the characters. Instead, Ma is put off by Wil's black neighbor but gradually comes to be his friend, giving him face masks and crying over Mandarin soap operas with him.

Apparently, Saving Face is the first movie about Asian American lesbians, and Alice Wu, the writer/director, had to fight to keep it that way. She met with producers who tried to get her to drop the "lesbian angle," or make it about white people, so they could cast Reese Witherspoon, which is shameful, and also stupid. The absence of a straight, white "perspective character" is one of the remarkable parts of the movie. Part of its appeal is that it's about Chinese American lesbians without being anthropological about it. The movie never treats the characters as people who need explaining for the audience to understand them, but instead as individuals.