Saving Face

REVIEW
Funny, smart and very romantic, Alice Wu's debut film puts a whole new fresh face on Asian-American family relations. When 48-year-old widow Hwei-Lan Gao (played by a radiant Joan Chen) informs her less-than understanding father she's pregnant, he banishes her from their family home in Flushing, NY until she remarries. With nowhere else to go, Hwei-Lan moves in with her grown daughter, Wilhemina (Michelle Krusiec), a Manhattan doctor who doesn't want a roommate, certainly not her mom. When Wil meets Viv (Lynn Chen), a dancer and her sexy young lover things get quite complicated. Their steamy lovemaking scene is one of the many highlights of this warm and intelligent film. She's come out to her mom years ago, but her mother has yet to acknowlege her lesbianism. Each week she tries to set her daughter up with a new eligible young man. In order for Wil to get her life back, she does what any dutiful child with an expectant, unmarried mother on her hands would do: she proceeds to set Hwei-Lan up with every eligible Chinese bachelor in town.

Sensitive to the nature of Chinese family in the US, Alice Wu has crafted a superior film about the many unspoken bonds. While the lead lesbina character is certainly an important part of the film, don't mistake this film for a coming-out drama or a movie about being a lesbian, it's much more than that! (Mandarin and English with English subtitles)