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Michelle Krusiec,
Lynn Chen,
Li Zhiyu,
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Alice Wu
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: Columbia TriStar
: Comedies, Romantic Comedy, Gay & Lesbian, Features
: 97 min.
: English, French
: English, French
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An Asian-American woman and her mother both find their private lives are becoming a family matter in this romantic comedy-drama. Wilhelmina Pang (Michelle Krusiec) is a surgeon living in Manhattan whose mother (Joan Chen) is eager for her to settle down with a nice man and get married. What Ma doesn't know is that Wilhelmina happens to be a lesbian -- or rather, Ma prefers not to acknowledge it, since she once walked in on Wilhelmina and her girlfriend several years before. As it happens, Wilhelmina is looking for someone special in her life, and thinks she may have found her in Vivian (Lynn Chen), a beautiful dancer, but a fear of commitment and a desire to keep her medical career on track is making their relationship problematic. As Wilhelmina tries to get her love life in order, her mother's shifts into crisis mode. Ma, a 48-year-old widow, has just discovered she's pregnant, and her staunchly traditional father (Li Zhiyu) will not allow her back into the home they share until she's married someone respectable. Unwilling to name the father of her baby, Ma is forced to move in with Wilhelmina, and while enduring the emotional roller coaster of pregnancy she is being pressured by friends and relatives to marry Cho (Nathaniel Geng), a sweet but boring man she doesn't especially like. Saving Face was the first feature film from writer and director Alice Wu. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
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| More Perils--and Joys--of Coming Out
by talltale
October 24, 2005 - 3:51 PM PDT
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5 out of 5 members found this review helpful
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Charming, light on its feet and savvy about love, family and the closet in New York's Chinese-American community, SAVING FACE will disarm you handily. Alice Wu's debut as writer/director is done with such class and cool that it puts to shame many "first features." Accepting as a given the need for a young fast-track professional Chinese woman to hide her Lesbianism, the movie also makes it clear how self-destructive this behavior can be via a wonderful performance from Michelle Krusiec.
If the girlfriend character (played by with verve and sass by Lynn Chen) comes off a bit too good to be true, and Joan Chen's "mom" (with secrets of her own) makes a too-easy turnaround late in the game, the movie survives a couple of stumbles to emerge as a better-than-average feel-good romance. For this non-Asian viewer, the look inside a culture and community in transition was fascinating and fun. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.44)
64 Votes
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