Laughing Through Color: Alice Wu's Saving Face (2004)
Saving Face is a vastly underrated 2004 lesbian rom-com about Wilhelmina (AKA Wil), a young closeted Chinese-American surgeon whose mother Hwei-Lan, played by the inimitable Joan Chen of Twin Peaks fame, continues to try to set her up with Chinese men at community events, one of which leads her to the magnetic Vivian Shing, a dancer whose father happens to be Wil's boss. An unmarried 48-year-old widow, Hwei-Lan unexpectedly gets pregnant, is subsequently shunned by her community, and moves in with Wil all while refusing to divulge the identity of her child's father to anyone, including Wil. She hides herself from Wil, who hides herself in return as Vivian forces her to grapple with queerness in public vs. private. The mother and daughter both struggle with the ways their sexualities are on display, for Wil on the axis of queerness and for Hwei-Lan as a pregnant unmarried person and are afraid of how the cultural norms they transgress infiltrate their relationship with each other and the world around them, a fact that ultimately helps them relate to each other more.
It was the feature debut for Alice Wu, a Taiwanese-American lesbian director, and one of the most interesting things about it for me is how it explores Wil's queerness as a parallel to her mother's journey and the ways the two work against gendered and cultured expectations alongside each other. This movie is smart, sexy, funny, and thoughtful and demonstrates a possibility for the rom-com genre to traverse nuanced depths of love and relationships and how culture imbues them with questions that prove so difficult to answer. It doesn't rush to answer these questions or present them as simple dilemmas constructed as mechanisms to thicken the plot but positions them as part of the architecture of love. Saving Face is invested in how many things can be true at once. What if queerness could be relatable beyond its variable boundaries and could help articulate the disillusion of being marginalized by your own community? Hwei-Lan's journey with her daughter's sexuality prods at this, wades around in its fullness--she is at once in and out of her culture, held by its comforts and shunned by its rigidity, but when confronted with this complication in Wil she sees so much familiarity reflected back at her.
Wil's relationship with her mother starts to affect her budding romance with Vivian who, unlike Wil, is openly gay. Vivian is pursuing contemporary dance against the wishes of her father, who wants for her to continue in traditional ballet--at the nexus of this story is the conflict between individual desire and tradition, and the added layer of queerness implicates this conflict and creates in the characters differently complicated relationships with authenticity. Vivian transcends her ethnic origins in her espousal of American values, especially concerning individual freedoms, and Wil's reluctance to detach from these origins (and subsequently alienate her mother) starts to impact their relationship. Wil is afraid to kiss Vivian in public but loves her freely in private; Saving Face understands the ability to move through public spaces as yourself as a culturally specific phenomenon and presents the stories of people who never had to think about it so much as they do at this moment, who try to make it matter less but when it comes crashing down on them, discover how badly it is they wish to be seen.
Alice Wu sought specifically to make a movie by and for Asian-American queer people, repeatedly rejecting studio's pleas to cast a major white actress in one or both of the leading roles and the film having an entirely Asian-American cast is an significant diversion from the typical trajectory of Hollywood rom-coms--Kaklamanidou's “Romantic Comedy and the ‘Other’: Race, Ethnicity, and the Transcendental Star" points out that many people of color in the rom-com genre, Will Smith in Hitch being one achieve stardom and success through the ways they shore up comfortable, easily digestible and markedly neutral characters who happen to be people of color without isolating white audiences, wherein box office success is entrusted. Saving Face, however, demonstrates a lack of interest in mainstream success and is interestingly also somewhat lacking from the queer canon; it occupies a noticeably niche space in the realm of queer movies insofar that its mainstream success was limited but, unlike other "before-its-time" movies ascribed with queer cult status such as Jennifer's Body, didn't necessarily circle back around to audiences today. The lack of whiteness in this film is no doubt a salient causal factor in this lack of rebirth--while being funny, it also demonstrates a commitment to telling arguably a serious story, and the film doesn't necessitate a "campy" read as much as other retroactively added to the queer canon.
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