In Alice Wu’s 2004 feature-length debut, Saving Face , a Chinese community group holds a dance every Friday night at a banquet hall in Flushing, Queens. The eager regulars are middle-aged moms and aunties who matchmake for their unmarried adult children and sit impatiently on the sidelines to see if their weekly labor bears any fruit. The widowed Hwei-lan (Joan Chen) is one such mom, who steadfastly continues setting up her daughter, a promising surgical resident named Wil (Michelle Krusiec), with different men despite years of failure.
The mostly unspoken tension between Hwei-lan and Wil derives from, and is exacerbated by, the former’s unwillingness to acknowledge that the latter is a lesbian, as well as Wil’s inability to fully come out of the closet. The tightly wound Wil is always aware of how she’s perceived by others, as her guilt manifests in fear that any wrong move might betray her queerness. Her androgynous wardrobe helps to keep men at bay, but when the bewitching Vivian (Lynn Chen)—another victim of matchmaking, albeit one more comfortable with, though still secretive about, her own sexuality—hits on Wil, the film really taps into Wil’s social and cultural anxieties.
Saving Face is a coming-out story that elicits plenty of universal truths, with Wu imbuing her characters and their community with such warmth, humor, and touchingly rendered specificity that the film feels as fresh today as when it was first released. It falls prey to rom-com clichés, as evidenced by the will-they-won’t-they romance leading to a final ultimatum and romantic showdowns at both an airport and a wedding, but it’s also full of grace notes and sly, funny cultural commentary that lends a richness and depth to even its most familiar beats.
Saving Face also shrewdly resists the temptation to limit Hwei-lan to the one-note disapproving mother who eventually comes around to support her daughter. It certainly helps that Chen plays her with such nuance and humor, and that Wu’s script gives the actress plenty to chew on. Where Wil’s inability to fully embrace her queerness gives the film its initial thrust, it’s the Hwei-lan’s shocking pregnancy, and her refusal to name the father, that imbues their relationship, and Saving Face as a whole, with a thorny complexity, braiding the mother and daughter’s parallel journeys together even as they drift further apart.
Despite their best efforts at, well, saving face, Wil and Hwei-lan fall victim to the intense pressures of their community, whose members see them as shirking expectations in favor of their own happiness and sense of personal freedom. Hwei-lan’s father (Jin Wang), for one, has the biggest parental crisis in the film, decrying his daughter’s supposed irresponsibility in getting pregnant not for how it affects her life, but how it tarnishes his reputation.
The tensions between these characters are mostly resolved by the end of the film, with Wu cleverly dovetailing Wil and Hwei-lan’s individual love stories. And while Saving Face embraces the typical rom-com happy ending, it still shows that communal acceptance of Wil and Hwei-lan’s nontraditional partners isn’t a given. The true victory for both mother and daughter is their newfound ability to stop caring about it.
Image/Sound
For this Blu-ray, Criterion has transferred an HD digital master that preserves Saving Face’s naturalistic look, with fairly strong image detail to boot. The color balancing nicely handles the film’s shifts from the warm color palette of the red-dominated dance sequences to the cooler one in scenes at the hospital and on the subway, in which greens and blues are predominant. On the audio front, the 5.1 surround track may not get a lot of moments to shine, but it adds resonance and depth to the overlapping chatter and background noises in the subway and dance sequences, and both the English and Mandarin dialogue is crisp and clear throughout.
Extras
The highlight of the disc is Alice Wu’s audio commentary, in which she discusses the story’s cultural details and the nuts-and-bolts of the production, touching on the various location shoots and the ways in which corners were cut. A newly recorded interview with Joan Chen is equally compelling, with the first half serving as a fairly comprehensive overview of her acting career in China and the second half covering her work in Hollywood and on Saving Face. Alice Wu returns in another new interview, where she talks about the influence that her parents’ divorce and her own experience of coming out had on the film.
The disc also includes a handful of deleted scenes with brief audio commentaries by Wu and a featurette about Wu and the three main actresses’ experiences at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Rounding out the package is a foldout booklet with an essay by critic Phoebe Chen, who elegantly teases out the various intricacies of the film’s mother-daughter relationship.
Overall
Criterion’s new Blu-ray, featuring a solid transfer and enlightening extras, should go a long way in securing a spot for Alice Wu’s debut in the queer film canon.
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