Movie Review: Saving Face

By Pat Aguiar
Published: Tuesday, November 15, 2005

11/15/05 - Saving Face is a remarkably well-executed genre film from newcomer Alice Wu. This romantic comedy is about a Chinese-American woman who attempts to hide her lesbian relationship from her family.

Romantic comedies are to women as kung fu movies are to guys. Both genres are extremely formulaic and restrictive. Every romantic comedy or kung fu film adheres to a certain set of plot points and usually contain few if any deviations from the norm. For aficionados, the worth of such a film is in the execution and in the subtle nuances. For casual moviegoers, however, it just appears like repetition. Thusly I, like many males, detest romantic comedies.

Despite that, Saving Face is one of those rare romantic comedies that is good enough to be liked by people with a predisposition against the genre. What makes it different? The writing is clever and the jokes are genuinely funny, for one. Alice Wu has concocted a script that has one of the most exceptional funniness-to-attempted-humor ratios out of any film in recent memory.

The characters are very likable, as opposed to 99 percent of romantic comedies in existence. Michelle Krusiec plays the lead with flair beyond her years. Veteran Joan Chen plays the traditionalist mother. In a lesser film she would be depicted as being more one-dimensional and unsympathetic, but in this film her character is every bit as endearing and interesting as Michelle Krusiec's Wil.

It is quite amazing how engrossing the film is (especially considering the plot is a stock romantic comedy plot, albeit with the twist that the lead is a lesbian as opposed to a heterosexual, like in every mainstream film), and with this in mind I had high hopes for the ending. But this, like every romantic comedy, ineluctably hurtles towards the expected. But Alice Wu does such a masterful job that although this is a strike against the film, it cannot be considered damning.

Minus a couple of sex scenes and a few utterances of the word "fuck," this movie, had it been properly marketed, would have made hundreds of millions. It is quality, but extremely mainstream in nature (an ostensible contradiction, all things considering, but true in this case). That it wasn't aggressively marketed is probably because it is about Chinese-Americans, some of which are lesbian, as opposed to, say, white people, all of which (except for maybe the comic relief) are heterosexual (as is the case in all of mainstream cinema). This is a real goddamn shame, but don't let this stop you from checking out one of the best films of 2004.