Joan Chen in Saving Face

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Transition

Wilhelmina Pang (Michelle Krusiec) is a surgeon. She puts on a good face, too. The center of Alice Wu's debut film, Saving Face, Wil is both driven and dutiful: she runs daily, takes extra shifts at the hospital without complaint, and spends precious little time in her sparsely elegant Manhattan apartment. She does spend quite a bit of time, however, on the train back and forth to Flushing, Queens, home of her mother (Joan Chen), grandmother Wai Po (Guang Lan Koh), and grandfather Wai Gung (Jin Wang).

At 28, Wil appears to have a direction for the future and a handle on her past, at least compared to her mother, who becomes pregnant at 48. Unwilling to reveal the child's father, much less marry him, Ma becomes a source of shame for her father, who pronounces her no longer his daughter and sends her packing. Neither Wil nor Ma has a moment's doubt that the newly homeless mother-to-be will come live with her daughter, though this development does throw something of a wrench into Wil's other, secret life: she's a lesbian and she has just started a new relationship with professional dancer Vivian Lu (Lynn Chen). She has her own generational issues, though of a different sort: she's paid to dance ballet, but her passion is modern dance, which her father rejects as unserious.

Wil's reluctance to out herself parallels Ma's secret, of course, and the strained affections between Wai Gung (he and his wife survived the Cultural Revolution, the subject of director Joan Chen's remarkable Xui-Xiu: The Sent Down Girl) and his resistant daughter parallel the relationship between Ma and Wil. And they all negotiate their diverse city in their own ways -- the older folks stick together, insisting on the value of tradition and arranging dances so Wil and other young eligibles can meet one another, and the younger ones venture forth, pursuing high-powered careers and socializing after work. That Ma, in order to please her own parents, agrees to go through an arranged dating process is not only exasperating, but also brings mother and daughter together in mutual appreciation (and exasperation). Seeing her mother dressed to go out, Wil is stunned: "You're beautiful," she stammers, having never considered her mother an object of desire.

These pieces of characters and plots are occasionally too familiar, as if pulled from a first-movie/romantic-comedy playbook, including the gossipy "Chinese biddies," as Viv calls them, and the sweetly supportive, ethnically "other" neighbor; in this case, he's Jay (Ato Essandoh), black and bisexual, who drops by to offer comic relief, poignant observations, and company for Ma as she watches soap operas. Jay's appearance at dinner grants Ma the chance to voice her judgment in Chinese ("Your neighbor is loud and dark and likes too much soy sauce"), as Wil pretends quietly to agree and shush Ma at the same time, and he smiles, loving his soy-drenched plate and oblivious.

This kind of comedy is about par, but in Saving Face, it also serves purposes apart from a "diversity" time-out. What's at stake here is the very concept of face, not only as reputation and legacy, as Wai Gung understands it (thus his shame over his daughter's late, unmarried pregnancy), but also as the means by which everyone of every culture gets through the days, performing in order to please others, to get ahead, to avoid trouble, to survive. The idea of saving face, then, becomes something of an inversion of daily life, as you might aspire to several ends at once, to appreciate ritual and collective identity, to reinvent yourself in a new context, to hang onto roots both in family and resistance to family at the same time. The process is multiply complicated, of course, within immigrant communities, as the past and present are differentiated by place (and lots of distance, in the case of Chinese Americans) as well as time, and fear of difference enters from all sides.

The story of Wil and Vivian provides a kind of ground (even background) for the more interesting story of Wil and Ma, as they must come to terms with their similarities and differences, the losses they share and the aspirations they've absorbed from their experiences. The film includes a scene already somewhat infamous, where Ma seeks brief distraction in a local video shop's "Chinese" section, consisting of The Joy Luck Club and The Last Emperor (nice bit of comedy here, as Chen stars in that film as the Empress Wan Jung). She selects the only other option -- one of those terminally cheesy "exotic" Asian porn tapes. This moment marks the notoriously limited canon of "Chinese" films, of course, as well as Ma's newly sexualized sense of self, and maybe even her desire to explore new options (her boyfriend still unknown), but more importantly, it highlights the film's framing of an untidy transition, between cultures, generations, sexualities, and genders: bracing, shifting, disappointing, and ongoing.

The scene also indirectly marks the visual distinction of Saving Face, compared to other intergenerational tension films, especially of the epic variety. With consistently exquisite compositions, tight focus on the details of exchange and the precision of ritual, the film frequently uses internal frames (doorways, windows, even the refrigerator door and a paper sack) in order to suggest connections and transitions, the ways that characters might cross over to comprehend one another's experiences. And as such, it's an especially welcome frame for Joan Chen, whose own career represents something of a cultural transition. Bold, smart, and resilient (she survived a Steven Segal movie), she's always good to see.