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Challenging stereotypes in Saving Face
23 October 2005
Saving Face is a movie about stereotypes: cultural stereotypes, sexual stereotypes, social and even racial stereotypes. Or rather, it's about breaking them all. It's about walls and making them fall, but it's a light, easy, and often comic film.
The story is set within the Chinese community of New York among the families who keep its traditions and inner politics alive. Traditional family values are are the cement that binds the families together within the community, but they're already under assault from the American side as the two cultures overlap and collide.
Wilhemina (Wil) Pang is the beautiful 28-year-old granddaughter of one of these families. She's a successful, brilliant and hard-working surgeon. Great things are expected of her. Unbeknownst to her family, she's also gay. North American culture may have embraced gay as a component, but not CHinese. Wil hides her sexual preferences from everyone, and of course is the target of the would-be matchmakers in the community who try to set her up with males. Wil is also much more assimilated in to the American culture and shifts freely between Chinese and English dialogue.
One day her mother lands on her doorstep - 48 years old, widowed, and pregnant. Disgraced and thrown out of her parents' apartment, she turns to her daughter for support. Wil's mother is the transition between the two generations. She refuses to identify the father, but gets caught up in Wil's efforts to match her with a suitable Chinese man to legitimize the impending child. The mother also intrudes into Wil's life, changing the apartment, watching Chinese soaps on TV all day, and pressuring her daughter about her love life.
Wil has just met and fallen in love with Vivian, a stunning, willowy ballet dancer. Their relationship gets put to the test by the combination of Wil's hectic, pressured work, and her efforts to hide the relationship from her mother.
It's a gentle film, really a romantic comedy. It would have been very predictable had it been set in American culture, but set in the Chinese community makes it more complex and interesting. And the mix of the mother's affair with her daughter's lesbian one makes it far more entertaining.
It's rated R - restricted - for one very brief scene where the two young women begin to make love. It's not a sexual scene as much as it is romantic and sensual, but the glimpse of breasts and nipples - two women's breasts pressing together in homosexual union - garnered it that rating, even if we don't actually see the women engaged in sex.
The story is set within the Chinese community of New York among the families who keep its traditions and inner politics alive. Traditional family values are are the cement that binds the families together within the community, but they're already under assault from the American side as the two cultures overlap and collide.
Wilhemina (Wil) Pang is the beautiful 28-year-old granddaughter of one of these families. She's a successful, brilliant and hard-working surgeon. Great things are expected of her. Unbeknownst to her family, she's also gay. North American culture may have embraced gay as a component, but not CHinese. Wil hides her sexual preferences from everyone, and of course is the target of the would-be matchmakers in the community who try to set her up with males. Wil is also much more assimilated in to the American culture and shifts freely between Chinese and English dialogue.
One day her mother lands on her doorstep - 48 years old, widowed, and pregnant. Disgraced and thrown out of her parents' apartment, she turns to her daughter for support. Wil's mother is the transition between the two generations. She refuses to identify the father, but gets caught up in Wil's efforts to match her with a suitable Chinese man to legitimize the impending child. The mother also intrudes into Wil's life, changing the apartment, watching Chinese soaps on TV all day, and pressuring her daughter about her love life.
Wil has just met and fallen in love with Vivian, a stunning, willowy ballet dancer. Their relationship gets put to the test by the combination of Wil's hectic, pressured work, and her efforts to hide the relationship from her mother.
It's a gentle film, really a romantic comedy. It would have been very predictable had it been set in American culture, but set in the Chinese community makes it more complex and interesting. And the mix of the mother's affair with her daughter's lesbian one makes it far more entertaining.
It's rated R - restricted - for one very brief scene where the two young women begin to make love. It's not a sexual scene as much as it is romantic and sensual, but the glimpse of breasts and nipples - two women's breasts pressing together in homosexual union - garnered it that rating, even if we don't actually see the women engaged in sex.
