F/F Friday: Saving Face
Jul. 5th, 2019 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerAlice Wu’s Saving Face is a delight. It’s one of those movies so intensely individual that you feel that no director but this one could have pulled it off: a lesbian love story that is also a family drama, set in the Chinese immigrant community in Flatbush.
Wil (short for Wilhelmina) knows that she’s a lesbian, but to please her mother she still attends the weekly dances that are the social epicenter of their immigrant community. And it’s there, totally unexpectedly, that she meets her potential new girlfriend: Vivian, a professional ballet dancer, and like Wil the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. (The older generation still speaks Chinese whenever possible; Wil and Vivian speak English to each other even when they’re alone.)
But just when Wil’s love life seems to be looking up, her family life takes a sharp left turn. Her forty-eight-year old mother, widowed for twenty years, has just gotten pregnant - and when her disappointed father kicks her out of the family home, she moves into Wil’s apartment.
I loved the knotty family relationships in this story (Wil’s cheerfully badass grandmother is a particular standout: at one point she compliments Wil’s sensible shoes with the words, “I had a pair just like that in the revolution. Sensible and sturdy, just right for a war”), and the portrait of the community - in a way it’s like reading a Jane Austen or a Miss Read novel, where you get a sense of the social relationships of a small interlocking group of people, only here they inhabit not a small village in the countryside but a small community within a larger city.
And the main couple! The main couple! Let me clutch my face and scream. There is a scene where Wil and Vivian are in Vivian’s apartment and it’s kind of a date but it’s not clear it’s a date date yet, and Vivian is trying to teach Wil how to fall correctly, and Wil can’t let go enough to do it… until Vivian leans in for a kiss and in a sudden attack of nerves, Wil suddenly masters falling.
(But don’t worry. Vivian falls down too, totally gracefully because she’s a ballerina, and then they make out.)
I also loved the dialog in this movie, which hits the perfect balance of funny but also something that a real person might actually say. Like this exchange between Wil and her mom, when her mom is trying to decide what to wear for a date: Wil holds up a yellow dress on her mom's clothing rack, to which her mom replies. “Chinese people can’t wear yellow." Wil raises her eyebrows incredulously (then why did you buy the dress?), and her mom cries, “On sale!”
Wil (short for Wilhelmina) knows that she’s a lesbian, but to please her mother she still attends the weekly dances that are the social epicenter of their immigrant community. And it’s there, totally unexpectedly, that she meets her potential new girlfriend: Vivian, a professional ballet dancer, and like Wil the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. (The older generation still speaks Chinese whenever possible; Wil and Vivian speak English to each other even when they’re alone.)
But just when Wil’s love life seems to be looking up, her family life takes a sharp left turn. Her forty-eight-year old mother, widowed for twenty years, has just gotten pregnant - and when her disappointed father kicks her out of the family home, she moves into Wil’s apartment.
I loved the knotty family relationships in this story (Wil’s cheerfully badass grandmother is a particular standout: at one point she compliments Wil’s sensible shoes with the words, “I had a pair just like that in the revolution. Sensible and sturdy, just right for a war”), and the portrait of the community - in a way it’s like reading a Jane Austen or a Miss Read novel, where you get a sense of the social relationships of a small interlocking group of people, only here they inhabit not a small village in the countryside but a small community within a larger city.
And the main couple! The main couple! Let me clutch my face and scream. There is a scene where Wil and Vivian are in Vivian’s apartment and it’s kind of a date but it’s not clear it’s a date date yet, and Vivian is trying to teach Wil how to fall correctly, and Wil can’t let go enough to do it… until Vivian leans in for a kiss and in a sudden attack of nerves, Wil suddenly masters falling.
(But don’t worry. Vivian falls down too, totally gracefully because she’s a ballerina, and then they make out.)
I also loved the dialog in this movie, which hits the perfect balance of funny but also something that a real person might actually say. Like this exchange between Wil and her mom, when her mom is trying to decide what to wear for a date: Wil holds up a yellow dress on her mom's clothing rack, to which her mom replies. “Chinese people can’t wear yellow." Wil raises her eyebrows incredulously (then why did you buy the dress?), and her mom cries, “On sale!”
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Date: 2019-07-06 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-07 01:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-06 10:11 pm (UTC)This sounds fun.
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Date: 2019-07-07 01:49 am (UTC)