Family Affairs

shall we dance?: Wil (Michelle Krusiec, left) gets down with Vivian (Lynn Chen).

Three generations of Chinese-American women negotiate life in the big city.

Saving Face

by Cindy Fuchs

Wilhelmina Pang (Michelle Krusiec) puts on a good face. A dedicated surgeon, 28-year-old Wil is also a dutiful daughter. When she's not jogging or taking extra shifts at the hospital, she's on the train to Flushing, home of her mother (Joan Chen), grandmother Wai Po (Guang Lan Koh) and grandfather Wai Gung (Jin Wang).

Wil appears to have a direction for the future and a handle on her past, at least compared to Ma, who becomes pregnant at 48. Unwilling to reveal the child's father, much less marry him, Ma is disowned by her father, who sends her packing. Ma's inevitable decision to move in with her daughter throws something of a wrench into Wil's secret life: She's just started a new relationship with professional dancer Vivian Shing (Lynn Chen), who's dealing with generational conflicts of her own. Though her father's proud of her work as a ballerina, her passion is modern dance, which he rejects as unserious.

These tensions surface in Alice Wu's first film, Saving Face. Older folks stick together, insisting tradition while arranging mixers for young eligibles. Children pursue careers and socialize after work. Ma is caught in the middle, trying to please her parents by enduring an arranged dating process. The ordeal brings her and Wil together in mutual exasperation. Seeing her mother dressed to go out, Wil is stunned: "You're beautiful," she stammers, never having considered her mother an object of desire.

These pieces are occasionally too familiar, pulled from a romantic-comedy playbook. More interesting is the film's attention to various concepts of "face" — not only as reputation and legacy, but also as the means by which everyone of every culture gets through the day, performing in order to please others, get ahead, avoid trouble and survive. Saving face is at once an acknowledgment of ritual and collective identity, a self-reinvention, a reclaiming of roots, and resistance to family expectations. The process is extra complicated within immigrant communities, as the past and present are differentiated by place as well as time, and fear of difference enters from all sides.

Against this backdrop, Wil and Vivian's romance becomes secondary to Wil and Ma's relationship. In one much-remarked scene, Ma seeks brief distraction in a local video shop's "Chinese" section, consisting of The Joy Luck Club and The Last Emperor (nice joke here, given Chen's starring role in the the latter). Comically marking the notoriously limited canon of "Chinese" films in the United States, this moment also acknowledges Ma's own self-exploration and energy, her capacity for change and openness, and Chen's deft timing.

Saving Face Written and directed by Alice Wu A Sony Classics release opens Friday at Ritz Bourse
Lynn Chen will appear at the Friday, 7:30 p.m. screening.