Saving Face

A comedy drama about a Chinese-American family in New York. Wil is a young surgeon. She is good at her job but keeps part of her life hidden from her mother and the community around her: she is seeing a woman. Then a second matter arrives. Her widowed mother, forty-eight, becomes pregnant and will not say who the father is. Her grandfather throws her out and she moves into her daughter's flat. So the two of them end up in the same apartment, each with something to hide. What the film is interested in is not shame but what people will say. The gossip machinery inside the community, the weekend dances and the matchmaking are the fixed background of the story. The relationship between mother and daughter is at the centre, and both do the same thing: manage the situation rather than tell the truth. Michelle Krusiec plays Wil, Joan Chen her mother and Lynn Chen her girlfriend. Alice Wu's first film; she wrote the screenplay out of her own experience and spent years trying to get it made. A warm and honest example for anyone who likes American independent comedy and family stories. For a viewer expecting hard drama, the film keeps its register light and does not push its resolution too far.