Susan Granger’s review of “Saving Face” (Sony Pictures Classics)
The adage of “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face” takes on a new twist in this culture-clashing, Chinese-American romantic comedy about the emotional price of preserving “face.” At age 28, Wilhelmina Pang (Michelle Krusiec) is a hard-working surgeon at New York Hospital who has amiably endured futile attempts by her widowed mother (Joan Chen) in Queens to introduce her to eligible suitors while never revealing her true sexual orientation. But her cover’s blown when a distraught and shamed Ma turns up on her doorstep, having been thrown out by her own elderly parents, survivors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for becoming pregnant at the age of 48 and refusing to reveal the name of the mysterious culprit (Nathaniel Geng). Because within her Park Slope apartment, Wil has secreted Vivian Shing (Lynn Chen), a sassy, sexy, supple dancer with the New York City Ballet. In this tradition-bound, immigrant family, lesbian relationships and unmarried pregnancies are shocking, to say the least. Writer/director Alice Wu, a former computer science student at Stanford and programmer for Microsoft in Seattle, makes this an impressively off-beat debut feature, one in which the characters are torn between their desire to conform and their need for independence. Wil is in love with a person of the “wrong” gender and Ma is in love with a married man. So Alice Wu’s message is: if you’re in love, there’s really nothing wrong with it. Veteran TV actress Michelle Krusiec has such an endearing Sandra Bullock-like appeal that on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Saving Face” is a warmly humorous, sophisticated 7. Making a point about choices, as opposed to convention and conformity, it’s in English and Mandarin with English subtitles.
