This month’s Smart Bitches Movie Matinee is Saving Face, a contemporary lesbian romantic comedy written and directed by Alice Wu. I’m so excited to see this film.
Ready for the description?
An Asian-American woman and her mother both find their private lives are becoming a family matter in this romantic comedy-drama. Wilhelmina Pang (Michelle Krusiec) is a surgeon living in Manhattan whose mother (Joan Chen) is eager for her to settle down with a nice man and get married. What Ma doesn’t know is that Wilhelmina happens to be a lesbian — or rather, Ma prefers not to acknowledge it, since she once walked in on Wilhelmina and her girlfriend several years before. As it happens, Wilhelmina is looking for someone special in her life, and thinks she may have found her in Vivian (Lynn Chen), a beautiful dancer, but a fear of commitment and a desire to keep her medical career on track is making their relationship problematic.
As Wilhelmina tries to get her love life in order, her mother’s shifts into crisis mode. Ma, a 48-year-old widow, has just discovered she’s pregnant, and her staunchly traditional father (Li Zhiyu) will not allow her back into the home they share until she’s married someone respectable. Unwilling to name the father of her baby, Ma is forced to move in with Wilhelmina, and while enduring the emotional roller coaster of pregnancy she is being pressured by friends and relatives to marry Cho (Nathaniel Geng), a sweet but boring man she doesn’t especially like. Saving Face was the first feature film from writer and director Alice Wu.
This movie has 87%+ scores on Rotten Tomatoes, and a friend of mine out of the blue raved about it after I’d added it to the movie schedule. SERIOUSLY. So excited.
Saving Face is available for around $3-4 to rent and $10-13 to buy digitally on iTunes, Google:Play, and Amazon, and the DVD can be found at your local library, or cheaply online in new and used condition from Amazon or Alibris.
Join us Sunday, October 30, for our discussion of Saving Face!
I haven’t seen this one for a while but enjoyed it. Hope you do too!
OMG I loved this movie! I was just looking for it the other day…
I’m really tempted by this, but my library doesn’t have it (and no ILL for anything but books). Any other suggestions for how to see it for free or cheap?
@Vasha: I found it for about $2.99 (SD not HD) as a digital/streaming rental via Google:Play and Amazon. Does that help or do you need a physical copy?
Google:Play is perfect– thanks!
This looks awesome!