SAVING FACE Blu-ray Review: Alice Wu's Crowd-Pleasing Romantic Comedy

Saving Face slips effortlessly between English and Mandarin and its associated dialects, with characters changing languages across scenes, conversations, and sometimes even single lines.

One of the latter is the most instructive moment in the film: Wilhelmina (Michelle Krusiek), coming out for a second time to her traditional mother (Joan Chen), does it entirely in Mandarin... except for one word: "gay."

In the supplemental features on Criterion's new Blu-ray of Alice Wu's 2004 comedy, Wu singles this moment out as well. As the only daughter of immigrant parents, she spoke -- but did not read or write -- Mandarin, until American school let her pick up English. In terms of her command of Mandarin, however, she only knew the words that her parents used in the home, "and 'gay' was not one of them," Wu says.

The stricken look on Wil's face as she struggles to finish her sentence, and can only do it in a different language than the one her mother uses, perfectly captures the multiple vectors of identity that are bearing down on the woman all at once. Wil, too, is a daughter of immigrants -- her father has since passed -- and her widowed mother lives for her, endlessly setting her up on match dates with eligible bachelors that take place in nearly speed-dating-like circumstances at the weekly Friday night dance in Flushing, Queens.

"Wow, six minutes, new record!" one of Wil's friends remarks as she churns out of yet another awkward conversation with yet another gormless heterosexual bragging about his stock portfolio (and cell phone plan). This is all duty to Wil, who has others in her life she can be more herself with. It doesn't matter that her mother caught her with a lover once and knows full well that Wil is gay. Ma doesn't have a word for it; and so, within her Chinese community, neither does Wil.

As a white writer, I don't have a great line of sight into the specificity of the Chinese-American diaspora that Alice Wu has built into every decision in Saving Face, other than that there are (inevitably) some elements that chime nicely with my own family's immigrant experience. I'm much more attuned to Wu's sculpting of the queer story within the story; I, too, felt lost in a world where language failed my sense of what I am, and had to convince a parent that there was a "there" there, with or without our ability to (initially) define it.

Wu describes Saving Face as a screwball romantic comedy, and it is that; but its love story is ultimately not about whether Wil will or won't get together with Vivian (Lynn Chen, who gives Jennifer Tilly in Bound a run for her money in smoking-hot queer gazing) or even whether Wil will learn to accept and love herself. Nope: this love story is all about Wil and her mother.

The energy of the story comes when Ma turns up at Wil's doorstep one night alone, wearing dark glasses, and (we quickly learn) pregnant. At 48 years of age, this is obviously a great surprise to everyone, not least Wil's grandfather, who kicked Hwei-Lan out of the house for her temerity. And for refusing to name the unborn child's father.

I love Joan Chen's performance here. Seen earlier stuffing cupcakes into her mouth and distantly keeping up with the dancefloor gossip, her slight shyness, her faraway look, comes into sharp focus when you realize that she's been secretly keeping company with someone to stave off her own loneliness, and a growing sense that her life is now behind her.

Now, life is all in front of her again, and the unexpected pregnancy provides the engine of the story; and, Hwei-Lan's shunning by her community forces her to confront some of the paradigms of the "good life" she's been trying to construct for her daughter.

Wil, whose tongue scraper and dental floss endeared me to her immediately, can't do a trust fall to save her life; she is forced to integrate her life with her mother's again at the exact moment she is falling in love with Vivian. Wil is so used to existing in the closet -- at least as far as anyone Chinese is concerned -- that her love affair with the much freer, more self-accepting Vivian goes, at a word, poorly. A dinner between the three of them -- Wil, Mom, and Vivian -- is a masterpiece of conflicting character decisions, as "what we officially know" and "what we actually know" pulls Wil back and forth like a chew-toy.

I unabashedly love this movie. Its screenplay -- written by Wu herself, largely in an effort to find some means to tell some aspects of her own experiences growing up -- shows some of the grind of its process, especially in early scenes as it tries to find its way out of an inherent "Sundance Labs" vibe.

But the story gains enormous confidence as it moves forward, and the web of character relationships -- there are very few throwaway parts in this story, so pay attention to everyone, early on -- become richer and more essential as Saving Face thunders to its final statement.

I'm thrilled to find this in the Criterion Collection at last. It feels like the kind of work they originally pledged themselves to doing; Saving Face was at risk of becoming just another forgotten indie until Wu followed it with her sophomore feature (The Half of It) 15 years later, allowing new audiences to find the 2004 work. Both Wu and her lead actor, Michelle Krusiek, should have become much bigger stars off the back of this.

The Criterion release is on Blu-ray only, but the 2K transfer is gorgeous. The 35mm production format slightly flattens the contrast ratio, resulting in a warm, creamy picture with beautiful grain structure and colour retention. (Unusually for them, Criterion does not list any information about the progeny of this transfer, so we can assume it is from a prior, non-Criterion effort.)

New extras for the disc include conversations with Alice Wu and Joan Chen, both recorded in 2025; plus a handful of legacy extras. Wu's 2005 commentary on the film is sedate and conversational -- or, let's call it confident enough not to be showy -- and a cast-and-crew conversation from Sundance 2005 is included as well. A jacket essay by critic Phoebe Chen completes the set.

The Blu-ray is now available from The Criterion Collection.