Alice Wu, Saving Face(2004) 《面子》, featuring Joan Chen whom I now love...
One of the best films/comedies that I saw this (passing) year, it was branded as "somewhat Ang-Lee" by my mommy and I agree. It's funny. It's about love, middle-age crisis and gay relationship. It's also very New York. New York in a non-aggrandizing way that is, which is not usual.
A touching and hilarious piece of coherant story-telling as it is, I didn't realize the significance of the title till putting the bilingual titles side by side. Saving Face, a present participle-noun phrase, directing the action of "saving" to the quintessential Chinese notion of 面子, which is the actual Chinese rendition of the English title. 面子 seems to be so Chinese that any verb or present participle designated to convey and concretize the "Chineseness" in English is redundant. Indeed, the mere evocation of 面子 is enough. We (Chinese) know what it is ALL about.
Right, you are correct in sensing that I'm about to turn to the "but". But, isn't "face" a problematically reified stereotype of the Chinese. As Prof. LL reminds us aptly in Translingual Practice, 面子 is NOT a distinctly Chinese concept until the arrival of the missionaries. I'll stop the translingual-practice way of reading 《面子》right here and save you all the references to Arthur Smith, Lu Xun, the coauthorship and the mutiple translation of the Chinese national character. See Chapter 2 of Translingual Practice if you are nerdy enough. Lol~~~!
But (right, another but) asdie from all theoretical crique or teasing-out of the orientalistic elements of any given piece of artwork, Saving Face in central light, let us put the seemingly reified Chinese 面子 in perspective and in motion. To make a long story short and to avoid undesired spoiler: by setting up a hyperbolic stereotype of 面子 (the Grandpa who speaks a too mandarin kind of Mandarin for example), the film takes a much-welcomed twist and breaks down the "face" to get at a new kind of "face", a new "face" that is lesbian-friendly, wild-love-tolerant, racially-harmoniously, linguistically-hybrid and self-reflexively-hilarious. Interestingly and perhaps euphorically enough, it is via the smashing of the face (the wedding scene as the most telling moment) that a new face is saved, a new life begins to seem worth living.
In conclusion: Is that not a fighsty continuum of the co-authorship of the Chinese national character? I suspect that the good-humoured Lu Xun would nod along. :P
