Tina Kakadelis
To “save face” is to preserve your dignity in the eyes of others. It’s an idiom that has roots in East Asia, and the idea of “face” as a concept tied to dignity in social situations. Saving Face is the 2004 film from writer/director Alice Wu about a lesbian and her mother who each have something to hide that threatens their connection to family and culture. In the twenty years since the release of the film, Saving Face has often been recognized as a turning point for queer and Asian-American films. That legacy is officially etched in stone with the release of the Criterion Collection edition of Saving Face. In celebration of the film’s inclusion in the collection, Alice Wu sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to reflect on the day she got the Criterion news, the radical nature of the film’s happy ending, and how her definition of “legacy” has changed in two decades.
Saving Face is about mothers and daughters, how different they are, and how painfully the same they can be without realizing it. Wil (Michelle Krusiec) is a Manhattan doctor who begrudgingly visits her mother, Hwei-Lan (Joan Chen), and the rest of her extended family for weekly dinners, where she’s always set up with a new bachelor. None of these dates ever amount to anything because Wil is a lesbian. She’s come out to her mother before, but Hwei-Lan doesn’t accept it. At one of these weekly dinners, Wil runs into Vivian (Lynn Chen), a girl she knew as a child but hasn’t seen in nineteen years. The two of them begin a relationship, but Wil’s world is upended when Hwei-Lan shows up on her doorstep, pregnant out of wedlock.
“I really wrote Saving Face for my mom,” Wu says. “I write to work out certain questions I have, and it took me until I finished because I thought the question I was answering was how do I help my mom who, at the time, was not pregnant, but was going through a big life change. I was trying to figure out how I, as a gay daughter who has already brought so much shame onto my mom, how do I help her with this?”
“I thought that was the question I was answering, but when I finished the film, I realized, oh, I’m much more selfish than that,” laughs Wu.
One of the reasons for Saving Face’s enduring legacy is its happy ending. For many queer people, it was the first romantic comedy of its kind where the two women in love ended up together. It’s an ending we take for granted in heteronormative rom-coms. As soon as a guy and a girl lock eyes across a crowded room, we know there’s a happy ending waiting for them. The same cannot be said for queer films, both in 2004 and now.
“The question I was really answering was, is it possible to have a close relationship with your family and a deep romantic love? Can those things coexist?” muses Wu. “As a lesbian, certainly as an Asian lesbian, the answer felt like no if I looked around the world. I guess I was writing a wish fulfillment movie where I was trying to figure out how I could get the answer to be yes. I wrote that happy ending because I wanted to get there myself.”
“I think The New York Times said the film collapsed into a feel-good nonsense. Someone asked me, do I think that ending is justified? Do I think it might have been too happy?” recalls Wu. “I don’t know that this ending is absolutely accurate for everybody’s experience, but I do believe that these two characters, because of their growth, I believe for these two characters the ending is earned.”
“I wanted to see that ending because if I never saw it, then how could I possibly believe it could happen for me? I still stand by that. What’s nice now is that no one questions it. That just means the world changed, right? Which is really great.”
In 2004, Wu likely never imagined a day where Saving Face would be added to the Criterion Collection. It was her debut feature film and she wouldn’t make another for sixteen years, until The Half of It. It was thanks to the latter’s Netflix release that Saving Face was rediscovered by another generation.
“Joan Chen and I were on the phone talking about something recently, and she said it was really too bad our film didn’t come out now because if it came out now, it would have had a much bigger splash,” recounts Wu. “I had said I was actually kind of glad it came out when it did because most people have no idea who I am, but for the few people who do, that film has really mattered.”
“That movie helped them come out to themselves or to their parents and made them realize maybe it’d be okay to have a family and be gay,” explains Wu. “That movie needed to come out then, in 2005, for it to have meant that much to those people. Not that it couldn’t mean something to people now, but I think it would be different.”
“It was less than a week later that I got this email from Ashley Clark and I felt like the universe was rewarding us,” smiles Wu. “As a filmmaker, it does feel like a level of validation I certainly never would have expected. That there would be any sort of acknowledgment that maybe our movie is meaningful not just to Asian lesbians, but maybe even meaningful in the canon of film is something I’m still honestly having a little bit of trouble processing.”
Legacy is a heavy word. One that plays a role in both the fictional narrative and the real journey of Saving Face. Wil and Hwei-Lan both worry about how their choices will impact their loved ones, but have to reckon with the fact that what’s best for them goes against what’s expected of them. In the film, legacy is something forced onto the characters whether they want it or not. For Wu and the film, in a way, the legacy of Saving Face found them.
“I’ve only made two films. I don’t wander down the street thinking I’m a filmmaker and wondering about my legacy. Mostly I lead a pretty normal life. It’s only when my films get screened that I’m thinking about it,” ponders Wu. “I’m not even sure I even think about the term legacy so much as I have an awareness that I feel like my role is, in some weird way, almost to be everybody’s parent or therapist, right?”
“I think my job is to hold space for them to get to say what they need. I never have any advice, but I think the important thing is just that they feel like they get to say what they need to. What’s interesting for me is that the people keep getting younger. There was this wild 20th anniversary screening at the Smithsonian where we somehow sold out the Smithsonian,” laughs Wu. “The Smithsonian even said to me, we’ve never had it this full. It was the wildest intergenerational audience of people who are older than me, in their 70s and 80s, and then there were people who would have been negative ten years old when the movie came out.”
“It makes me realize that Saving Face really has a life of its own, you know?” says Wu. “In a lot of ways, I feel slightly like I’m on its ride. I’m discovering its journey along with it. I do think when you’re a filmmaker it’s yours in the moment you’re making it, but once you’re done, it’s not yours. It takes on its own life, and if you’re lucky you get to experience it alongside it.”
The journey that Saving Face has brought Wu along to experience started off with a premiere at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, then played at Sundance, Seattle International, and the Florida Film Festival. In the twenty years since, Saving Face has had a plethora of anniversary and reunion screenings because there’s an enduring quality to the film. It’s a piece of canon that’s filled with heart and transcends the trappings of a conventional romantic comedy. Saving Face takes the blueprints of the genre and translates, subverts, and celebrates the tropes to make a film that’s unique and warmly familiar. Wu’s exercise in understanding her relationship with her mother and her own desires unlocked the language for so many others to do the same.
