Saving Face
In ''Saving Face," Wil (Michelle Krusiec), a prodigious New York City surgeon, falls for Vivian (Lynn Chen), a pampered ballerina. For Wil, the affair is a secret tangled up in ironies. Vivian's father, for instance, is Wil's boss. And Wil's new roommate happens to be her own widowed mother, Ma (Joan Chen), a beautician who's been exiled from her own parents' Queens home in disgrace. She's having a baby and won't say who the father is.
Written and directed by Alice Wu, what ensues is poised between an exasperating sitcom (look out for Wil's African-American neighbor) and a grand, classic Hollywood screwball.
Wil and Ma are about as close as two women with sexual secrets can be under one roof. The mother threatens to nag and nitpick the daughter to death. The daughter, in turn, sort of dares the mother to guess what she's up to. Wil's family pushes her toward obnoxious banker types, men who make ideal husbands on paper or at big Chinese-community functions.
Ma has her share of suitors, too. Her most persistent is a kind and sincere gentleman who vows to love her despite her condition. She'd rather stay home, watch the soaps, and feel sorry for herself. Neither woman is all that pleased with her options, but it's almost easier to repress what they really want and to do what's expected of them.
In order for this movie to take off, the obstacles to bliss have to seem substantial, which for Ma, they are. She's a radiant 48-year-old pregnant woman lugging around a fairly unexpected secret (I, at least, was surprised).
Wil, meanwhile, is caught in a cultural trap that, regardless of how true it actually is, feels rote. Sure she's a gay daughter in a traditional Chinese family, but she has less to lose than her mother, and the movie has a hard time making her dilemma all that exciting.
Actually the problem with ''Saving Face" as a romantic comedy is that its central romance is a drag. Wil and Vivian don't have enough at stake to hang so much movie on. It's a fling masquerading as something more pressing. And while Krusiec and Lynn Chen are decent actors, neither brings out anything terribly vital in the other.
Joan Chen is an actress whose characters we rarely get to know as people. They're often too insignificant (''On Deadly Ground," ''Judge Dredd") or too broadly drawn (''What's Cooking") to amount to much. Here, she reduces the wattage on her luminousness to make Ma seem sympathetically homely without turning downright pitiful. It's an engaging performance.
There are other pleasures, too. Wu's Chinese Flushing is bustling, vivid, full of gossip and vibrant personalities. The whole place is arranged on the knife's edge between custom and taboo, and Wu's best characters -- Wil's strong grandmother (Guang Lan Koh) and her forbiddingly stern grandfather (Jin Wang) -- embody the grudging acceptance of change.
Eventually, various deadlines pile up, and Wu isn't equipped to juggle them all. One ill character's hospital stay in the traffic jam of a final act is the product of a hopelessly overwritten screenplay. But it's also around that time that ''Saving Face" spills the beans on Ma's secret, and Wu whips up an enjoyable batch of brisk scenes that end with a riff on the last shot of ''The Graduate."
Because Wu insists on a feel-good picture, the movie continues even after that. The tidy finale is a chance to insist that her characters live without shame. The sequence is unnecessary, but the sentiment is appreciated.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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