The amount of flesh and blood

Pearl 2022-01-18 08:02:51

"Saving face" is a light and sweet comedy.
The Chinese translation "Love•Mianzi", read together or separated, there are two disagreements, which is also clever. The story is simple: Wil, a young Chinese female doctor, has a mother who has lived in the Chinese community in New York for more than 20 years and still speaks English well. Wil's embarrassment is that she likes girls, but she has to be dragged by her mother to join the Chinese circle. A blind date party called a party. Suddenly one day, a mother who was more feminine and beautiful than Wil appeared at the door of her apartment. The mother in her forties was pregnant and never mentioned who her father was. The grandfather, a respected professor in the Chinese circle, became very angry and said that her daughter should not go home unless she gets married.
Chen Chong played such a pregnant middle-aged single mother. Her role exists in many Chinese families: to parents, she is a daughter. To the daughter, she is the mother. Maybe the marriage back then was just the order of the parents. After so long, life suddenly went off track one day. If this story is just told in this way, it is also very common, but it is mixed with a homosexual daughter, and it is still a half ABC with a little bit of Chinese.
Wil has a headache for her mother, and her life has been drawn into a frantic triangle. Hospital, girlfriend dancing modern dance, mother pregnant at home. She tried to take care of it at the same time, but she was a little messy, and at the same time she found that her mother had gradually transformed her home into an unfamiliar Chinese house, beaming with a little cheesy and warmth.
This is a very Chinese movie. Although it takes place in the United States, Wil, one of the protagonists, can be said to be half American. Between grandpa and mother, between mother and Wil, all the confrontations were light. After most of the movie, Wil's girlfriend came to her house as a guest, and Wil's mother was stinged. The viewer can't help thinking: Hey, being a mother is really sensitive. Next, Wil and the neighbor's black guy were chatting on the rooftop smoking cigarettes. She said: My mother knew about it a long time ago.
This is the mother of China. Of course Wil is not a completely Chinese daughter. One night when her girlfriend was about to leave the United States, she confessed to her mother: "Mom, I love you. Also, I am gay."
The mother who was her daughter's angry father answered calmly, "How can you say two things at once? Big thing. You are my daughter, you won't be gay."
Love, face. It is for the family you love to remain silent, so silent as to go the way you have to do it, or to speak out and break the so-called face-even if it is possible to break more things at the same time. "Saving face" finally moved towards Happy ending. Mother didn't marry herself casually to hide her ugliness. Her daughter also recovered her lover who always thought she was not brave enough. Even the grandpa sat with the young son-in-law and the girlfriend of his granddaughter. This is a bubble-like warm color, because it can only happen on the screen.
Bai Xianyong has written "Niezi" and Li Ang has filmed "The Wedding Banquet". Similar plots have different depths, sorrows and joys under the interpretation of different creators. When the external plots and emotions of all these stories are stripped away, maybe we can see something similar to the inner core: who you love, who you are with, need to give your family an account.
Li Yinhe once said: Each of us is more free than we think.
In fact, freedom is far from a state that can be obtained by cognition or belief alone. The children of China have carried the weight of the family relationship for thousands of years, and may continue to carry it for a long time in the future. After all, we are not Nezha, it is impossible to eviscerate the bones and return the flesh to the mother. Although one's own life is one's own, if it cannot be included in the trajectory approved by the parents, the way to seek forgiveness may be far away. After all, life is not a movie.
I hope that one day in the future, I can say to my grown-up sons and daughters: "Your life is yours." After a few years, can parents still have this kind of mental state of mind? Frankly speaking, I am really not very confident.

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Extended Reading
  • Cassandra 2022-03-24 09:03:27

    Group play is wonderful

  • Fredrick 2022-03-19 09:01:08

    The ending is very bright, too bright to be a little unreal.

Saving Face quotes

  • Wil: It's been crazy. Vivian, there's a lot going on right now. I'm sorry if I... if this hurts.

    Vivian Shing: At least it's not a flesh wound.

    [gets up and walks away]

  • Vivian Shing: Your hot dog got cold so I fed it to the birds.

    Wil: Careful. We don't wanna train them to eat flesh.