Also crushing on Aster is football player and heir to his family’s sausage company fortune, Paul Munsky (Daniel Diemer). Ellie’s crush is Aster Flores (Alexxis Lemire), a popular girl in school and the town deacon’s daughter. They share the same awkward charm, endure strained parental relationships, and have trouble vocalizing their feelings for their crush. It’s hard not to think of Ellie as the younger version of Saving Face ’s Wil. This time, the story is set in the small, fictional Pacific Northwest town of Squahamish and quiet, nerdy high-schooler Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) is the focus. There was a sixteen-year gap between Saving Face and Wu’s spiritual sequel, The Half of It. Wil’s grandfather has kicked her mother out of the family apartment in Flushing because she’s pregnant and unwed. The two reconnect outside these weekly events, but Wil’s life is turned upside down when she comes home from work one night to find Gao at her front door. At one of these events, Wil runs into Viv (Lynn Chen), a childhood crush who is now a prima ballerina. Her mother insists that Wil attend a weekly social gathering in Flushing, NY, that she jokingly calls “Planet China” because that’s where her extended family lives.
It centers on Wil, a twenty-something surgeon who is trying to balance her life with the expectations of her widowed mother, Gao (Joan Chen), and the rest of her family. Wu has described Saving Face as a love letter to her mother.
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Many queer women point to it as the first LGBT movie they saw that had a happy ending. Wu held her ground on all fronts and created a romantic comedy that has stood the test of time. Executives told her the story was “too happy” and wanted her to make the main character, Wil (Michelle Krusiec), white so Reese Witherspoon could play the part. It’s not a decision that was taken lightly when Wu was making Saving Face in 2004. That’s why writer/director Alice Wu’s films, Saving Face and The Half of It, and her decision to give her lesbian Chinese-American characters happy endings are so radical. All of a sudden, their future and potential are limited.
The inability to see someone who looks or loves like them be happy and desired is detrimental to their self-esteem and self-worth. It’s easy to say that outlook is blowing things out of proportion, but so much of a teenager’s understanding of the world comes from popular culture. Whether the filmmakers means it or not, these movies are essentially teaching LGBT people that there isn’t a happy ending waiting for them. These people are likely in search of representation as a means of understanding themselves, but instead they’re being told over and over again that the only outcome for a queer person is being alone and/or dying. All of these tragic demises and their overabundance across genres can make the young, queer person watching these movies at home feel isolated.
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In fact, there is a plethora of examples of queer women dying in tv and movies, usually immediately after coming out or finally having a romantic moment with a partner. Specifically in LGBT movies, there are many examples of films that don’t have a happy ending. These movies focus on hardships, and the person ends up alone rather than riding into the happily-ever-after sunset. Usually, when the focus is on someone who doesn’t fit into that box (whether they be queer, transgender, person of color, etc.), the story is much more melancholic.
But what about the people who have never gotten to see themselves in the romantic comedy world? For so long, Hollywood has made it seem like only white, cisgender, non-disabled, heterosexual people fall in love. If someone has seen a character who looks/acts/feels like themselves end up happily time and again, they start itching for those new spins on the genre. That’s all well and good when there are happy endings on the horizon. Romantic comedies exist to encourage people to put themselves out there and fall in love. Noah hanging from the Ferris Wheel in The Notebook immediately comes to mind as more of a red flag than probably originally intended. There’s a lot to say about romantic comedies and their impact on young people learning what a healthy relationship looks like. Of course, there are films that add a new, lively spin to the romantic comedy (newly-released Fresh is an example), but there’s comfort in watching a movie where there are no unexpected detours. It’s easy to call the genre stale, given the fact that audiences know how these movies will end before they even begin. There are certain beats the film must follow: a meet-cute, a swoonworthy first kiss, an argument, a deep soul-searching montage set to an indie pop song, and an inevitable reconciliation that blends into a happily ever after. Romantic comedies are a promise between the filmmaker and the audience.