Saving Face (2004) on Netflix
Wil, a surgeon in New York, keeps her love life from her mother. At a dinner she meets Vivian, a dancer. Her pregnant mother, cast out by Wil's grandfather, moves in.
- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.4/1015,552 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes86%
Trailer
Plot summary
Wilhelmina Pang is a surgeon in New York City, and a lesbian; her mother Hwei-Lan does not know, and neither do the family friends she grew up among. Hwei-Lan arranges a dinner at Planet China hoping to introduce her to the son of a friend. Wil is drawn instead to Vivian, another woman at the table, who dances. Vivian's father Dr. Shing is Wil's boss at the hospital, and he disapproves of her choice to pursue modern dance rather than ballet. Then Hwei-Lan turns up at Wil's apartment: her own father has banished her from Flushing because she is pregnant and unmarried, and she will not name the man.
Cast
Show all 13 cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Saving Face (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Studios wanted to make Saving Face more like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and asked Alice Wu to cast white actors, with Reese Witherspoon as Wil and Ellen Burstyn as her mother; a compromise offer would have made the love interest white for Scarlett Johansson.
- Alice Wu began writing a novel based on her own coming out as a lesbian to her middle-aged mother, who told her she did not think Wu was gay and never wanted to see her again; the two did not speak for two years.
- Michelle Krusiec says Saving Face, one of the few lesbian movies with a happy ending, remains important because many viewers told her it made them feel represented, enough that they were able to come out.
- Alice Wu drafted the first Saving Face script in three days during a 12-week screen writing class at the University of Washington, then quit her Microsoft job, moved to New York and gave herself five years to make the film on her instructor's advice.
- With little money left, Alice Wu's team shot Saving Face's New York landscape shots from a helicopter that was already flying over Manhattan to film aerial footage for the movie Hitch.
- Because Alice Wu wanted Saving Face to be bilingual, she met with over one thousand actors before finding her cast; for one main role she had to use her second choice because the actor she wanted was stuck in China by visa problems.
- Saving Face won the Viewer's Choice Award at the 2005 Golden Horse Film Festival, where Michelle Krusiec was nominated for Best Actress; Krusiec said the nomination made her see the Asian and Asian American communities as a legitimate audience, leading her to pursue roles for both.
