Saving Face (2004)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Audio Commentary-Alice Wu (Director) Deleted Scenes-With Optional Commentary Featurette-Behind The Scenes Featurette-Sundance Diary
Rating
Year Of Production	2004
Running Time	93:18 (Case: 97)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (60:37)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Ads Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4,5	Directed By	Alice Wu
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Michelle Krusiec Joan Chen Lynn Chen Jin Wang Guang Lan Koh Jessica Hecht Ato Essandoh David Shih Brian Yang Nathanel Geng Mao Zhao Louyong Wong Clare Sum
Case	?
RPI	$39.95	Music	Anton Sanko

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Italian Dutch Arabic Bulgarian Croatian Czech Danish Finnish Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Norwegian Polish Romanian Slovenian Swedish Turkish English for the Hearing Impaired English Audio Commentary Italian Audio Commentary Dutch Audio Commentary	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    First time writer/director Alice Wu describes her film Saving Face as “a Chinese-American lesbian romantic comedy of manners”. While that might be a reasonable summary of some of the themes of the film, it does not do justice to the depth and heart of this impressive directorial debut.

    Set around an Asian-American community living in New York, the story centres on successful young surgeon Wil played by Michelle Kruisec. As the film opens we see her mother, played by Joan Chen, unsuccessfully trying to set her daughter up with prospective young Asian men. Wil’s affections, however, are for ballet dancer Vivan, played by Lynn Chen.

    The tables are soon turned when Wil’s single mother turns up pregnant on her doorstep and now Wil must help find a marriage partner for her mother in order to save her from the shame of being an unwed mother.

    This is a film that deals with the demands of relationships, family, sexuality and cultural taboos. It tells its story with a fine balance of humour, drama and emotion. Supported by a fine cast who put in first rate performances, this is a film that is sure to please lovers of fine cinema.

    I’ll leave the final words to the film's writer/director. She summarizes the main message of the film by saying that “no matter who you are, you know, whether you are black or white or yellow or gay or straight or if you’re young or if you’re old I think that basically everyone just wants to love.”

Video

    The transfer provided is very good and is a pleasure to view.

    The video is provided at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and is 16x9 enhanced.

    Image sharpness is very good and the picture exhibits high levels of image detail. Shadow detail is quite good and the image is free of low level noise.

    Colours are well saturated and accurate. It does seem clear, however, that the filmmakers have deliberately played around with the colour timing to give scenes either a fairly warm or  fairly cool colour palette. Although mostly effective I felt it was sometimes a little overdone and drew attention to itself.

    There are no MPEG or compression artefacts to report. The only thing I observed was some very minor edge enhancement which I noticed in a few scenes. Notice for instance a slight halo effect around a girl’s body at 32:42. The only other thing to report is a little bit of dirt on the print that shows up as small black specks, but these were never intrusive.

    Subtitles are white and easy to read which is a good thing as about half of the dialogue is in Mandarin.

    The film is presented on a dual layered disc with the layer change occurring at 60:37 which is a cut between scenes and is well placed.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The main soundtrack, which is Dolby Digital 5.1 encoded at 448 Kb/s, is very front oriented but still perfectly serviceable.

    The dialogue was easy to understand and I didn’t notice any obvious issues with audio sync.

    Because of the low budget of the film, the filmmakers had to be creative in the way they sourced songs for the film and the results are extremely impressive. The original score by Anton Sanko is also very effective and makes terrific use of recurring motifs to underpin the development of the story.

    The surrounds were really only used for some of the music. Otherwise it was very front centric.

    The subwoofer really didn’t get used much at all. I can’t actually recall any significant use of the subwoofer.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    A small collection of extras are provided here.

Menu

     The disc opens with the annoying anti-piracy advert which thankfully can be skipped. Menus are 16x9 enhanced but are just still images with no sound.

Commentary – Alice Wu (Director)

    While Alice Wu seems to spend a bit too much time simply describing what is on screen she also discusses why she made certain decisions and also some of the more subtle messages in the film. She discusses a bit about the Asian culture which may help non-Asian viewers better appreciate some of the characters' motivations.

Deleted Scenes with optional commentary from director Alice Wu 4x3 (4:02)

    This is series of five short deleted or extended scenes from the film. In the optional commentary Alice Wu discusses why she likes each of the scenes and their purpose. Only in one of the scenes, however, does she discuss why she removed it. These are all nice little scenes but none of them are of any particular consequence.

Behind the Scenes of Saving Face 4x3 (9:00)

    While this is a fairly typically promotional featurette it rises a bit above standard thanks to the frank and interesting discussion by the cast and filmmakers. Well worth a watch.

Sundance Diary 4x3 (12:21)

    The director and main cast went to the Sundance Film Festival to promote the film. This featurette shows them at some of the screenings and also discussing their experiences at the festival.

    Apart from a few extra trailers on the R1 version there are no other differences between the R1 and R4. I’d call it a draw.

    Saving Face is an impressive debut for writer/director Alice Wu. It explores issues surrounding relationships, family, sexuality and cultural taboos and is very well done.

    The video transfer is very good although the soundtrack is fairly front oriented.

    A modest package of extras rounds out the package.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall