It's good to see an Asian woman's perspective in a film, especially an indie production with really great cinematography and music. And Sandra Oh is really a talent to watch out for!
This film is however a real disappointment in its narrow-mindedness with regards to the lead character's dilemma; the fact that Jade is Western-identified isn't so much a problem as director Mina Shum deals effectively with issues of being trapped between conflicting cultural values and personal expectations. But the character's (and, by extension, the writer/director's) unquestioning perception of the Chinese family structure as limiting and oppressive undermines the drama's effectiveness as a character study. The film seems to be trapped in a dialectic of "White Guy Good/Asian Man Bad" Shum's deterministic view of Asian males as "The Oppressor" comes front and center when she won't even show the faces of the Asian men Jade is "forced" by her parents to date, compared to her wimpy, non-threatening Caucasian boyfriend who's still vastly more appealing than these faceless goons her parents set her up with. Shum won't even show the faces of Jade's Asian dates: they're portrayed as less than human as they lead Jade to her doom in the passenger seat of their luxury cars. By dehumanizing the Asian men and rendering Jade's father as a one-dimensional all-purpose oppressor, Shum weakens the film as a study of a character's struggle to overcome her circumstances. Jade becomes a misunderstood victim, and the film becomes a shallow exercise in whining and unresolved cultural anomie.
Skip it...see Ang Lee's "Life On A String" for a really great vision of Eastern/Western cultural conflicts.
This film is however a real disappointment in its narrow-mindedness with regards to the lead character's dilemma; the fact that Jade is Western-identified isn't so much a problem as director Mina Shum deals effectively with issues of being trapped between conflicting cultural values and personal expectations. But the character's (and, by extension, the writer/director's) unquestioning perception of the Chinese family structure as limiting and oppressive undermines the drama's effectiveness as a character study. The film seems to be trapped in a dialectic of "White Guy Good/Asian Man Bad" Shum's deterministic view of Asian males as "The Oppressor" comes front and center when she won't even show the faces of the Asian men Jade is "forced" by her parents to date, compared to her wimpy, non-threatening Caucasian boyfriend who's still vastly more appealing than these faceless goons her parents set her up with. Shum won't even show the faces of Jade's Asian dates: they're portrayed as less than human as they lead Jade to her doom in the passenger seat of their luxury cars. By dehumanizing the Asian men and rendering Jade's father as a one-dimensional all-purpose oppressor, Shum weakens the film as a study of a character's struggle to overcome her circumstances. Jade becomes a misunderstood victim, and the film becomes a shallow exercise in whining and unresolved cultural anomie.
Skip it...see Ang Lee's "Life On A String" for a really great vision of Eastern/Western cultural conflicts.