[Warning: Plot spoilers galore!]
After years of watching ethnic minorities caricatured in Hollywood movies and TV shows, it was a refreshing pleasure to see a couple of movies in quick succession where one of the main leads is Chinese, and further, to see them portrayed entirely positively.
The movies themselves, while watchable, are not superlative. I'd give them each a 3.5 out of 5. They have their flaws, but their differentness alone makes them worth a watch.
Love Hard (directed by Hernán Jiménez) is a story of a Caucasian American woman (played by Nina Dobrev) who meets who she thinks is a Caucasian American man online through a dating app. He's smart, well-read and witty, and seems quite sorted too, so she impulsively takes a trip across the country to be with him for Christmas. Which is when she gets a shock. The guy (played by Jimmy O Yang) turns out to be Chinese, not Caucasian. Of course, he's a second- or third-generation Chinese-American, and everything else about him is genuine, except for his profile pic. He wasn't getting any interest from girls when he had his own picture up, so he swapped it for one belonging to his Caucasian friend, and then things began to look up.
There's some credibility-stretching stuff in the plot after that, but the long and the short of it is that the woman finally realises that this thoroughly decent Chinese guy is the one for her after all.
Minor plot point: The movie takes its name from the fact that the male lead's favourite Christmas movie is "Love, Actually", and the female lead's is "Die Hard". (Yes, I know. Whether "Die Hard" is in fact a "Christmas movie" is one of the big topics of discussion between the characters.)
The Half Of It (directed by Alice Wu) is an even less conventional movie. The main lead (played by Leah Lewis) is a Chinese girl, a high school senior in a small, all-white American town. She endures plenty of casual racism and mild bullying, but the other kids need her, ironically enough, for her superior English skills. She makes some pocket money writing their essay assignments for them.
The romantic angle here is very different, though. There is a love triangle, but since director Wu is herself lesbian, that makes the triangle a bit different. There isn't a clear resolution of who pairs up with whom at the end of the movie, but it's not a tragic ending either. (I wouldn't give it a 3.5 out of 5 if it was.) It's what can be called a "coming of age" movie because the characters grow and learn over the course of the story.
Incidentally, both movies are set in small American towns (Lake Placid in New York state, and Squahamish in Washington state). If that's what small-town society is like, I'm glad I'm a big-city person!
What I liked about both movies was the portrayal of the lived reality of ethnic minority people in Western countries. We're normal, not fringe. In many ways, we're not just normal, but positively high-functioning, and our families are typically not broken or dysfunctional, but fairly cohesive, and singlemindedly oriented towards the education and upward socio-economic progress of the children.
In other words, we're different but we're all right, and that's what these two movies bring home. I know, I'm Indian and these characters are Chinese, but with my experience of living in a Western society, I identified quite strongly with these characters.
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