I like films dealing with foreign culture, especially Chinese. This movie presents a nice blend of American and Chinese traditions, it shows the way to deal with one culture while you're surrounded by the other.
The film centers around a Chinese guy named Wai-Tung Gao who is a prosperous young businessman living in America. He lived with his white friend Simon (they are gays). They are happy and seems to have everything going just fine. There is only one cloud on their happy horizon: Wai_Tung's parents who are traditional Chinese want their son to get married in order to have grandchildren. Wai-Tung keeps his relations with Simon secret from them.
Wai-Tung's parents are so determined that they enroll their son to a matching agency and he fills all the necessary forms trying to make his “ideal mate” as impossible as possible (ha-ha). Like she should be an opera singer and speak 5 foreign languages. And whad'yah know? The agency found it. But that is not what the film is about.
Wai-Tung's parents decided to visit in order to supervise the wedding (it's a big thing in their culture). It also happens that Wai-Tung becomes particularly friendly with one of his tenants Wei-Wei who is on the brink of getting back to China due to the lack of funds and green card. So Wei-Tung and Simon develop an ingenious plan. Why not kill two bird with one stone? Wei-Tung would marry Wei-Wei (who is well informed of these guys' relationships). In that way she'll get her green card, Wei-Tung will get tax break and Wei-Tung parents will get their daughter-in-law. Everyone will be happy. But of course the plan will go awry…
Mr. and Mrs. Gao were indeed very happy to meet Wei-Wei: she was charming, beautiful and seemed to preserve some aura of Chinese tradition around her. They were delighted with their son's choice. They stayed, of course, with “the family”, which now included Wei-Tung, Wei-Wei-Wei and Simon who pretended to be Wei-Tung's roommate. And that's when the things became really interesting…
I liked how the director handled the homosexual theme: the relationships between Wei-Tung and Simon are very cordial but also get strained at the right placed and at the right time. The story is handled extremely well: from the quickly thought-of scheme to the hurried marriage at the City hall office, the action is transferred into a banquet room of a Chinese restaurant.
The bogus marriage becomes exposed, as expected, but then the action gets really interesting. The final twist was very unexpected and amusing. And finale seemed very realistic and true to life.
In the final analysis the film is about human relationships regardless of sex or culture.
I enjoyed this movie a lot.
Back to Movie Reviews Back to Home Page
