This tongue-in-chick movie explores Chinese-American face-losing and face-saving, not in the immediate social interactions that Goffman describes, but nonetheless transgressions of social grains in the Chinese-American community. The movie centers around Wil, a young female surgeon (add to the mianzi) who is secretly a lesbian (big time losing face). Her mother who lived a role of traditional good wife (lots of mianzi) but got pregnant with an illegitimate lover Wil's age (definitely losing face).
In the movie, both Wil and her mother dealt with various strategies to minimize face-losing within the community as they fell from their well-respected positions, while trying to not lose face in front of each other.
In the optimistic end, they both decided and helped each other to pursue their love without worrying about the face, a move that actually lead to the community's acceptance and they reestablished their faces. At the end of the movie shows the newborn baby, the lesbian couple, and prominent figures of the Chinese-American community in New York all gathering joyfully at a party. Wil's girlfriend's father made a remark that sums up the face-saving: "well, at least she's with a surgeon."
Other than wildly entertaining, I found this movie portraying a more nuanced and long-term sequence of face-losing and face-saving of how a community maintains its (perhaps we can call) social equilibrium. Every small talk or brief conversation is loaded with potentials to lose face or to save face and with considerations of the facework in the bigger picture. For example, in the trailer where Wil's father asked "you are not also pregnant, are you?" was simultaneously a derision towards Wil's mother and a way out for Wil, as the implication is "well, at least you are not pregnant out of wedlock."
This movie also explores other aspects of inter-cultural facework that are subtly contested. For example, when Wil's mother asked Wil with a derisively surprised tone "Since when do you drink beer?" highlights the tension between generations and between one who grew up in New York and one who was a transplant. The act of drinking beer might be gaining face for Wil but losing face for Wil's mother, complicating her facework.
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