Blink and you’d have missed it: the Barbican’s New Zealand Film Festival 2011 took place over just 3 days in London last weekend. Although it is a nice idea for every country, however small, to have its own festival, it might have been a better to hold one combined festival for Australia and New Zealand, allowing audiences a slightly longer time frame to catch several films, rather than having to fit everything in during the space of one weekend. What’s most important, though, is that the event took place, as it gave audiences a chance to see the first feature film ever made by a New Zealander of Chinese background: My Wedding and Other Secrets (2011).
In this romantic drama-comedy, awkward twenty-somethings Emily and James fall in love. The problem: James is white, and Emily’s parents, immigrants to New Zealand from Hong Kong, have forbidden their daughters from dating anyone outside the Chinese community. Emily decides to marry James in secret, but can’t work up the nerve to confront her parents: she dreads being forced to make the terrible choice between her family and the man she loves.
Described in this way, the film’s storyline may seem a little short on comedy, but the film is indeed as funny as it is poignant. The comedy begins with the aforementioned awkwardness of the two lovers: Emily, who still lives with her parents, is a film student with an unabashed love of popular cinema; James is a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, and shares a flat with two similarly nerdy male friends. They meet at a fencing class where Emily, thrilled to have found a partner in James, ends up knocking him over. Flat on his back, he invites her for dinner, and they click over a conversation conducted through mouthfuls of Chinese food. This is a film that embraces the unpretentious and embarrassing parts of life, turning them into a cute and quirky form of romance.
The film’s aesthetic also contributes to its idiosyncratic comedy: it is characterised by frequent frontal shots where characters stare earnestly into the camera as they speak to each other, and close-ups which emphasise Emily’s enormous glasses. The style mirrors Emily’s own playful approach to filmmaking as she works on two films of her own during the course of My Wedding: first, a hybrid horror/kung-fu movie, which proves too ambitious, later a documentary about her relationship.
My Wedding gets a certain amount of comic mileage out of cultural misunderstandings: James’s excruciating efforts to learn basic Mandarin, for example, or his horrified reaction to the Chinese delicacies that Emily offers him. There is less emphasis on cultural difference than you might expect in a film about intermarriage, and this is a positive sign for a multicultural society. The main point of difference between Chinese and white families is generational relationships: Emily becomes exasperated as she tries to explain to James that ‘being disowned isn’t like being sent to your room!’ Ultimately, though, the barrier to Emily and James’s relationship is not cultural difference but parental prejudice: Emily and James have so much in common that it is no wonder they fell in love.
My Wedding is based heavily on director Roseanne Liang’s own life. Like Emily in the film, Liang began by making a student documentary (Banana in a Nutshell, 2005) about her own experience trying to persuade her parents to accept her chosen partner. This documentary was screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and subsequently a producer approached Liang to ask her to turn it into a fiction film that would appeal to a wider audience.
Much of My Wedding‘s power may stem from details and emotions lifted directly from real life. Lest anyone suspect Liang of being a one-trick pony, relying too heavily for inspiration on one episode from her personal life, the screening of My Wedding was preceded by her 2008 short film on a rather different topic. ‘Take 3’ was a spirited and ironic exploration of the stereotypes that New Zealand born actresses are pushed to conform to, simply because their ancestors happen to be from East Asia. The film’s thematic novelty was matched by an innovative aesthetic approach: Liang began by splitting the screen into three to show all three actresses at once; then, the actresses were shown separately in auditions with three different directors, each with their own stereotype about what Asian girls are like; finally, the girls were brought together in an ensemble piece, where they gleefully took the director’s ridiculous demands ad absurdum.
My Wedding and Other Secrets was one of the funniest and most moving films I have seen in a long time. There were a couple of comic set pieces that were overused and not so funny. Equally, some of the film’s most emotional moments veered into melodrama, which felt calculated to wring tears from the audience. This latter impression may have been due to the director’s own emotional investment in the story, and it is more admirable to have invested too much of oneself than not enough.
The cross-cultural appeal of My Wedding does not just reflect the increasing prevalence of inter-cultural marriages in a globalised world. While the Western tendency is to be independent from family, deep down most still care very much what their parents think of them. The ideal, however elusive it can be, is to find harmony between family expectations and personal priorities. This is an uplifting film because Emily dares to chase after this ideal, and obtains it against the odds.
