I was rather impressed by this, a sort of Cyrano de Bergerac idea, updated, but - and this is where it's really good - with an ending that could go different ways, a real breath of fresh air from your normal romantic comedy / dramas. Nicely drawn characters too.
Leah Lewis is the hard-working daughter of single parent Collin Chou, who starts to help jock Daniel Diemer communicate with the object of attraction Alexxis Lemire (who herself is dating another jock Wolfgang Novokratz).
Nice touches - the jock starts sharing his German (Polish?) cuisine with the Chinese; she sheds her 'Russian Doll's' layers of clothing; the wall 'art' that is painted over; painful uphill bicycle rides followed by a joyous car journey. We did think the father should have pulled himself together and get a job rather than watching a string of admittedly good films (most of which I identified, but failed to get Wings of Desire (tut, tut) and Ek Villain, 2014 Indian film - can't know them all).
Subtle, sweet, funny - Wu one to watch. Strongly female behind camera too - DP Greta Zozoula, female production designer / art director / make-up / costumes.
Wu was a computer science whizz at MIT, left a job designing software at Microsoft to write and direct her first film Saving Face in 2004. So what happened in the meantime?
“I thought I’d left the industry. I was 39 at the time, and I was like, well, I spent my twenties doing computer science, I spent my thirties doing this crazy film thing, my forties are going to be about taking care of my family. So that’s what I did.”
She read investment books to make her money work for her and started doing improv comedy for fun. Her mom got better (she’s doing great), and she saw the end of a long-term relationship. In short, life happened and at some point she seemed destined to write about it again.
Thanks again to Indiewire.
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