After all these years, Alice Wu remains astonished at the reach of her debut feature, Saving Face. “Usually, I imagine that the people who saw the movie are just, like, me and my friends, my friends’ girlfriends, maybe their ex-girlfriends and then a few random straight people,” the writer-director says with a laugh.

Way more than a few random straight people have seen Saving Face. It’s featured in both Letterboxd’s Top 250 Narrative Features directed by women and our Top 100 Narratives directed by Asian Women Directors lists, and has a 4.0-out-of-five-star average rating at the time of writing. The classic lesbian romantic comedy celebrates its twentieth anniversary this month, and on August 26, it will be available on Blu-ray for the first time ever—courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

Wu’s groundbreaking film premiered at the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival, played Sundance, has screened in retrospectives (Philadelphia Asian American Festival, the San Diego Asian Film Festival) and an incalculable array of living rooms worldwide. People still approach Wu with warm words about her film, occasionally revealing that Saving Face helped them come out to their own families.

“One of the things that’s most surprising to me,” the director recalls, “is that I will be somewhere and someone who’s nineteen will come up and be like, ‘This movie meant so much to me.’ And I will do the math and be like, ‘They were either not born or they were one-year old when it came out.’ That is something!”

Wu its to lifting Wil’s cosmetic ritual from her own life, as the writer-director’s own mother inundates her with skin products. “They would just sit there,” she re. “But every now and then I would break one out and it would always be some weird face mask. That was very much where that was coming from.”

The movie’s Mandarin title is 面子 (Miànzǐ), which Wu says translates to “the face you’re saving.” “It’s such a huge concept in Asian cultures,” she elaborates. “Maybe some part of me unconsciously was thinking, ‘How mad can my mom be about this lesbian movie? The daughter is still taking care of her skin.’”

The rest of the opening sequence economically immerses us into Wil’s various faces and places. There’s that glimpse of her in her apartment bathroom, before we witness her at work in the surgery bay, and land finally with her, her widowed mother and grandparents at a weekly social dance in Flushing, Queens. As she begrudgingly partner-dances with a carousel of single Chinese American male suitors, possibility blooms when Wil reconnects with Vivian Shing (Lynn Chen), a shimmery dancer and fellow lesbian whom she first met as a kid.

As Vivian’s magnetic, confident gaze meets Wil’s bashful eye, something karmic and tantalizing begins. It’s the kind of full-circle romance that cinema is made of. Bethany writes, “Oh to kiss a girl on the nose and then run away, the both of you in your youth, only to find yourself still in love with her so many years later…”

Wil and Vivian’s romance blooms in secret. When Hwei-Lan is impregnated by a love interest whose identity she conceals, she gets kicked out of Wil’s grandfather Wai Gung’s (Jin Wang) home and is forced to move in with her daughter. While this confluence of taboos—knocked-up 40-something-year-old widow moves in with her closeted, gay, thot? daughter—whirls in the Pang family’s world, Wu conjures a humanizing, loving portrait of a group of imperfect people.

“I want to show that these are not boring people,” she tells me. “They seem so quiet, but actually, these are people who have deep loves and desires and petty feelings and jealousies. I want to show that, and then against the backdrop, let the secrets explode out in a way that hopefully will be satisfying by the end.”

Wu’s love of cinema undoubtedly influenced her work on Saving Face. In our conversation, she cites Annie Hall as being the first film she saw in theaters and gushes over Swedish director Lasse Hallström’s My Life as a Dog, a drama about a young boy coming to with his mother’s death. To my surprise, Wu waxed most enthusiastically about her love for a specific ’80s film whose explorations of gender expression, desire and repression resonated deeply and overlapped in essence with elements of Saving Face. 

“Tootsie is one of my favorite movies of all time,” she exclaims, ing that she saw Sydney Pollack’s 1982 comedy at the cinema. “It’s a perfect movie. It’s brilliantly written. It’s so funny. It’s so well-acted. Everything about it is just excellent.”

Wil, too, tangos with this question of legibility and eligibility to be embraced for who she is. Sure, she’s a rising star at the hospital, but Wil still struggles to express herself unabashedly, especially in her burgeoning romance with Vivian. She’s reluctant to believe that she’s someone who’s already lovable, already enough. Wu doesn’t wile away the runtime on the question of Wil’s coming out, but it is a significant plot point. The contrast between her repression and Vivan’s confidence in love lends nuance to their romantic and sexual dynamic that’s seldom annunciated this sonorously on-screen.

Lindsay writes, “Since there are so few movies for and by queer women, there is an expectation to make them powerful and impactful dramas… But I feel like it’s also important to have movies that exist just to be cute and fun! This is just as important for queer women to see themselves and feel seen by society. Saving Face is one of the best queer movies I’ve ever seen because of this.” 

The film expands its gaze beyond Wil’s inner turmoil, enfolding Vivian’s desire to transition from ballet to contemporary dance despite her father’s wishes, Wai Gung’s contemplative tai chi practice in the park, the mystery surrounding Hwei-Lan’s romantic suitor and her tantalizing discovery of a VHS porno she watches when Wil is away.

“What would you do if you’re bored to death, you’re stuck at a video store, there’s nothing for you to watch, except some old movies that you either don’t want to see or you’ve already seen, and then there’s porn and you’ve never seen porn and nobody is there to check on you?” Wu ponders. “She’s not just a Chinese mother—she’s also a woman who’s starting to clue in on her own desires.”

Wu makes a point to include the contours and shadows of her characters’ humanity, too. During a dinner conversation, Hwei-Lan makes prejudiced remarks about Jay (Ato Essandoh), Wil’s Black friend, whom Hwei-Lan finds too loud, too dark-skinned, too Black.

During our interview, Wu asked me directly what I, as a Black filmmaker, made of that sequence and Jay’s arc, in which Hwei-Lan slowly warms to him. It was a direct curiosity that disarmed me but also demonstrated, twenty years out from the release, Wu’s concern about the aims of Saving Face, what emotions—discomfort, repulsion, indifference, praise—it arouses in viewers.

In another filmmaker’s hands, holding multiple genre elements and capturing that color might have resulted in a bloated, overly ambitious film. On Wu’s page and screen, the story—even in its heightened comedic moments—sings with this refreshing balance and matter-of-fact flair. Saving Face unfurls itself as a soft celebration, evidence of the small triumphs that self-permission can usher into our lives.

Wu credits her ive collaborators for the generative experience she had making the movie. She met with a revolving door of DPs and looked for one who would help her achieve a greater naturalism and humanistic camera movement. Wu re being enamored with La Ciudad, a New York-set film that Harlan Bosmajian DP’d.

“There was a gentleness to the way he understood my story and my sense of comedy, too,” she says. “There’s a way he uses lighting that I felt would lend itself to the story I want to tell. I’m trying to make the biggest romantic comedy I can on a tiny budget, but my influences tend to lean, in a weird way, European. I love the visuals of Pedro Almodóvar. There’s so much bold color.”

Casting director Heidi Griffiths was invaluable during the search for Saving Face’s leading ladies, according to Wu. “That poor woman had to bring so many people and I kept being like, ‘Nope, nope, nope, nope.’ And she got it,” she shares, going on to confirm that she’s still very close with her cast. “Joan’s just a genius, you know? [The actresses] got what the script was saying. Through the discussion, they’d start to unpeel layers within themselves.”

Since Saving Face, Lynn Chen has co-starred in a string of Dave Boyle’s indies like Surrogate Valentine and Daylight Savings with Bay Area crooner, Goh Nakamura. Joan Chen has continued her illustrious legacy of portraying lovable Chinese Taiwanese mothers in films like Sean Wang’s debut Dìdi (弟弟) and Andrew Ahn’s recent reimagining of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet.

In a Letterboxd interview with The Wedding Banquet cast, Bowen Yang and Ahn both pay homage to Wu’s rom-com. Ahn shares that, when picking the movies that his characters must hide to “de-queer” their house, they “had to throw in an Alice Wu reference.” Much like The Joy Luck Club before it, Saving Face makes a cameo via physical media.

“The way I tell stories, it’s almost never what you say—it’s what you don’t say that matters,” she muses. “I’m always looking for ways, whether it’s, in this case, action, like dance—I’m looking for a way to express what’s happening without the character having to say, ‘I feel this right now. I don’t feel satisfied in my life. I wish it were bigger. I’m scared my mom doesn’t love me. I’m doing this thing that feels deeply uncomfortable to me because I love my mom, even though I don’t know how to say I love you to her directly.’”

Wu concludes, “I made this movie because I was trying to find a way to let my mom know that I love her. This friend of mine was like, ‘Couldn’t you just have told her?’ And it was such a funny moment where I was like, ‘Actually, she’s right.’ It had really not occurred to me at all that that was a possibility.”