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Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart
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Wayne Wang’s Dim
Sum begins with a series of shots that are not especially about the film’s
characters. Among them: a curtain blowing gently with the wind; a bird
twittering in a cage; a lounge room; a dining table; and finally, cars driving
along a main road. The film ends on a variation of the same series of shots.
But the series has been expanded, at key punctuating moments throughout the
story, to include a backyard, a collection of shoes at the bottom of a flight
of stairs, and the sea.
There is a familiar method for reading this kind of
image, comprehending them as little grace notes, moments of epiphany that adorn
a human(ist) story. Here is the story in question: Geraldine (Laureen Chew)
lives with her mother, Mrs Tam (Kim Chew). Geraldine is “the best Chinese
daughter” to look after her Mum in this way, according to neighbour Auntie Mary
(Ida Chung). However, Geraldine is torn inside, and in a few different
directions. Should she marry her boyfriend, Richard (John Nishio), just to
please her mother? Should she move out and live independently, like her friend
Julia (Cora Miao)? Or should she just stay with her duty of care – particularly
as Mrs Tam is convinced that, at the age of 62, according to a fortune-teller’s
prediction, she is about to die?
Classic family problem: the conflict between duty
toward one’s parents, and the desire to live one’s own life. Classic mortality
problem: how to die happily, or at least contented? What better agenda of
supposedly universal themes for a humanist movie! The Western critic fresh from
the latest Woody Allen, who probably also cultivates a taste (profound or
superficial) for Yasujiro Ozu (the plot problems just mentioned are the
essential stuff of his cinema), knows well what to do with all those seemingly
empty “pillow shots” of curtains and shoes and dining tables in Dim Sum: to see there the signs of time
passing, and be thus reassured that life
goes on, that all wounds will be healed, that everything balances out,
cosmically, in the end …
Wang is (I would venture) fully aware of this audience
of sentimental Western humanists, and he gives them a film they are bound to
love. But this is only one, evident face of Dim
Sum. In a film so resolutely “Chinese-American” – neither entirely one nor
the other, and definitely not the two melded into the same species – we can
expect the existence of another, hidden face that can only be seen and grasped
in a different light. One thing is certain: whichever faces you can see, it is
an exceptionally fine film.
Dim Sum both represents, and plays out
on its surface, a series of differences between Chinese and American styles
(life styles, cultural styles, sets of values). In a manner similar in feel and
intelligence to the great American comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s (by Frank
Capra, Leo McCarey or Preston Sturges), Wang at no point lays down a rigid
opposition between two poles at absolute semantic extremes. Rather, he carefully
grades markers of in-betweenness. Some Chinese are more American than others.
Some characters resist assimilation into the American way of life (and succeed
or fail in their resistance); others aspire to assimilation (and likewise
succeed or fail).
The film milks its cleverest and most poignant effects
from the attempt to precisely understand the play and balance of cultural forms
in any given action, reaction, gesture, affectation. Mrs Tam might at first
seem to be the most naturally Chinese of all the family members; but we are
later told that “she’s Chinese when she wants to be”, in order to “get what she
wants” – which is a rather different game. Auntie Mary is fully converted to Dynasty on TV – but that (as she
explains) is because it’s “just like the Chinese soap opera: sex, love and
money”. Uncle Tam (played by that brilliant comic actor, Victor Wong) adores
American cinema and American women alike, but bemoans the loss of the most
exquisite Chinese recipes traditionally handed down from mother to daughter. And
even the most entirely Westernised teenagers here can heartily get into a game
of Mah Jong.
Wang’s special interest in the Chinese/American
comparison centres on the question of emotions and their expression – the dim sum or “little bit of heart” of the
title. The American ideal of family life, as learned by Uncle Tam from his
ecstatic childhood memory of Capra’s You
Can’t Take It with You (1938), is that of “people laughing and hugging each
other and loving each other”. The Chinese are portrayed by Wang as, by
inclination, less open; Mrs Tam provides the unemotive extreme, an
inscrutability suggestive of deep self-repression. But here, too, the film
yields its richest and most telling moments from the slight shifts and changes
along this sliding scale of emotional expressiveness – such as the scene in
which Julia lets go of her grief over her mother’s death.
The Westernised side of Dim Sum itself, as a piece of culture, is precisely this “human
drama” aspect. It is a drama of conflicting cultural and emotional tendencies
that eventually resolve and blend into each other over the course of time.
Linear time, that is, in which flowers and people alike grow and die; a time
painstakingly marked out on a calendar of family rituals great and small. Such
rituals construct an apparently common-sense world of decisions that must be
made by each and every responsible individual, and the casualties that follow
from bad decisions or outright indecision … We could call these the terms of
endearment of everyday life. Due credit must be given here to scriptwriter
Terrel Seltzer, whose intriguing career arc has taken her from a 1979 film
about the Freudian case study of “Anna O.” and Situationist-USA video art (Call It Sleep, co-made with Isaac Cronin
in 1983), via collaborations with Wang, to teen movies (Savage Steve Holland’s How I Got Into College, 1989) and
romantic comedy (One Fine Day, 1996),
not forgetting an absolutely strange New Age TV series for Lifetime, The Hidden Room (1991-1993).
Indeed, Wang and Seltzer have the genre of everyday
life worked out to a fault. Dim Sum is entirely comprised of details: preparing and eating food; combing hair;
brushing teeth; putting on reading glasses; sweeping the back porch; hanging
clothes on the line; visiting a neighbour at a regular time each day. This face
of the film has an appropriate musical score featuring a zheng and a saxophone,
their phrases alternating until, in the final credits, they proceed in harmony.
The other Dim
Sum is harder to describe – and it’s not “Chinese” in any simple way,
either. It doesn’t take place in linear time, or in the bits of space that can
be used up in and by a narrative. It is empty of purposeful action, and is
barely audible above the sound of single bird, or a distant murmur of traffic.
It describes a world which can, on no account, be made tandem with what the
characters perceive, feel or think. On the contrary, it is the world that is
all around but completely beyond the command of these people whom Wang rigorously
hems in for the duration of each, crystalline two-shot of his film. A world
always and everywhere off-screen, draining away without the slightest tension.
But also on-screen, in all those pillow shots that are really much more,
finally, than epiphanic punctuation. As Ozu already knew, and practiced.
Wang reached the border of this realm three years
previously in Chan is Missing (1982,
co-written by Seltzer and Cronin), and he appears to have realised full well
then the necessary condition of entry: abandon there any notion of an
individual consciousness or subjectivity that can, through force of will or
reason, master and comprehend all things. Not a cold world, by any means – in
fact, it is full of surprise, laughter and whimsy – but one that is simply
unburdened of weighty, Western notions of destiny, chronology, identity,
meaning. Eastern spirituality? Maybe. Or perhaps something Wang and his
collaborators arrived at through cinema alone.
I won’t give away the ending of Dim Sum here, but I can suggest that what it releases, like a bird
suddenly let loose to fly from the hand, is the intimation of this Other World
that has been there all along. Geraldine learns that there are no longer any
terms to be met, or decisions to be made. And in the context of what first
appears to be a humanist homily dedicated to the necessary pain of familial
responsibility, that’s a subversive message, indeed.
MORE Wang: Anywhere But Here, Slam Dance, Smoke, Strangers, Blue in the Face, The Joy Luck Club © Adrian Martin August 1987 |
