A Chinese-American student agrees to write love letters for a jock classmate, though falls for his crush herself…
It’s been some fifteen years since writer-director Alice Wu made her debut with Saving Face, an award-winning 2005 film which followed a young queer woman and her experiences in the Chinese-American community. Wu finally returns with her sophomore effort, The Half of It, a coming of age comedy-drama set in a small US town, which recently won the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, and which landed on Netflix on May 1st.
Chinese-American actress Leah Lewis (Nancy Drew) headlines as Ellie Chu, top of her class in a small, middle of nowhere town in the US called Squahamish and living with her widower father (Colin Chou, who starred in a long list of Hong Kong classics, including Hail to the Judge and The Bodyguard from Beijing, before featuring in The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions), making money from writing papers for her classmates. Shy and isolated, Ellie is surprised when football team jock Paul (Daniel Diemer, The Man in the High Castle) asks her to help him write secret love letters to school beauty Aster (Alexxis Lemire, Truth or Dare). Secretly in love with Aster herself, Ellie agrees, and starts to woo her on Paul’s behalf with letters filled with literary and film references, and things gradually become more and more complicated.
While its basic plot is clearly a US teen take on Cyrano de Bergerac, there’s a great deal more to The Half of It, and Alice Wu’s film is a quietly intelligent and moving take on sexuality, identity and the immigrant experience. This quietness comes not from a lack of drama or any kind of muted narrative, but through its differences with similar films, which often have these themes very much front and centre and in bold type, whereas here Wu allows Ellie and her journey to be defined on her own terms. The film sets out its stall in this regard from early on, with Ellie announcing via voice-over that this isn’t a love story, or at least not the kind where everybody gets what they want, and Wu sticks to this admirably.
While the plot to an extent is driven by the expected relationship tensions between Ellie, Paul and Aster, this develops into something more humanistic and rewarding, an exploration of the meaning of love and the confusion it brings, rather than the expected twists and last act resolutions. Wu shows real warmth towards all her characters, and the film is grounded and forgiving even when dealing with racism, casual or otherwise, and several of its most affecting moments come in spite of a lack of linguistic or cultural communication – one stand out scene has Ellie’s stoic father finally opening up about his wife’s death to Paul in Mandarin, despite the boy not being able to understand a word of it.
The Half of It shows a skilful subversion of genre throughout, weaving what could have been clichés together with something more complex and multi-layered, resulting in a film that, like Saving Face, is a mix of the commercial and lo-fi indie, with scenes real visual beauty scattered throughout. Wu makes great use of the small-town setting, though in a very different way to most US teen high school comedies or dramas, and while there are jocks, geeks and moments of comic awkwardness, the script steers mostly clear of the usual loud drinking parties and clear-cut underdog heroes and villainous bullies – the film also wins points for avoiding the usual kind of mean-spirited humour and revenge gags, and is funny in a much gentler, though no less amusing manner. While there are a handful of slightly jarring sequences, Wu directs with calm confidence, and the film benefits from an unhurried pace and strong performances from its leads, Leah Lewis and Daniel Diemer both bringing real depth to their roles.
The Half of It is a fantastic second film from Alice Wu, and there hopefully won’t be such a long wait until her next outing. Emotionally rich and generous, as well as frequently very funny, it’s one of the best coming of age or teen films of recent years, and will hopefully find a wide audience on Netflix.