SDAFF Film Review: Almost Perfect

By Johnny C

[EDITORS NOTE: This is a review for Almost Perfect, the Opening Night Film at this years San Diego Asian Film Festival.]

One of the unfortunate images of Asian American relationships and marriages we’ve seen in the arts is the tendency to be portrayed as unhappy and unstable. Throw in the rare occurrence when Asian American relationships is actually between Asians rather than interracial ones (especially with the common white male and Asian female) usually end up being full of conflict and tension, and you can imagine why it’s hard not to be cynical about how our relationships are portrayed—or rather, misrepresented.

Thankfully, with director Bertha Pan’s Almost Perfect, we can throw away all of those cynical expectations and assumptions about clichéd formulas. It’s a romantic comedy that doesn’t feel like one that you’d only watch when getting dragged to see it, because it’s just that good.

Kelly Hu plays a Manhattan professional working in an NGO, who by chance encounters her younger brother’s college wingman (played by Ivan Shaw), which moves quickly into a date and a relationship in the blink of an eye. What we see is not a relationship that gets treated like a straw that broke the camel’s back as a result of how it affects her personal life, but how her personal life affects her relationship.

Interestingly, all of this is done in a very natural way, where the audience can figure everything out without having the plot or background of all the characters spelled out for them in the beginning or when they are introduced. The movie is a slice of life for the entire cast, because who they are as the sequence of events unfolds is who they choose to be, for better or for worse, regardless of their history. It’s an alarming parallel to how we Asian Americans choose who to be now regardless of or exactly because of what circumstances were thrown our way.

Relationships—whether it’s between siblings, parents, friends, or love interests—are not treated as being abnormal or unhappy because of the age difference between Hu and Shaw’s characters, or even the interracial marriage between her parents (her father’s character even being Anglo British creating layers of multiculturalism in her family). Everyone is considerably “normal”, in that the existing neuroses we all have is celebrated by the cast even as each character points out each other’s flaws, while denying their own—just like we all do. Nothing that was already present changes in any way throughout the story, because it’s about acceptance and adjustment to one another in order to live with each other. That’s how relationships work—whether it’s with family, friends, or lovers, you love them all to death (often times with an emphasis on the last part).

When the film gets a major release, you can bet I’ll be buying tickets with a date and multiple copies of the DVD to give out as gifts. Until then, if you get a chance to see it at the next screening, go watch it. Now.

ABOUT JOHNNY C: John “Johnny C” Chuidian was born in California and grew up in Hong Kong and Manila. He is currently a student at UCSD’s graduate school of International Relations and Pacific Studies, and hopes to use his specialization to raise awareness of global issues and call people to take action, especially in Southeast Asia. He will be going to film his first mini-documentary in Thailand this December on human trafficking and sex slaves, and can be followed on his project blog at johnnycrockstheplanet.wordpress.com