SFAFF: Rice Rhapsody (Hainan Ji Fan)
Dang, it was cold waiting outside the Four Star for the doors to open for the San Francisco Asian Film Festival's premiere of Rice Rhapsody! And can we just say, the movie that screened right before Rice Rhapsody (A Moment to Remember) must have been extremely sad -- they opened the doors and people came out of the theater bawling. Like, two girls got out of the theater sniffling, looked at each other, laughed that shaky laugh, and then started crying again and hugging each other. Intense! (We looked it up -- it was about a doomed newlywed couple.)
Good for us that Rice Rhapsody is a comedy! Also -- Chef Martin Yan's film debut! We already love it. The plot? A Singaporean restauranteuse (Sylvia Chang), who's raised three boys as a single mother, has recently learned that her first two sons are gay. Is her third son gay too? Plus, why is the dopey next-door neighbor restaurant owner always hanging around? It's Martin Yan!!! Wackiness and poignancy ensue.
Martin Yan in person at the show, an exoticized French girl named Sabine, and the Singaporean specialty of Hainan Chicken Rice, after the jump.
For an Asian film festival, there was an unusually high number of non-Asian people (and totebag carriers) in the sold-out audience. The reason for this became clear when we figured out that a good number of people were KQED watchers out to see Martin Yan. Who, we have to say, was absolutely adorable in his prefatory and concluding remarks -- charming, witty, modest, well-dressed.
We won't give away the plot of the movie, but basically, restaurant owner Jen (Sylvia Chang) owns Singapore's best chicken rice restaurant. (Mmmmmmm, chicken rice.) Her two older sons have moved out to live their openly-gay lives ("am I unhappy because they're gay or because I'm all alone now?" she wonders. Hmmmm, which could it be?) In order to lure her son away from a boy she thinks to whom he might be getting too close (and we think you know what we mean by "too close"!), she and neighbor Kim Chui (Martin Yan) hatch a plan where Jen agrees to host an alluring female French exchange student for a few weeks.
The script seemed a little overly simplistic in places, especially in how it cut Jen a little too much slack for her homophobic outlook and in its "all you need is a good girlfriend" view of heterosexuality, but not every movie has to be the Celluloid Closet, and not every Asian food movie has to be the Wedding Banquet. It was kind of like on a Philadelphia level of gay portrayals (newsflash! Gays can be good and kind people!) -- which is still a good and important message to have in mainstream cinema (which this is), right?
And we suppose it's a step forward for something that the exotic-foreigner role usually assigned to the little Asian flower in a Western movie was assigned to a Caucasian French actress (Mélanie Laurent) -- but we still found her scenes a little hard to watch. And the acting seemed a little wooden in spots -- but, as Martin Yan told us after the film, almost everyone in the movie other than Sylvia Chang and Mélanie Laurent had never acted before.
Not to say we didn't have a great time, though -- we're pleased to announce that Martin Yan stole every single scene he was in, and Sylvia Chang doesn't do so badly herself. Martin Yan gets in some of his trademark garlic chopping and makes a dish (Hainan Duck Rice) that made us starvingly hungry in the theater -- and plus, despite his repeated entreaties after the film to the contrary, is not a bad actor at all (and we're not huge Yan Can Cook fans or anything either!).
And hey, family unity and unconditional love are always a good message, right? Although rice cooked in chicken stock is a close, close second.
Rice Rhapsody screens again at the Presidio (without Martin Yan, unfortunately), on Sunday the 21st at 3 p.m. Buy tickets here.