Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (Wayne Wang, 1985): USA

Reviewed by Colin Marshall. Viewed on DVD.

“What went wrong?” Such is the standard cinéaste’s lament about Wayne Wang, which has reverberated through the halls of cinema for at least a decade. Watching 1985’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, just like watching its 1982 predecessor Chan is Missing and even 1995’s Smoke, turns out to be an impressive and disheartening experience in equal parts: impressive because of the bold, formidable filmmaking skill on display; disheartening because this skill has, in recent years, been squandered on the schlocky likes of Anywhere But Here, Maid in Manhattan, and Because of Winn-Dixie.

We may never know the cause of Wang’s wrong turn. Certainly the man himself isn’t talking, assuming he knows. But even in his strong sophomore feature, we see signs of a struggle. Here, the angel on the director’s shoulder offers him the chance to become the next Ozu. The devil on his other shoulder makes a pitch for the dark side, filled as it is with by-the-numbers heartwarmers who’ve cashed in their early promise. While the forces of cinematic good win this round, the victory doesn’t come effortlessly, and Wang’s angel walks away with a few nasty bruises. If only it knew what lay in store.

Indeed, Dim Sum — whose clunky subtitle, in hindsight, probably foreshadowed trouble down the line — a study in benign familial dissolution, reads like an application for Ozu’s vacant seat in the cinematic pantheon. Even the requisite kiss-up is there: Tam, the family’s substitute patriarch, a bar-owning former business partner of the deceased father, sees fit at one point to analogize the situation of he and his to a certain “old Japanese movie,” obviously Late Spring. Geraldine, the 30-year-old daughter still living in the parental home, increasingly unable to remain but lacking the wherewithal to hitch up to her long-distance boyfriend, must therefore rise to the forbidding Setsuko Hara role.

This film, in contrast, features a mother not dead but immersed in semi-unreasonable preparations to become so. Convinced of her imminent death by a fortune teller’s prediction — her often-revised means of assigning jewlery inheritance has become a family joke — the mah-jongg-loving 62-year-old dreams only of marrying off Geraldine, attaining United States citizenship and paying one final visit to the motherland — in that order. That all this comes to pass will not, presumably, constitute a spoiler, nor will the revelation that nobody sees their way to their choices with absolute clarity. Geraldine kind of wants to marry Robert, her L.A.-based squeeze, and kind of doesn’t. Her mom wants her off and on her own, but kind of doesn’t. Tam professes his own desire to marry the woman of the house, though perhaps he kind of doesn’t have one.

The newer film lacks the impact of its referent, to put it mildly, but not the pleasure of its aesthetics. Legend has it that Wang found the seed of the picture in an array of western-style shoes he saw laid out, Chinese-style, in the hallway of a home to which he paid a visit. Dim Sum gives the sight of such a tableau, and many other such striking moments, its proper due, framing it to perfection and observing with impeccable stillness. The visual and temporal sensibilities resemble the Japanese master’s almost uncannily. Late-afternoon sunlight streaming onto a momentarily abandoned sewing machine; two women sweeping their adjacent, almost mirrored back porches; the waves as seen from the family’s San Francisco Chinatown home: some of this sort of thing even Ozu himself didn’t do as well.

But despite the visual points Wang scores, Ozu keeps the upper hand in the subtlety game. Though admirably restrained about eighty percent of the time, the film occasionally, if briefly, wallows in moments of swelling string instruments and immediately melancholy yet cosmically optimistic smiles backed by pre-weep eyes. Even when this happens, it’s orders of magnitude less false or maudlin than in a hundred thousand other similar films one could name, but it still strips the picture of some of the immediacy and joie de cinéma possessed in force by, say, Chan is Missing. Endearingly, for the most part artfully and with quiet but substantial comedy, this family muddles its way to the end. But it’s more of a standard happy ending than one would like, and the happiness itself falls uncomfortably far into the unambiguous side. We’re a long a way from Chishu Ryu peeling the apple, that much is certain.

DVD extras: interviews and Dim Sum Take Out, a short film composed of material not included in Dim Sum