The Girlfriend and I watched the film Saving Face on DVD this past weekend. We were looking forward to seeing it based on a review on AfterEllen.com, but we were pleasantly surprised by how much the movie exceeded our expectations.

Saving Face is billed as a romantic comedy, a genre that tends to provoke a gag response in me. The Hollywood version of the genre seems too self-celebratory, and all too often there are weddings--though perhaps that's a redundant criticism. In any case, I find them cloying and overly sweet, like the white icing roses on a wedding--there's that word again!--cake.

Saving Face is comedic and does include a romance, and there is even a scene in a chapel at one point. But it doesn't club you about the head with it's happy ending. When it comes, it's more like a pause of relief, or a moment of resolution of the several conflicts presented in the film.

The main romance is between two Chinese American women, Wil (played by Michelle Krusiac), a surgical resident, and Vivian (played by Lynn Chen), a ballerina. The actors have remarkable chemistry on screen and are wonderful to watch. I also want to interject here that any butch who can say, "I'd like you to meet my girlfriend, the prima ballerina," is a butch who has my immediate respect.

Wil, on whom the story is focused, struggles with the demands of ambition and her ambivalence towards personal commitment. She also struggles with her single, 48-year-old pregnant mother, who has moved in with her, after having disgraced the family's patriarch. Through these overlapping storylines, the film examines the workings of private shame and public face within the tightly knit Chinese American community of Flushing, NY.

One of the challenges of making a lesbian or gay romantic comedy is that for gay couples there are several real-world checks on the romantic principal of "and they lived happily ever after." In the past, if we became partnered, there was no possibility of state- or church-sanctioned celebration; any vows we might take did not reflect on or represent the harmony of a wider community or world.

Now that the California Supreme Court has ruled against the exclusion of gays and lesbians from civil marriage, perhaps the narrative of gay romance will have to change. But I wonder if it will be a good thing if our stories come to more closely resemble a fairy tale?