A modern-day queer riff on the time-honored Cyrano de Bergerac story transposed to an American Podunk town called Squahamish, Alice Wu's THE HALF OF IT timely puts an immigrant Chinese-American girl in the focal point, high school student Ellie Chu (Lewis ) seems to be a bookish shrinking violet prima facie, yet after the football jock Paul Munsky (Diemer) pays her to write a love letter to his crush Aster Flores (Lemire), the prettiest girl in the school who appears to have a perfect life , including a popular boyfriend Trig (Novogratz), though who is too self-involved with braggadocio to give her proper attention and care, the resultant exchanges of words between Aster and Ellie (pretending to be Paul) develop into a mutual attraction and appreciation between them (though for Aster, she thinks Paul is the wellspring of those sensible,unpretentious emotions and wording).
The catch is, Paul is hot to trot to meet Aster, and his gaucherie and ignorance is a dead giveaway during their first date, but Aster is either too blind to see that, or, more likely, intrigued by the happenstance, well-disposed to play along to see who is the real Romeo behind, Ellie's slapdash match-making doesn't fail epically, but the sizzling teenage affection among the three becomes more mutable as the none-too-secretive secret will eventually surface and during her “what is love” speech inside the church, Ellie (who doesn't even a believer, just to moonlight as the organ player) finally lays bare her inner oscillation and confusion in total honesty, and the rest doesn't matter.
Wu strictly fences the narrative in the adolescent realm, so compared with her first feature SAVING FACE (2004), another story about a queer woman's rite of passage, THE HALF OF IT feels less captivating but slighter, Ellie's parentage only serves as a vague backdrop , Collin Chou, best known as an action star in Hong Kong, has too peripheral a role to animate the story's trite route as Ellie's widowed father (his attitude towards Ellie's sexual orientation remains a moot point). Among the three key characters, both Diemer and Lemire are adequate at most (the former often looks too wooden whereas the latter can never register a particularly convincing emotion without a sense of self-consciousness), but cannot really stand out with a difference in their preordained modes, whether it is star- spangle wholesomeness,or deadened by the small-town humdrum, as for Lewis, who fares slightly better on the strength of Ellie's complexity, on top of the usual stereotype as a brainy, whip-smart, ostracized Asian minority kid who has to earn extra money to tide over her family, her vulnerability and frustration is also presented viscerally for this unusual visibility as the pillar of the whole movie, a baby step, still, is comforting and soul-lifting.
Much as yours truly's sincere hope that Wu's sophomore feature could be a veritable class act, so as to vindicate the unfairness of an unconscionably long 16-year hiatus between Wu's two features, especially for a promising female queer filmmaker, THE HALF OF IT doesn' t cut it, as if nowadays we still use snail mail to express our thoughts, it feels awkwardly out of touch with reality (even Wu tries very hard to keep it up with the glance-and-you-will-miss-it sms messages on the screen) and over-familiar in almost every aspects, for all its sensibility and good intention, the film is too twee for its own good.
referential entries: Wu's SAVING FACE (2004, 7.6/10); Olivia Wilde's BOOKSMART (2019, 6.8/10); Michael Gordon's CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1950, 7.4/10).
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