Slumming by Outsiders: the Casualty of Cultural Representations and How to Be a Respectful Spectator I really wanna talk about the privacy of this movie and the millions of stories and cultural artifacts that are behind the representation and iconorgraphies of this film.
This movie is essentially a Chinese Diaspora movie made for Chinese viewers. But how to define a Chinese viewer? I guess for this instance, if you can identify with any of the character shown in this movie, then you are the person this movie is narrating for. You probably need fluent English listening skills, native Chinese skills, and potentially some Italian opera background (which I didn't know could have been useful for this movie while some Caro mio ben started playing).
Although, as a first-gen Chinese Canadian young adult, they don't have too good a line write for lots of Chinese conversations, plenty of slangs, expressions and idioms were still used in this movie in Chinese. And to be honest, I wouldn't even expect anyone Chinese who migrated out of China before secondary education system to half-understand them. So while I was crying so hard or being silent during some heart-breaking lines and emotion-inducing dark-humor scenes, I wasn't expecting or appreciating or the "cultural outsiders" to laugh so hard that I could not even hear the lines.
This movie is a cultural mark. While commercially wide-released in North America as an Invitation for our fellow "earth-er" to have a taste of this, relatively, extreme representation of fraction of our ubiquitous life, WE REQUEST THE RESPECT WE DESERVE for what's our own, the emotions through the native Mando Chinese lineage.
If you cannot identify as any of the character in the movie, don't read Chinese, don't have Mandarin-listening skills, or don't have a mediocre or even preliminary understanding of Mando Chinese cultural, please be a respectful spectator, just sit back and let the experience sink in. Don't try to laugh with the crowd, since one, it might not be funny before the line got translated into English subtitles, two, most of your crowd probably was already not "behaving", and three, you probably will look like a jerk or imbecile while all the native Chinese viewers sitting by you are tearing up so hard and they want to hear all the lines that were inaudible because of the nonsense laughter all around. It's a Suspense Dramedy, not a simple Comedy for you to slum :).