The Dating Game
(USA/UK/Norway, 90 min.)
Dir. Violet Du Feng
Programme: World Cinema Documentary Competition (World premiere)
“I see really ugly men with beautiful girlfriends,” says Zhou in The Dating Game. “Can that ever be me?”
Zhou is one of three bachelors looking for love in The Dating Game. But these three guys have tough competition. Thanks to China’s one-child policy, women greatly outnumber men. Millions upon millions of men in the populous nation vie for a smaller pool of women. Even the most eligible bachelor might find himself a longshot.
Zhou, at 36-years-old, knows that the odds aren’t in his favour. Add to his age a lower class status, a slightly chubbier build, and an introverted personality, and he’s a little fish in a big pond. That’s why he enlists the help of a Hao, a so-called dating coach. Hao teaches Zhou, along with fellow bachelors Li and Wu, how to be pick-up artists. Or, he at least tries to.
The Dating Game follows these four men around the busy streets of Chongqing, China, as Hao plays Henry Higgins to the boys’ Eliza Doolittle. He teaches them how to choose the right outfits to impress the ladies. They get makeovers and haircuts with K-Pop accents and slick fades. Hao even grooms their online profiles to boost their chances. But the costly sessions quickly raise a flag for Zhou. What chance is there of finding a meaningful relationship when one’s match is premised upon a lie?
Hao doesn’t seem to register this concern. Director Violet Du Feng shadows the coach and his would be-daters as they continue to buff and polish their profiles. They take well-posed shots in posh hotels, or try golfing just for the profile pics. Li and Wu soon share Zhou’s concerns that Hao’s advice steers them away from their authentic selves. But they soldier on because the apps just aren’t working.
Vérité sequences observe as Hao tries to get his playboy operators some matches. None of his advice seems to work. All the while, Du Feng’s camera captures young women performing similar tricks, taking selfies in the square and staging photos. These guys seem oblivious to potential matches. Instead, they pursue woman after woman at Hao’s suggestion. They introduce themselves with the same line, “Hey, you look classy. Can I add you to We Chat?” The response is always no, if the guys get an answer at all. The best response is a woman who out-right asks Zhou if he’s a scammer.
The irony here is that the more The Dating Game turns the camera from the prospective matches to the matchmaker, the more Hao looks like a total hustler. Even his own marriage seems teetering on the brink of disaster. His wife, Wen, works as a matchmaker for women. Her approach differs greatly as she speaks with women. She guides them to manage their expectations. She focuses on self-improvement, while Hao favours smoke and mirrors. But even the scenes from their own marriage show firsthand how his penchant for mansplaining and gaslighting doesn’t work. Wen calls his bluff scene after scene, while he makes outright misogynist remarks that show the fallacy of his advice to always pair a compliment with a put-down.
Du Feng somewhat situates the stories of these four men within China’s cultural backdrop, if with limited scope. (The film has the misfortunate of echoing last year’s superior Mistress Dispeller when observing the economies of marriage in China.) A scene takes audiences to a match-makers’ market where parents essentially browse classified ads hung on outdoor clotheslines and trade notes in the park. Meanwhile, new video games have young women glued to their phones. They prefer sexy male avatars to flesh and blood blokes. The convenience and alienating nature of social media further narrows the pool. The bleary-eyed women staring into their phones echo Hao’s own slip-ups: life is so impersonal nowadays that people simply don’t know how to forge real-life connections.
Unfortunately, The Dating Game shares a hurdle with these guys: they simply aren’t that interesting as characters. Du Feng spends a lot of them with these three people when the game plan might have been better to take a cue from speed dating and move on to the next options. Aside from Zhou, they offer little in terms of engaging casting.
Wu, however, provides perhaps the best composite for young men in China as a whole, but his presence in the film seems like an afterthought. He’s easily the best looking of the bunch, but also the shyest. His introspective nature inevitably limits his chances for both matches and screen-time. When he does speak about his situation, his story illustrates how the dating game doubly hurts men from working class families from small towns. His workload leaves little time to chase potential matches in the city. Hao can’t fix Wu’s situation with his game-plan to lie his way into a posher life.
What follows is a novel if relatively limited consideration of the ripple effects of China’s one-child policy. There are avenues that could take the story further, though, and larger considerations of what it means to be authentic in the age of digital dating. These young men shoulder an impossible burden to continue their family names. Maybe the film will help Zhao, Li, or Wu find the lucky lady. Photos from festival premieres make for classy profile pics.
