The Dating Game director Violet Du Feng grew up in Shanghai, and remembers the period in the ’90s when people from the countryside began pouring into the city, looking for work. Locals would cruelly joke that they smelled like mud, and, because she was too young to know better, she sometimes repeated the joke.
But attitudes changed. She remembers a night when the neighbors gathered around her family’s TV set, the only one in their alley, to watch a documentary about a woman from the country who made a man from the city take responsibility for their child. The city people ended up cheering for the woman.
“Everyone started clapping, and I just remember that I had goose bumps all over my body — I understood the power of emotional storytelling,” Feng recalls. “If a film can challenge my own biases and stereotypes, then there’s a way to challenge the audience as well.”
She became a journalist and then filmmaker, driven by her empathy for outsiders. She brings that empathy to The Dating Game, a fascinating documentary that premiered at Sundance and plays Wednesday at the Santa Fe International Film Festival.
The documentary elegantly explains broad societal movements in China — including migration from the countryside to the cities, and the fallout from the country’s one-child policy — through the most relatable of problems: Getting a date.
The Dating Game — no relation to the old American game show — follows three struggling bachelors, Zhou, Li, and Wu, as they seek the guidance of flashy, confident dating coach Hao.
He has his work cut out for him. Men in China outnumber women by 30 million, because of the one-child policy that lasted from 1979 to 2015. Sons were so preferred over daughters that many girls were put up for adoption or simply abandoned. In the film’s darkest moment, one bachelor recalls seeing baby girls left out to die.
Additionally, many parents went to work in cities, leaving their children in the poor countryside to be raised by grandparents. As one person in the film laments: “This whole generation grew up without love.”
Given that grim backdrop, it’s remarkable that The Dating Game can find any room for laughter. And yet somehow humor abounds, from the very first scene, in which Hao dresses up his clients like K-Pop stars in the first of many maneuvers he hopes will help them find wives. Later he will have them pose like they’re golfing, or with immaculate dogs, to seem cool and prosperous.
Hao endorses goofy dating tactics including “push-pull” and abruptly withdrawing from text conversations in hopes of appearing mysterious.
His main credential is the fact that though he himself came from the countryside and modest means, he has married a highly educated, sophisticated woman, Wen. In a fabulous reveal, we learn that she is also a dating coach — one who explains that she fell for Hao in spite of his “greasy” tactics, not because of them.
In the presence of Feng’s cameras, she sees her opportunity to talk frankly with her husband about what’s missing from their marriage, and to ask that he prioritize sincerity over flash.
People of almost any background will recognize the universal humor of singles playing misguided games in the hope of impressing prospective mates: It turns out people are pulling the same moves in China that they are in the United States.
“Humor is one of the basic foundations for us to all agree to some sort of fundamentals in our values and understandings,” notes Feng. “And through that, hopefully, people can have a transformative experience of asking themselves questions.”
But Feng, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and adjunct professor at Columbia University, took care to make sure her subjects are never the butt of a joke.
She started out by making sure the bachelors in her film were completely comfortable telling their stories on camera, screening them from a huge pool of applicants. Then she set up a special dating camp just for the film, between Hao and the three chosen bachelors. She made sure the film included context about the historic patterns and societal problems that keep many Chinese men from finding partners.
China’s birthrate is falling, as are birthrates in many other countries. That won’t change unless more men and women connect. But, as the film illustrates, it’s easier than ever for people to seek comfort in A.I. companions and other substitutes for real love.
Feng wanted to be sure The Dating Game made clear that the bachelors’ dating problems are actually problems for the entire country — and perhaps the entire world.
“People are very judgmental,” Feng says. “I was actually really nervous when I noticed that there’s a lot of humor in the film, because the last thing I want is for people to laugh at them. So that was the reason that I had a responsibility to contextualize their stories, for people to really understand where they come from. The more that I can contextualize it, and people understand it, the less people will laugh at them.”
Feng has a history of empathetic, nuanced filmmaking that helps her gain trust from her subjects. Her best-known film in the United States is 2022’s Hidden Letters, which follows women who use a secret language to commiserate about patriarchy. It premiered at Tribeca and aired on PBS’s Independent Lens.
She creates her films with both Western and Chinese audiences in mind, in the hopes that Chinese audiences will recognize themselves, and that Westerners will both understand China better and relate to Chinese people through universal truths.
But with The Dating Game, she is considering not distributing the film in China. She wants to be sure her subjects aren’t subjected to mockery at home.
“I’ve come to a place where I felt like even though they’re comfortable, I may not be comfortable, given how extreme the social media comments of people can be — they can be really harsh and brutal and mean, and I don’t want that to happen to them,” she says.
But the film has had a positive impact on at least two of its subjects: Hao and Wen. Wen’s onscreen openness led Hao to make serious changes.
“They’re in a much better place,” Feng says. “I think this process really made Hao make more effort to change and talk less trash.”
And Wen?
“She’s pregnant with their second child.”
The Dating Game plays Wednesday at 4 p.m. at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, one of our 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee.
Main image: Dating coach Hao and bachelors Wu, Li, Zhou go shopping in The Dating Game. Photo courtesy of Wei Gao.