Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), a Chinese-American professor of economics, is Chinese-American, and the adaptation of Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel Crazy Rich Asians emphasizes this fact constantly. Rachel's college closest friend Peik Lin (an exuberant Awkwafina) refers to her as a "banana": "Yellow on the surface, white on the inside," with a superlative attached. When Rachel's mother (Tan Kheng Hua) learns she would be visiting her handsome boyfriend's family in Singapore, she reveals her an unsettling truth: "You are Chinese, you speak Mandarin, but you are American in here," she continues, pointing to Rachel's heart.

It's a bittersweet, but perceptive observation, one that finely articulates Rachel's compounded sense of otherness throughout the film, especially once the plot gets going and Rachel realizes her debonair Nick Young (Henry Golding) is the son of an obscenely wealthy Singaporean family that leans heavily on traditional Chinese family values and matriarchy. She is middle-class, was raised by a single mother, and is, as everyone has pointed out, Chinese-American.

If Crazy Rich Asians is not as incisive in its satire of the bourgeoisie as one might wish in a cultural landscape where it has become more popular to be vocally anti-capitalist (or, at the very least, skeptical of capitalism as a system and ideology), it still sparkles in its in-jokes about Asianness and Chinese families and the interconnectedness of other Asian people. It is slickly directed by Chu, whose skill in crafting champagne on a beer budget rests not in the goods on show in and of themselves, but in the color correction and cinematography by Vanja Cernjul.

Detailed information:
Directed by: Jon M. Chu
Starring: Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Gemma Chan, Awkwafina, Nico Santos, Lisa Lu, Ken Jeong
Release date: 7 August, 2018
Running time: 120 minutes