LA Daily News

March 2005
Bob Strauss, Film Critic

A gripping bride-and-prejudice love triangle

"Mail Order Wife" is self-reflexive in more ways than one.

Co-writer/director Andrew Gurland plays the filmmaker within the film, also named Andrew Gurland.

The presentation's cinema verite facade crumbles about a third of the way through, with cameras (and cameraman/confessors) popping up at moments a real documentary crew would never get access to. And while Gurland and co-creator Huck Botko have an outrageous time skewering white male sexual and racial attitudes, the increasingly, appallingly funny situations they dream up cut so close to the bone that you can't help wondering how much of their own personal misogyny made it into the mix.

Whatever, the result is a uniquely raw, cruel and unfortunately honest comedy. Those not irretrievably offended by it will laugh their heads off - some, perhaps, out of rueful recognition.

The slow-starting setup involves Gurland paying the expenses for Adrian (Adrian Martinez), a chubby, frizzy-haired doorman from Queens, to import a bride from Burma. In return, Adrian agrees to allow Gurland to film his life with the lovely Lichi (Eugenia Yuan).

But it's not a pretty picture. From the beginning, hopeless shlub Adrian treats his English-impaired wife like a live-in maid, instructing her on how he likes his toilet cleaned, his chili ketchuped and how live rats should be fed to his pet snake. Then he dreams up far worse ways of treating Lichi, backing out of his agreement with Gurland at that point.

Eventually, Lichi turns to the far more educated and sensitive filmmaker for help. Gurland can hardly say no. This turns out to be a huge miscalculation on everyone's part.

Plotting gets incredibly intricate and increasingly hilarious from the moment Lichi first knocks on Gurland's door. But for all the obsessive craziness that ensues, matters never leave the realm of behavioral plausibility.
Some will find Lichi a demeaning stereotype, an Asian woman reduced to passive sex object. That's partially true, although she proves to be far more than just that (though the character drifts dangerously close to other kinds of stereotypes as the plot unfolds). However, the American men who mess with her prove themselves such utter, loathsome pigs, you can hardly accuse the film of singling out any particular race or gender.

The actors commit beyond the call of duty, to put it mildly. Yuan, a Chinese-American (and daughter of the great Hong Kong actress Cheng Pei-Pei), is utterly persuasive as a bewildered immigrant working her way through a strange culture and even more foreign male perceptions. Martinez, who'll be seen soon in Sydney Pollack's "The Interpreter," gives as vanity-free a performance as has ever been registered yet makes us understand his incalculably unattractive character's feelings without appearing to try.

As for Gurland, well, if this fictional version of himself is at all like the real thing, I'm worried about the guy. But I hope he keeps making movies as gutsy, discomforting and slyly uproarious as "Mail Order Wife."
I guess we all take advantage of others' vulnerabilities in our own funny ways.

MAIL ORDER WIFE
Our rating:
(R: language, sexual situations)
Starring: Andrew Gurland, Eugenia Yuan, Adrian Martinez.
Directors: Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland.
Running time: 1 hr. 32 min.
Playing: Laemmle's Sunset 5, West Hollywood.
In a nutshell: Unsettling, admirably ruthless comedy about a documentary filmmaker who pays for some shlub to import a Burmese bride, then falls in love with the woman himself.