Starring Joan Chen and Michelle Krusiec. In English and Mandarin with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, July 1, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

In Saving Face, first-time writer-director Alice Wu displays a contagious sense of affection for the China-born old-timers whose habits and prejudices keep getting in the way of everyone's personal fulfillment. They've been through wars, the Cultural Revolution, and multiple moves. Now they have to accept that some of their sons and daughters are gay and not ashamed of it. Unfortunately, Wu doesn't seem quite as interested in the young people at the centre of the story, or else they might have more than two dimensions.

The tale is built mostly around Wilhelmina Pang, or Wil (Michelle Krusiec), a resident surgeon at a large Manhattan hospital. She has "golden hands", according to the head of surgery (Louyong Wong), but no apparent social life. That's because Wil's same-sex inclinations don't fit with the world-view of her grandparents and their old-country pals out in suburban Flushing, where she goes weekly "to swim in the Chinese gene pool". Everyone keeps trying to fix her up with eligible bachelors but nothing clicks until she meets the vivacious Vivian (Lynn Chen), a dancer who also happens to be the chief surgeon's daughter.

They begin a tentative affair, with the haughty Vivian pushing all of cautious Wil's buttons. But the moment after they connect-in the film's single flash of heat-Vivian instantly morphs from vixen to cling-on.

With her main love story running out of steam-and it doesn't help that Krusiec is a dull presence, handling everything with the same world-weary sitcom shrug-Wu changes focus by having Wil's widowed mother, known only as Ma, arrive on the doorstep. She's played by the improbably beautiful Joan Chen, although her sultry Twin Peaksness perhaps helps explain why this middle-aged paragon is suddenly pregnant and flushed out of Flushing.

Thus Saving Face becomes a parallel study of two generations trying to push past the limitations they have superficially accepted. Sorry, but there's no more amusing way to put that, as the director makes clear in a script that's really only funny and insightful around the margins of everyday life, not at its core. Her attempt to introduce meaningful secondary characters, such as a black male neighbour (Ato Essandoh) who becomes Wil's confidante, is even more half-hearted.

Overall, this is a watchable, if pedestrian, debut feature that just about gets by on its fine intentions. But if self-expression and the realization of dreams are so damn important to Wu, then how come we only see Wil at work a couple of times and she never tells us why medicine, or anything else, is important to her? More crucially, the filmmaker likes the idea of Vivian being a ballet dancer who wants to go modern, although not enough to ever show us the woman dancing-in any style.

Those are not trivial oversights. In a genuinely satisfying tale of empowerment, regardless of ethnic and gender particularities, there would be more to life than just getting the girl.