China One -child policy may have ended in 2015, but the effects of its inheritance are still felt by millions (on millions) people born while it was enforced. Due to a variety of factors that include food deficiency, gender -elective abortions and gender physical violence, the disproportionate majority of these people are boys.
China now has 30 million more men than women, which means that legions of eager Twentysomethings are chronic single without ending in sight-with reservation for a cruel game with musical chairs that feel particularly stacked against the working class children whose rural homes abandoned under the country’s driving force against urbanization in the end of the 1900s. With the words from hao, a Chongqing-bashed dating coach that has mentored about 3,000 young men on modern art seduction: “The whole generation grew up without love.”
That phenomenon is at the heart of Violet du Feng’s superficial but fascinating ‘The dating game“A documentary whose strengths and weaknesses are too perfectly reflected the nature of the crisis in its core – a crisis derived from a huge confluence of geopolitical issues, but expresses itself through the hidden misery of loneliness and longing.
A lick speaker who can be confused to one of his customers if not for any hair gel and a loosely suitable chain mail with performative trust, HAO knows that his workshops are offering a band aid for a gaping wound. He knows that it is to buy a spotted new shirt from the mall and spam of dozens girls on WeChat with the same grainy pick-up line will not turn their gormless, backwater clientell into overnight stays. It will not solve the economic circumstances that put these men on such an extreme disadvantage or teach them to defy the strictures in social immobility. But Hao also knows that a good date is all it takes to beat the odds, and he is proud to share his tips for playing the system.
Stream in its view but increasingly unfocused with its attention, “The Dating Game” follows three delightful Bumpkins as they submit to the humiliation of HAO’s course. Zhou is a serious 36-year-old who can’t afford a matchmaker on his $ 600 per month salary, but knows that he is too old to land one of the few bachelors from his city. Li seems to be a much less tragic case as a comparison; He was a silly but Hyper-Obe-Obey 24-year-old with friendly eyes and a crooked smile and told his parents that he was going on vacation because he knew they would never approve his plan.
Twenty -seven year old WU is the least defined by the party, but it turns out to be tender in its own way in the end. He remembers that he saw girls abandoned on the side of the road when he was growing up, and nothing that Hao teaches him seems as if it could penetrate the skepticism he cared for in his heart since he was a child. Why did he even care about registering for HAO’s class? Well, no one is immune to a small fantasy every now and then, at least of everything in a corporate metropolis like Chongqing, whose streets are lit by neon signs that advertise a life that these men can’t even afford to imagine themselves.
HAO’s response to the city’s glittering facade is to give its customers its own Seen and the “dating game” is on its most effective when drilling into the relationship between the unique modern emphasis on performative identity and the indivisible honest honest need for human connection. Feng highlights that relationship by creating a tangible connection between her flash filmStyle-dess interstitial segments that adopt shine and pop by a modern Chinese Rom-com and her character’s salt-by-earth hopelessness.
For its part, Hao is happy to emphasize that tension at every tour, as each lesson in its course instructs its clients to hide who they are. Preserved WeChat messages are just the beginning of a strategy that is approaching dating profiles as a form of performance art, complete with ridiculous photoshoots who think the boys are posing and well-known dog owners. In a world where every picture of social media is photo adjusted to abstraction, of course there is a facility that exists only for young people to make false impressions of their own lives. Our heroes even see a group of girls there do the same; It seems that the perfect occasion for a meeting -rate, but the reality that it would impose on the situation is too much for any of these singles to bear.
“The Dating Game” would rather see their characters fumble through the city than drill into the remaining effects of such conditioned themselves disgust (the scenes where the boys ask random girls to add them to WeChat quickly graduating from Cringe-inducing Schadenfreude to the things from A ritualistic shame ritual), but Feng never loses visibility for the fraud. Far away from the film’s most detailed character, Hao inevitably appears as a victim of his own bullshit, less an unsympathetic cone man than a colored-in-unadel believer.
For all the documentary’s half -hearted attempts to broaden their scope with detours exploring the public’s fairs and the onset of virtual boyfriends (among other things), “dating game” never feels more extensive than when it unpacks Hao’s personal luggage. First we meet his wife, a dating coach for a completely different stripe – she teaches her clients to ditch unrealistic standards and focus on enriching her own souls, and she grows quite deeply suspended by Hao’s emphasis on Mystery -like Pick -up techniques. Later we follow HAO on a trip back to his poor hometown, where a conversation with a definite offline uncle helps to emphasize the extent to which the love guru has lied to himself.
“It is tiring to pretend to be someone else,” one of the boys regrets towards the end, but what other choice do they have in a society that continues to deny so much of their inner value? It is a heartbreaking question that the “dating game” is steadfast to answer (just as it moves towards the benefits of self-acceptance), but Feng’s documentary refuses to a large extent to pretend something else. Strangely optimistic as its last moments are, even when one of its subjects mainly surrenders to the idea that he is too bad for romance, never forgets that some facts are too undeniable to be hidden by any digital flash and a hairstyle inspired by Actor Nicholas TSE.
Love can be seen as a luxury in a world where basic resources are too difficult to come up with, but when the loneliness epidemic expands over the 2000s and people sink even deeper in themselves, it stands to become an increasingly accurate metric to measure the measurement True health in the human economy.
Rating: B-
“The Dating Game” premiered at 2025 Sundance Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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