I Will Make You Mine
“I Will Make You Mine pits three leading women against each other for the affections of a man.”
Title: I Will Make You Mine (2020)
Director: Lynn Chen 👩🏻🇺🇸
Writer: Lynn Chen 👩🏻🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
—SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 3.25/5
For a gentle afternoon, spend 80 breezy minutes with I Will Make You Mine. Shot in crisp black and white, the musical ode to tangled feelings and misplaced nostalgia marks the directorial debut of longtime actor Lynn Chen, who also wrote the script and plays a leading role as Rachel, a well-to-do wife whose husband has cheated on her. Along with parallel stories of Yea-Ming (Yea-Ming Chen) and Erika (Ayako Fujitani), each woman considers the regrets in her life and navigates anxiety about the future.
At the center of the melodrama sits singer-songwriter Goh Nakamura, playing an alternate version of himself as an affable dad characterized by a permanent smile and unshakable guilelessness. He serves as a romantic interest to each woman in some capacity, whether past, present, and/or future. But Goh symbolizes something different to each woman—an alternate life, a relationship that has lost its luster, or someone unattainable.
This charming movie hums along quietly, evoking similar slice-of-life dramatics not unlike acoustic musicals Once (2007) or Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). However, despite its minimalist leanings, I Will Make You Mine lacks subtlety. Emotional beats swoon transparently on the surface: When buying a dress for her father’s funeral, Erika dissolves into tears in front of a panicked salesman, and during the rough waters of Rachel’s marriage, she conveniently reconnects with an old friend who used to have a crush on her. Preciousness also suffuses the film, such as when Yea-Ming serenades Goh with a song she wrote about their one night stand in Las Vegas, after which he snaps a Polaroid picture of her with a perfectly quaint click.
This isn’t to say Chen’s film strikes as false. On the contrary, situations mimic life perfectly well. In press notes, Chen vulnerably shares that Erika’s in-store crying came from her own reaction to her father’s passing. But when so many pat scenes jostle for room in a relatively short runtime, it detracts from its own relatability. By the time the final acts drive home the moral of I Will Make You Mine—that it’s never too late to chase one’s dreams—the overall naiveté has set, impossible to unearth anything more than what’s already been said aloud.
Gender: 3.75/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Chen’s fellow producers were predominantly women. The ideology behind I Will Make You Mine sounds feminist, too: Chen takes the female characters from prequels Surrogate Valentine (2011) and Daylight Savings (2012), then flips the perspective to tell their points of view. Unfortunately, by using Goh to anchor each of their stories, we never explore Rachel, Yea-Ming, or Erika outside the parameters of their relationships with him or other men.
Erika fares the best among the three, seen as more than just a significant other. She’s the mother to Sachiko (Ayami Riley Tomine) and grieves her recently passed father. But Rachel’s story arc completely relies on men, as she uses Goh to distract from marital problems, and Yea-Ming feels painfully tethered to the man through a long-term crush that may have been previously explained when they co-starred in Daylight Savings, but that never feels established or believable within the confines of I Will Make You Mine.
It’s especially disappointing to see where their stories end. Rachel fast-forwards to heteronormative bliss as she cradles a tiny baby, with little indication of how she and her husband worked out their problems beyond vague mentions of couples’ therapy. Poor Yea-Ming continues to pine away, forever doomed to make love songs about Goh (and to cringingly send him the videos) despite his own priorities as a married man and a father.
Above all, the inescapable weight of pitting three leading women against each other for the affections of an average dude feels like a trodden trail. Reminiscent of Judd Apatow movies of yore, the premise skirts the edges of male fantasy, where Goh serves as the everyman who has beautiful, talented, and successful women clamoring for his attention. Sure, they may each have their own personal motivations for doing so, but that doesn’t change the fact of seeing women contort their emotions around the men in their lives.
Race: 5/5
Asian American cinema has enjoyed a spate of recent gems like Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari (2020), Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019), or Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians (2018), all of which cover topics of immigration and multigenerational friction. But Chen takes a different tack, giving us a boots-on-the-ground look at how American-born Japanese, Taiwanese, and Chinese millennials realistically go about their lives in LA. “No one does karate. No one has an accent,” she states in press notes. “They are the women I relate to, the women I know, the women I have wanted to play for 30 years.”
Chen’s lived experience as a Taiwanese American easily relays to the silver screen. Coming from a similar background, albeit growing up in the Bay Area rather than the East Coast where Chen was raised, I instantly recognized people I knew in Rachel, Yea-Ming, Erika, and Goh. While Rachel’s husband is white and Yea-Ming rooms with a young white Aussie woman, it feels realistic to see how the three leading women largely interact with other East Asians, whether as friends or family or romantic interests. The film may not showcase an idealized melting pot, which feels like a bit of a shame considering the diversity of LA, but its contained scope reflects the way people cluster within socioeconomic groups.
Where the film makes its boldest statement on Asian representation occurs through the establishment of Goh as the romantic lead. Traditionally desexualized by Western media, Asian men have increasingly been tapped for romantic roles with colorism providing the next barrier to overcome, a topic we touch on in some of our reviews like A Sun is Also a Star (2019) or Plus One (2019). In contrast, I Will Make You Mine easily vaults over that colorist barrier with the casting of Japanese American Nakamura. While I wasn’t bought into his status as a total studmeister with three women panting after him, I definitely appreciated what his inclusion meant for challenging racial tropes. Not every Asian male lead needs to be mixed with white ancestry or cut from marble to deserve romantic love (and onscreen kisses).
Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.25
A couple queer characters surface within the world of I Will Make You Mine. First, a salesman coded as gay through wardrobe and mannerisms appears in a normalized (and thankfully, non-comedic) role. Later in the film, Yea-Ming casually mentions to Goh that he and his daughter can crash at her apartment since her roommate Jasmin (Christina Paterno) often stays overnight with the men or women she’s seeing. While the tired notion of sexually deviant bisexuals could be seen in this offhand remark, when we meet Jasmin later, no aspect of her personality feels negative in any way.
Mediaversity Grade: B 4.08/5
I Will Make You Mine poses a bit of a mixed bag on representation. While Chen indisputably casts women of color into multilayered roles and showcases an Asian male lead who doesn’t have to be a supermodel to get the girl, the way they revolve around him—and jealously regard each other as competitors—falls short of empowering women in full.
Like I Will Make You Mine? Try these other stripped down indie films.
Atlantics (2019)
Jezebel (2019)
The Climb (2020)