After nearly four decades of its one-child policy, designed to curb population growth and reform the country’s economy, China has fully removed all childrearing limits in recent years. But the cultural repercussions will be felt for generations to come, even (and especially) in the swiping apps hounded by modern singles. Violet Du Feng’s documentary “The Dating Game” ventures to crack open this fleeting yet critical online realm, where families are formed and the weary are ghosted. But coming in at a brisk 89-minute runtime, the feature is awkwardly compressed in its portrait of heartache and easily overwhelmed by the political portent of its subject.
Opening on the statistic that China’s population has become lopsided — with males outnumbering females by many million — the film drops into what’s become a hyper-competitive dating scene for men. One trio turns to a dating coach for guidance on attracting a partner in the city streets of Chongqing. The bachelors are Zhou, a sheepish, older 30-something who longs to move back to the country; the stonerish Li, usually wearing a big grin; and Wu, who quietly holds himself to honesty while having little time to date between work. Their mentor is Hao, a married man who allegedly bagged his wife using his own teachings. The main tool: lies.
“Being nice is no use,” they bemoan. A man has to be an asset to attract a partner. Hao’s seven-day training is the center of “The Dating Game,” kicking off with new hairdos, luxuriously staged photo ops and manipulative DMing. These hang-outs largely unfurl as a meaningless montage of coverage, packaged with some punchy, comedy-forward exchanges. The sequences come lathered in a stupidly bouncy score, better fit for a cruise ship commercial than emotional defeat.
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Not only are these men forging confident false identities, they must also cease being particular at all in their romances. Hao orders them to swipe right on every profile on dating apps, and even encourages approaching random women en masse in shopping centers. The guru is blunt in his low opinion of these men, but he holds onto what he believes is compassion: “They shouldn’t be deprived of love.”
The re-virilizing boot camp isn’t exactly premised on novel ideas for humans communication in the digital age. While “The Dating Game” is restrained enough to withhold a value judgment on Hao’s deceptive playbook, shown as just one approach available in the dating sphere, it never puts them to the test either. The production seems to have been given zero access to these bachelor’s dates or online interactions; instead, they are recounted as unsurprising post-game chastise sessions, with Hao reiterating his principles while the other men nod along or squirm a bit.
Faced with such guardrails in exploring romantic woes, Hao himself emerges as the documentary’s most intriguing figure. One detour hints at his own past: an escape from a lower-income background for self-improvement and city living. The chinks in the armor are most pronounced in the brief glimpses of Hao’s home life; his wife is a lifestyle coach for women and domestic conversations tend to arc towards tense gender essentialism. But “The Dating Game” is too satisfied in simply finding a vulnerable side to Hao here, skirting a more probing look at his marriage and profession. How much does he charge for his advice? How exactly did he and his wife fall into the same field?
Not much happens in “The Dating Game,” which, generously, reflects the purgatory of modern dating, but also evidences not much of a story being here at all. (Another nagging question: Has Hao ever been successful at his self-employed job?) Limited to the shallow prism of Hao’s philosophy, the documentary loses credibility in its second half, distracted by a series of cursory tangents to expand its scope to larger China. An abrupt sequence shares footage of animated eboyfriend games that the doc asserts millions of women have become drawn to, but moves on quickly after dropping that vague statistic. Later, the doc awkwardly notes that the military is one of the few viable pathways for poorer men to reach better lives — a sad sociological phenomenon, but hardly one that’s unique to China. Cultural specifics go unarticulated. These journalistic impulses appear compulsory and hastily satisfied; the earlier, eventless reality TV sheen seems a haven of human insight by comparison.