Tamlyn Tomita

(On Cable TV, May 2022) If you know anything about how Hollywood portrayed Asian characters for much of its history, you know that there’s going to be nothing uplifting about a film called Yellowface: Asian Whitewashing and Racism in Hollywood. As the film goes through Hollywood history, noting the stereotypes and attempts to pass white actors as Asian characters, it’s one dismal excerpt after another. I recently wrote a brief history of American black cinema, and one of the things that popped into my mind as I was writing it was “Wow, I’m happy I’m not trying to write about American Asian cinema” – but here’s a documentary to illustrate just how right I was. From yellow-face casting to interment, cheap enduring stereotypes to lack of representativeness, Asians have not been served particularly well throughout Hollywood’s history and this documentary scratches at the issue. Alas, this specific film (especially when I’m measuring it against such top documentaries as The Celluloid Closet) is very disappointing in many ways. Some of it can be explained by its pedigree — A French TV special sometimes popping up as an English-original documentary (understandably so given that its topic, excerpts and interviews are all in English), it’s clearly limited by its 60-minute running time and its lower production budget. There’s a total of four interviewees and there’s a sense that this isn’t enough to fully cover the topic. It does not help that the film spends a lot of time explaining about the American internment camps of Japanese citizens during WW2 – a worthy topic made real by one interviewee’s personal connection to the camps, but one that apparently prevents the film from offering a better look at Asian representativeness in the last few decades of the twentieth century. At times, it feels as if Yellowface skips from the 1950s to the twenty-first century, running roughshod over decades of incremental or temporary progress. Flower Drum Song is barely mentioned, for instance, which casts the completeness of the project in question. (Even using it as an example of a false hope for representativeness would have been something.) I was quite disappointed by the result. Even though the film does have highlights (one of the four interviewees is Tamlyn Tomita, and I’ve seldom liked her more than in seeing her here being incensed, animated and opinionated), there’s a sense that there’s a much better documentary to be made about the laudable issue being half-heartedly tackled here. But then you’d need more effort and budget than was likely available to the filmmakers. Maybe one day we’ll get the documentary that Asian representation on Hollywood really deserves.