A Dark Truth Runs Beneath the Surface of The Dating Game

The colorful, almost exuberant surfaces of Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game mask a grim, dystopian reality. Following the efforts of three youngish bachelors to learn how to attract women under the tutelage of a professional dating coach, the documentary (which premiered at Sundance) offers a unique, ground-level perspective on a sad social phenomenon: Nearly a decade after the end of China’s One-Child Policy, men in the country outnumber women by 30 million, making the idea of starting a family feel like a ruthless free-for-all. This is compounded by other factors, including the fact that many rural children were left behind in villages when their parents left to work in the cities during the country’s rapid urbanization. “This whole generation grew up without love,” someone observes.

Not just without love, but often without an ability to communicate with the opposite sex, or to be open about one’s emotions. At one point, we see mass gatherings of parents in public parks looking for mates for their kids, putting up and perusing flyers with each prospective spouse’s relevant details; the kids themselves are too ashamed to show up in person. There are also government-organized matchmaking events, where party officials welcome participants as important pillars of the nation, because they understand that increasing birth rates is critical towards ensuring “a harmonious society.” They’re not wrong. Historically, surpluses of men tend to result in great social instability.

Du Feng’s film focuses on Hao, a slick and fast-talking dating coach (one of China’s most sought-after, evidently) based in the sprawling, glittering metropolis of Chongqing. Tasked with turning three single men into confident, prospective mates, he makes them over with new haircuts, new clothes, and a whole new set of social media photos. He teaches them about his “push-pull technique,” a way of simultaneously complementing and disrespecting the girl you’re talking to, to keep them uncertain about your interest. Then there’s the fake imagery: a whole host of social media photos and information designed to project a kind of life and persona these people don’t possess. These young men don’t play golf, but Hao makes them take pictures playing golf, because “girls like men who golf.” They go to a dog house and take pictures with the affectionate canines, because “girls like cute animals.”

The disingenuous nature of these exercises bothers Hao not one bit, but his students do sometimes balk at the phoniness they’re being asked to embrace; they may be inexperienced, but they’re not idiots. They seem sweet and genuine — they’re quite open in front of Du Feng’s camera, willingly offering details of their loneliness and awkwardness, and what they hope to find in a spouse. Some of their ideas are quite traditional, which adds extra dissonance to their makeover as hip, happy urbanites. The overall feeling one gets from The Dating Game is a gnawing hopelessness; it’s hard to imagine any of these people finding love in such a hectic and superficial place. That’s a crushing realization. The film also delves into the rise of virtual dating games, where fake digital lovers provide online companionship to lovesick users. These users are not delusional: They know these cyber-sweethearts aren’t real. But they do provide a replica of affection that, however manufactured, many humans don’t know how to find elsewhere.

Looming over all these interactions is the fact that social mobility is enormously difficult in China. One client mentions that a proper date would probably cost half his month’s salary. Hao feeds on these men’s naïveté. For all that smooth talk, much of his coaching seems to center on sending his students out into crowds to ask random girls if they can add them on the Chinese social media app WeChat. These scenes, as our shy protagonists trudge through plazas to anxiously and awkwardly ask total strangers if they can be online friends, play out like some sort of humiliation ritual.

Hao isn’t entirely a slime-ball. More than anything, he might be a reflection of his times. “Most of my clients are regarded as failures, but they shouldn’t be denied love,” he observes, noting also that most of his over 3,000 clients are working class, which places them very low on the eligibility chain. He offers himself as an example that his techniques work. He admits that he was once terrible at talking to girls, a stutterer with a lousy job, no money, and no prospects, before he made himself over as a player. His wife, Wen, who is also a relationship and self-improvement coach, recalls that Hao’s slick act clearly seemed like a charade when they first met. She saw through him, she claims — but hey, they did wind up together. (Will they still be together by the end of this movie? That’s a different question.)

But maybe that’s the real goal: not to present yourself as someone you’re not, but to present yourself as someone who’s willing to lie about who you are, because it shows some level of commitment. Given the fake-it-till-you-make-it half-reality that governs all our social media lives, there may well be a dark truth running beneath the superficiality on display in this film. In an openly phony world, who cares about being genuine? The Dating Game captures that idea in deceptively chilling fashion.