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China’s One-child policy may have ended in 2015, but the impact of its legacy is still being felt by the millions (upon millions) of people who were born while it was being enforced. Due to a variety of factors that include food scarcity, sex-selective abortions, and gendered physical violence, the disproportionate majority of those people are boys.
China now has 30 million more men than women, which means that legions of eager twentysomethings are chronically single with no end in sight — subject to a cruel game of musical chairs that feels especially stacked against working-class kids whose rural hometowns were abandoned during the country’s push towards urbanization at the end of the 20th century. In the words of Hao, a Chongqing-based dating coach who’s mentored some 3,000 young men on the modern art of seduction: “This 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 all too perfectly reflect the nature of the crisis at its core — a crisis that stems from a vast confluence of geopolitical issues, but expresses itself through the siloed misery of loneliness and longing.
A slick talker who might be confused for one of his customers if not for some hair gel and a loose-fitting chainmail of performative confidence, Hao knows that his workshops offer a band-aid for a gaping wound. He knows that buying a flashy new shirt from the mall and spamming dozens of girls on WeChat with the same corny pick-up line isn’t going to transform his gormless, backwater clientele into overnight lotharios. It isn’t going to solve the economic circumstances that put these men at such an extreme disadvantage, or teach them how to defy the strictures of social immobility. But Hao also knows that one good date is all it takes to beat the odds, and he’s proud to share his tips for gaming the system.
Narrow in its purview but increasingly unfocused with its attention, “The Dating Game” follows three endearing bumpkins as they submit themselves to the humiliation of Hao’s course. Zhou is a serious-minded 36-year-old who can’t afford a matchmaker on his $600-per-month salary, but knows that he’s too old to land one of the few bachelorettes from his town. Li seems like a much less tragic case by comparison; a goofy but hyper-obedient 24-year-old with kind eyes and a crooked smile, he told his parents that he was going on vacation because he knew they would never approve of his plan.
Twenty-seven-year-old Wu is the least-defined of the lot, but that proves tender in its own way by the end. He remembers seeing baby girls abandoned on the side of the road when he was growing up, and nothing Hao teaches him seems like it could pierce the skepticism he’s nurtured in his heart since he was a child. Why did he even bother signing up for Hao’s class? Well, nobody is immune to a little fantasy now and then, least of all in a corporatized metropolis like Chongqing, whose streets are lit by neon signs that advertise a life these men can’t even afford to imagine for themselves.
Hao’s response to the city’s glittering facade is to give his clients a see-thru sheen of their own, and “The Dating Game” is at its most effective when it drills into the relationship between the uniquely modern emphasis on performative identity and the indivisibly honest need for human connection. Feng highlights that relationship by creating a palpable disconnect between the flashiness of her film’s style — its interstitial segments adopting the gloss and pop of a modern Chinese rom-com — and the salt-of-the-earth hopelessness of her characters.
For his part, Hao is happy to stress that tension at every turn, as every lesson in his course instructs his clients to disguise who they are. Canned WeChat messages are just the start of a strategy that approaches dating profiles as a form of performance art, complete with ridiculous photoshoots that find the boys posing as well-heeled dog owners. In a world where every social media pic is photo-tuned to the point of abstraction, of course there’s a facility that exists just for young people to manufacture false impressions of their own lives. Our heroes even see a group of girls there doing the same thing; it would seem like the perfect opportunity for a meet-cute, but the reality that it would impose upon the situation is too much for any of these singles to bear.
“The Dating Game” would rather watch its characters fumble their way through the city than drill into the residual effects of such conditioned self-loathing (the scenes where the boys ask random girls to add them on WeChat quickly graduate from cringe-inducing schadenfreude to the stuff of a ritualistic shaming ritual), but Feng never loses sight of the deception at play. Far and away the film’s most detailed character, Hao inevitably emerges as a victim of his own bullshit, less an unsympathetic con man than a dyed-in-the-wool believer.
For all of the documentary’s half-hearted attempts to broaden its scope with detours that explore public love fairs and the rise of virtual boyfriends (among other things), “The Dating Game” never feels more comprehensive than when it unpacks Hao’s personal baggage. First we meet his wife, a dating coach of a very different stripe — she teaches her clients to ditch unrealistic standards and focus on enriching their own souls, and she’s growing rather deeply turned off by Hao’s emphasis on Mystery-like pick-up techniques. Later, we follow Hao on a trip back to his impoverished hometown, where a conversation with a decidedly offline uncle helps underscore the extent to which the love guru has been lying to himself.
“It’s tiring to pretend to be somebody else,” one of the boys laments towards the end, but what other choice do they have in a society that continues to deny so much of their intrinsic value? It’s a heartbreaking question that “The Dating Game” is unequipped to answer (much as it shrugs towards the rewards of self-acceptance), but Feng’s documentary largely refuses to pretend otherwise. Strangely upbeat as its final moments are, even when one of its subjects essentially surrenders to the idea that he’s too poor for romance, the film never forgets that some facts are too undeniable to be obscured by some digital flash and a haircut inspired by actor Nicholas Tse.
Love might be seen as a luxury in a world where basic resources are all too hard to come by, but as the loneliness epidemic widens across the 21st century and people sink even deeper into themselves, it stands to become an increasingly accurate metric for measuring the true health of the human economy.
Grade: B-
“The Dating Game” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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