‘The Dating Game’ Review: Gaming China’s Loneliness Epidemic

“This whole generation grew up without love,” remarks Hao, the slick dating coach at the center of Violet Du Feng’s documentary The Dating Game. Hao is what the kids might call a “sigma.” For him, finding a partner in China, a country where men outnumber women by 30 million, is all about gaming the system and crafting a façade of success. That means, say, posting pictures of yourself wearing trendy clothes and posing in front of fancy vehicles. It worked for Hao, who appears happily married to his wife, Wen, and now runs a service to help other men, particularly from China’s countryside, find wives.

What begins as a goofy sojourn inside Hao’s seven-day boot camp turns into a reckoning with reality for three bachelors, who bond over shared issues of self-confidence, shyness, and loneliness. Right out of the gate, Feng lucidly frames the men’s predicament in the context of the gender imbalance resulting from China’s one-child policy and the country’s rapid transformation into a consumerist society. But if The Dating Game were an actual game show, it would be accurate to say that we never see its participants out of that context.

What we do get is the sense that the three bachelors at the center of Feng’s documentary are set in their ways, but that they also don’t fully understand who they are. For one, they prove resistant to Hao’s K-pop-inspired fashion makeovers and his 48 Laws of Power-type pep talk for dating success. Though all grown men, they’re boyish and sincere in their thoughts on love and marriage. A camaraderie forms between the three men, who’ve all wandered out to Chongqing in an attempt to change their lives, during Hao’s dating trials.

Zhou, a bashful man in his 30s, is on a timer to find a partner, especially given his lack of money and rural background, while Li, an energetic man in his 20s, is “on vacation” and muses about his desire to experience an authentic romance. Wu, who’s a few years older than Li, is the quiet cynic of the group, not believing that they’ll be able to attract a partner in seven days.

As The Dating Game progresses, it’s clear that Hao’s method of “strategic deception” is at odds with the men’s practical needs. Hao tosses nuggets of wisdom like “girls like golf” and “social media is all performance art” at the bachelors as they sit before him taking notes like schoolchildren, and whether or not you find the sight funny may depend on your tolerance for the film’s chipper score. By the time that Li walks up to a woman for the umpteenth time to ask her to add him on WeChat, and failing, you get the sense that Feng is less interested in having us be emotionally invested in her subjects than she is in mining humor from their humiliation.

There are segments where the documentary’s focus shifts to Hao and how he found his wife, who’s also now a dating coach for women. Hao rather predictably reveals that he essentially escaped his own lower-class origins by becoming a player, and while his marriage to Wen seems to be on steady ground, a disagreement they have about how women and men should act while dating casts doubt on whether their marriage, let alone any romantic relationship, can survive the artifice of essentially pretending to be who you’re not. Wen struggling on the same plane as his students, right down to watching videos by other marriage coaches on his phone, is poignant, but its inclusion also feels calculated to the point of being hamfisted.

Other tangents include footage of anime mobile games that allow women to romance virtual boyfriends, government dating events, and parent matchmaking in parks. Some of these tangents are more interesting than others, while some are random and leave the film feeling disjointed. Mostly, though, the speed with which The Dating Game jumps from topic to topic leaves it feeling like it has no center of gravity—that it’s lost sight of Zhou, Li, and Wu, who, while they’re ostensibly the heart of Feng’s project, we don’t come back to until the end of the film as they’re having dinner and debriefing after their time in Hao’s boot camp.

Throughout The Dating Game, Feng implicitly drives home the idea that Hao’s boot camp, though unhelpful, isn’t the reason why Zhou, Li, and Wu can’t find partners. It becomes clear that they can’t communicate with the women they pursue because of a class divide. By the end, as they toast one another, there isn’t a sense that the men have gained any new insights on dating or love. Still, they’ve forged a camaraderie of loneliness. And while that moment is poignant and sad, in part for quietly underlining that Zhou, Li, and Wu, like so many men in China, are contending with a historic gender imbalance, this ultimately cynical film still sees them more as statistical examples than as individuals with inner lives.