Archive for July, 2023
A More Constructive Use of Leisure Time: CAAMfest 2023 review
I had an interesting conversion recently with a friend who’s worked in the independent Asian American film community for a long time. He postulated that in some ways, Asian American film festivals have achieved everything they set out to do when they first started up back in the 1970s, which to him meant increasing the visibility and voices of Asian Americans in the US filmmaking landscape. In some ways I think he’s on target, with Everything Everywhere All At Once winning the Best Picture Oscar this year and streamers regularly programming Asian American content of all types. So where do we go from here? The 2023 CAAMfest shows all of the pros and cons of Asian American narrative plenitude.
CAAMfest opening night film, Joy Ride (dir. Adele Lim), is a great example of what happens when Asian American voices are mainstreamed—namely, that we’ve come far enough that we now have silly sex comedies from an Asian American perspective. I didn’t hate this movie and I did laugh in some parts but to my mind it was pretty predictable and pretty much lacking in emotional depth of any sort. The cast works hard and is charming and agreeable but all of their hard work can’t disguise the film’s sloppy story construction and gaping plot holes. Twenty years ago we all would’ve eaten this kind of movie up as progress but now that we’ve got a lot more options I feel less forgiving about this kind of simplistic execution. We don’t necessarily have to support representation for the sake of representation.
Similarly, Land of Gold (dir. Nardeep Khurmi), about a Sikh American long haul trucker who acquires a young Mexican American stowaway in his rig, is told in fairly conventional strokes. Currently airing on HBO Max, the film does feel like a made-for-TV movie in its standard narrative beats. Lead actor/director/writer Nardeep Khurmi is solid as the truck driver with some family issues to work out but I was very annoyed by child actor Caroline Valencia as the stowaway. She’s the kind of precocious and self-assured kid performer who feels like she’s been taking tap-dancing and voice lessons since she was wee and thus lacks any discernible authenticity as an actual child. But other reviewers have praised her performance and Land of Gold won both Best Narrative and the Audience Award at CAAMfest so what do I know? Again, twenty years ago this film would have been groundbreaking but now it seems less so to me. That said, I did love seeing the world of long-haul truckers and appreciated the small details, like the fact that every truck stop now serves Indian food and that there are homespun gurdwaras along the highway to allow the Sikh drivers to worship as needed.
More poetic and less formulaic is The Accidental Getaway Driver (dir. Sing J Lee), about an elderly Vietnamese driver for hire who gets caught up with three escaped convicts on the run in Southern California. The film does a good job connecting generational trauma with life on the lam, utilizing beautiful emotional dreamlike images and a gritty, dark mis en scene to create an unusual visual texture. Lead actor Hiệp Trần Nghĩa is great as Long, the driver who forms an unexpected bond with Tây (Dustin Nguyen), one of the convicts who is also Viet. Dustin Nguyen, who debuted as a teen star way back in the 1980s on 21 Jump Street, is excellent as the world-weary convict searching for a chosen family. He’s now sixty years old (!) and he’s come a long way from his heartthrob beginnings to become a sensitive and nuanced performer. Although at first it appears to be a crime film, with a noirish look and feel, the movie ultimately is about the relationships formed between the characters as they find solace and connections with each other.
Liquor Store Dreams is So Yun Um’s debut feature documentary and she guides the film with a sure hand. The doc is an expansion of her short film Liquor Store Babies (2014) and the longer version allows Um to elaborate on several of the themes she touched on in her short. Um updates the story of her Korean immigrant parent’s immigration experiences in the US to include pandemic era, expanding her scope to include a thread on reconciliations between black & Korean communities in Los Angeles. Her kind and smiley Dad is a healing presence throughout the film.
Another example of how Asian American voices have reached the mainstream, Jeanette Lee vs was produced by ESPN for their 30 for 30 series of profiles of sports figures. Director Ursula Liang brings a decidedly Asian American perspective to the story of Korean American Jeanette Lee, aka The Black Widow, who in the 1990s was one of the most famous and popular professional pool players in the world. Liang describes the many obstacles Lee faced to reach success in her sport including childhood scoliosis and a battle with cancer later in life, as well as the racism and misogyny she dealt with throughout her career. Liang also includes a moving interview with Lee’s elderly mother who describes her fear that her daughter will predecease her. By focusing not only on Lee’s professional journey but her struggles with white supremacy and patriarchy Liang injects a bit of Asian Americanism into a doc made for a general audience.
Twelve Days, Hong Kong director Aubrey Lam’s dramatic romance had no edge. The story, about a doormat wife and her asshole husband, is an AITA post come to life. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for either character since both the husband and wife are ciphers with no interior lives or motivations. With all of the interesting indie films coming out of Hong Kong these days it’s telling that this sleek, vacuous and politically inoffensive piece of aggravation is what the Hong Kong Film Council chose to showcase.
The uncatagorizable hybrid feature Starring Jerry As Himself (dir. Law Chen) was one of my favorite films from the festival but it’s impossible to explain this film’s appeal without spoiling it. Suffice to say I found it entirely satisfying and completely unpredictable, with dramatic music, solid performances, and good cinematography that makes good use of its Florida location, where nothing is as it seems and everything is fleeting and unreadable.
Wisdom Gone Wild, Rea Tajiri’s latest experimental documentary, is a lovely, thoughtful, and surprising portrait of Rea’s aging mom and her progression into dementia. The film shows dementia as a blessing that can become a new language and way of perceiving and combines a gorgeous sound design with home movies, contemporary footage, archival photos, a spare voiceover and Rea’s mom’s own gems of perception. I especially liked the evocative use of midcentury songs such as Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and other standards from the American songbook. The film is a brilliant example of how to say more with less and how to have faith in your viewers’ ability to discern meaning without excessive explanation. To my mind it is really the best thing in this year’s festival. Wisdom Gone Wild’s freeform, improvisational structure, guided expertly by Rea’s accomplished, confident hand, results in a film that’s not afraid to take risks and make bold and surprising choices.
Rea Tajiri’s documentary is the kind of film that I want to see from Asian American cinema in the 21st century, and not just horny road trip movies. I hope that we don’t simply aspire to insert Asian American characters into the same old genre movies. I want to be confounded and surprised by Asian American movies, not shown the same stories we’ve seen before. Otherwise we may find Asian American filmmaking to be obsolete and irrelevant, as it becomes just another cog in the commercial moviemaking machine.
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