by Douglas Messerli
Gay Kim (screenwriter and director) 질투는 나의 손님 (Jealousy Is My Guest) / 2016
Poor Hun, the waiter in the small Korean restaurant in Gay Kim’s short film, Jealousy Is My Guest. We can see, just from the way he looks at Mr. Jang, his boss and the cook, that he has a crush on the man. And then, one slow night, when the restaurant customers seem to have all fallen asleep, Mr. Jang, almost out of the blue, offers to close up early and cook a special meal of fish cake soup for his young employee, Hun feels for the first time in years that he might get the opportunity to tell his boss what he truly feels about him—or perhaps to just enjoy the homage his gentle boss is paying to him.
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No such luck, for out of the
night comes Misuk, an unhappy female, insisting that she be let in for one more
drink, arriving in tears. Mr. Jang, it appears, is an inveterate
sentimentalist, a man who loves all his customers to such a degree that he
simply cannot let the drunken Misuk go without serving her up the soup he has
begun to prepare for his young employee.
A favorite of his, he
attends to the unhappy woman as she gradually reveals that her husband seems to
have left her, while meanwhile demanding that he make the soup spicier and that
she should be served up some soju on the side. Mr. Jang obediently obeys her
drunken instructions, while Hun grows more and more jealous and bitter for the
fact that she has intruded on what he has perceived as a very special moment in
his life.
As he cleans up the rest of
the dishes, he accidently cuts his finger and applies a Band-Aid to quell the
bleeding, without Jang, attending to Misuk, even bothering to notice.
Misuk swills down the soup
without even properly tasting it, and surely without even a kind word to her
would-be savior. A call on her cellphone reveals that her errant boyfriend or
husband is waiting for her at home, as she drunkenly rises and trudges off back
to where she has declared she might never return.
Hun exposes his small cut,
hoping at least for a little sympathy, and Mr. Jang offers him the customer’s
left-over soup. But this time, Hun makes it clear that he will not eat the
leftovers of his bosses’ kind deeds, demanding that he make up a new batch of
fish cake soup just to his taste.
Jang seems to know what just
what the jealous boy needs, agreeing to start over in their special evening, so
rudely interrupted.
Nothing is openly expressed
about a relationship between the two other than the fact that a kind owner/cook
offers his open admiration his cute employee, but anyone with even smidgen of
gay romanticism should realize that there is truly something sexual boiling up
in that fresh fish cake soup.
The actors in this modest
and understated melodrama are Ahn Dae, Kyum Bae, and Jinho Kwon Yujin.
Los Angeles, May 19, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).
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