Ezra Li | The Variable / 2024

asked to be everything he isn’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ezra Li (screenwriter and director) The Variable / 2024 [9 minutes]

 

Writer and director Ezra Li stars in his short film as X, a racially ambiguous actor, obviously of mixed Asian descent—although not at all that obvious to the director (Peter Friedman) who has selected him to play the ex-partner of his stock-handsome leading white man (Ty Molbak) in what the director believes is a radical act of casting, a gay man come back to challenge his former lover albeit to lose out to the woman with whom his leading man has since fallen in love.

     X begins in a strange feminine costume playing the character as if he was told to employ an accent that sounds like it might have escaped from some Transylvanian-like Hollywood time warp. Obviously, along with the ridiculous script, it is working.

     Accordingly, the director suggests they play with other possibilities. Although he sees the boring Leading Man as having been perfect, he suggests X try it with a Spanish accent, along with an occasionally Spanish word tossed in. To him Li certainly looks Spanish and must, accordingly, speak the language.

     Miraculously, X transforms himself to be a Spanish-like drag queen throwing in mostly Spanish-sounding words in order to sound convincing, in the process actually making it a much more fascinatingly campy film that the supposed “hero” and his director might ever have imagined.

     Things still out going right, however, and the director and his casting director wonder if he might perform the effeminate villain as being French.

      Li refuses to even consider that alternative, suggesting that perhaps the character might be Asian. The director, however, insists that Li doesn’t at all look Asian to which the X replies, and what does an Asian look like?

     We perceive the director’s vision of an Asian in the very next scene where X is dressed as a Japanese Samauri warrior, eventually with sword in hand.

      Finally refusing to go any further, he dresses all in black, and now looking more like the venerable villain Fu Manchu demands a gun from props, aiming it at the hero. Nonplussed by lines that are not in the script, the Leading Man demands that he stop, reminding him that it is he, X, who must die.

     X changes the story, shooting the Leading Man dead.

     We suddenly realize this has only been in Li’s imagination, and he ultimately refuses to pretend to embody any figure involved with such a ridiculous production, while yet again losing a job due to racial and sexual stereotypes.

     Li graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Southern California in 2018.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).