Emily May Jampel | Clean Slate / 2025

i’ll take manhattan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Josephine Chiang and Joyce Keokham (screenplay), Emily May Jampel (director) Clean Slate / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

I’m up for a good black comedy any day, but recently I have watched perhaps too many so-called comedies wherein lovers and dear friends blithely do in the other for self-gain, works in which it is hard to even regurgitate a chortle let alone a full grown chuckle. Welcome to the Trump years.

     Josephine (Josephine Chiang) and Joyce (Joyce Keokham) are two non-binary friends (although the movie doesn’t quite satisfactorily reveal why it’s an LGBTQ work other than its press kit statements) who have moved together from California to New York to find acting gigs that might include an Asian non-binary figure.

    Writing in The Daily Californian, Molly Flynn nicely captures what these women face:

    

“On top of this all-too-familiar battle between success and friendship, Josephine and Joyce are entrenched in an industry that can’t even bother to discern the difference between two queer, Asian actors. As they perform their audition pieces, editor Alan Wu cuts back and forth between the two of them reading the same lines, reflecting the director’s inability to differentiate the pair. When the show’s director gives Josephine a callback mistaking them for Joyce, the short film fully displays the shocking expendability with which Hollywood perceives its talent. The endless machine of creation, production and money-making doesn’t have time to learn names and faces. Josephine and Joyce learn this the hard way in Clean Slate making their uphill battle toward fame all the steeper.”

 

    They both seem to get call-backs for the role, but when it turns out that Josephine’s is not really on the list, but her dear friend Joyce is, despite their friendly river-view chats and boba fortifiers, something in Josephine snaps. Joyce, clearly the more grounded of the two, has begun to debate whether it’s worth staying in New York just for the slight chance to get a small role. She tells Josephine that if she doesn’t land the role in her call-back, she’s thinking of taking the plane back home.

    But when, by accident of a dropped cellphone, Joyce discovers that, in fact, Josephine has been pretending to be her, and is planning to attend Joyce’s call-back, something’s “gotta to give!” And in this case it’s as simple as providing Joyce with a route to obscurity via the Hudson River in order to allow Josey a “clean slate” to impersonate her dear former friend.

    At film’s end, we’re left with only one very “would-be” actor standing, forcing us to wonder whether for Josephine it was worth killing off her best friend and, more importantly, whether or not it was worth watching this mean little movie.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).