Andrew Ahn | Spa Night / 2016

LOCKED UP IN FAMILY LOVE

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Ahn (screenwriter and director) Spa Night / 2016 

Andrew Ahn’s dark coming out film begins with a family crisis: the small Los Angeles Koreatown restaurant they run, with only a few customers, is taken away from the mother, teenage son, and father, who have worked there together for several years, because of Jin’s (the father) inability to pay the rent. With little money left, the mother Soyoung (Haerry Kim) is forced to work as a waitress in a more successful restaurant owned by a church friend, while the father and son attempt to find day jobs, without much success. Although Jin applies for other jobs, his age and bad health work against him.

 

      What is even worse for the family is that, without money, they find the American Dream they had planned for their son, is almost out of reach. David (Joe Seo), moreover, is a middling student and does not have the SAT scores to get into the favored educational facility for such families, University of Southern California. The family can hardly even pay for the tutoring necessary to increase his scores so that he might get a fellowship for his necessary education. And when he does begin his lessons, he makes little improvement in his test scores. For David is, as one might say, extremely distracted, beginning to realize—living within a community where such a thing is unthinkable and even more importantly, unspeakable—that he is gay.

     There is no place, clearly, for him to turn to help make the difficult transition. His parents link him up with a slightly older USC student who has also known him from church—that successful restaurant owner’s son—encouraging David to spend a day on campus in that hopes that he will become more interested in the prospect. But his campus visit only confuses the young David even more, as his former “friend” apparently dorms with a young man who spends most of his nights at his boyfriends and the tutoring elder student spends most of his nights drinking and partying with girls.

     They all, including David, get so drunk that the males determine to visit one of the many local spas that dot the Koreatown landscape—places, as David remembers them, of close father-son bonding, as we see early on, when the two gently rub each other’s backs in a kind of cleansing process after their sweat in the spa.

       While visiting with the others, David has spotted a “help wanted sign,” and so goes to work, unbeknownst to his family, to bring in a little extra income. But as he gathers towels, mops down floors and, after work, joins others in the over-heated rooms and showers, he perceives another series of activities also at work in the spas, a world of secretive gay love. For the most part, he observes these erotic couplings—as if almost out of the corners of his eyes—with simple desire. And much of the film, accordingly, seems more voyeuristic than revelatory. But gradually, he too, joins in with more direct stares, an occasional touch of an older man, and dares to go even a further—while still engaging in nothing too obvious or salacious.

      He is, after all, aware of an occasional arrest when a gay man mistakenly encounters a heterosexual customer, and he has been told by the spa owner to report any “unusual goings-on.”

       The tension of this film is that every member of this family is a loving being, caring and meaning well for each other. Yet in that embrace of family love, everyone is also delimiting and gradually choking one another. Soyoung is exhausted from her long hours and hurt, surely, by her former friend’s orders that she dress better. Without a job, Jin, like his father before him, turns to alcohol and increasingly falls into a drunken stupor each night. David, locked up in his parent’s dream for him and his own whirl of inexpressible sexual feelings, is represented again and again in this often-slow-moving film, as almost torturing himself, exercising beyond endurance in endless sit-ups and long street-runs. Like the deep rubs between father and son in the spa, he can be seen in many sequences as clearly trying to rub out his own existence.

       When Jin returns late one night drunk and fights with Soyoung, she angrily reacts, forcing the now-completely defeated man to admit his failure in life. He leaves the house, with Soyoung gently asking that her son follow him to make sure he doesn’t attempt to drive.

      After a long prowl in the late-night Koreatown streets, David, following in his father’s staggering footsteps, finally takes him to the well-known spa, this time paying for their entry, where he puts his father into a chair to let him sleep off his drunkenness. David, meanwhile, undresses and enters the spa, this time encountering a handsome young man with whom he finally consummates, in no uncertain terms, his desires. Yet as the couple finishes their lovemaking, the spa owner enters to observe what has just happened, and David realizes the consequences. Collecting his now more sober father, he drops his locker keys off at the desk, attempting to apologize for his actions—which the spa-owner meets him with a stony silence.

        As David goes for yet another long run through the vibrant Koreatown streets, the screen goes black.

        In short, this painfully moving first film offers absolutely no solutions to the problems its characters face. It simply shows the situation, the near impossibility of coming to terms with such issues within a society that refuses to speak of the problems here reiterated. All we can hope, as the director has said in a newspaper interview in the Los Angeles Times, is that this film can serve as an opening of that now-closed conversation. If nothing else, this movie reveals that all cultural and social communities share the same problems and fears, even if some would rather pretend they not exist.

 

Los Angeles, September 4, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2016).

Moshe Rosenthal | שבתון Shabaton (Leave of Absence) / 2016

a night with the boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Moshe Rosenthal (screenplay and director) שבתון Shabaton (Leave of Absence) / 2016 [19 minutes]

 

Moshe Rosenthal’s 2016 short Leave of Absence is not explicitly an LGBTQ movie, but in its tone and implications clearly represents—through the encounter between an older man, Meir, and three teenage boys (Michal Bernstein, Chen Hefetz, and Ben Heine) who are determined to spend their evening frolicking in a pool together and filming their own fraternal-coded songs and antics, no girls invited—a symbolic male gathering with strong homoerotic overtones.

     Their invitation for the former teacher (Uri Klauzner) to join them is proffered at the perfect moment for the older man. Having recently taken a leave of absence from his teaching job, and after one of his two daughter’s had just attempted to lighten the shade of his hair—with disastrous results, turning him into a peroxided blond—he has just escaped from his dominantly female society into the night, on his way to get a darker shade of hair dye when he encounters the boys.

     Meir’s sense of displacement from his absence of his weekly teaching responsibilities, the suggestion by his daughters that need do something about his graying hair, and the simple realities of his uneventful daily life all remind him that he’s aging and without a sense of purpose he previously felt. Meeting up with the boys, some of his better students as they brag, determined to involve him almost as a mascot in their male rituals, is somehow exciting, certainly something out of the ordinary and apart from the female-oriented world which he now daily inhabits.

     At first, understandably he refuses, but they begin by insisting they take a picture with him, suggesting he will be missed by the one of the three students who hasn’t yet graduated. Already their actions seem to involve physical expression, one of the students asking “Sir, could you carry me piggyback,” as he literally heaves himself up upon his teacher’s back to have his photo snapped.

      It does not take long for them to suggest he be included in the video they’re planning for one of the trio who’s just enlisted for his military duty. When he demurs, they even jokingly offer him beer and drugs. But he trudges on to get his “Just For Men” hair coloring.

      On his way back, in a moment of compulsion, however, he detours to the pool they have talked about, breaking in through a cut in the metal fence. Peering through the glass windows he sees that there are now four boys, one photographing the other three, shirtless, as they seem to be involved in what appears as almost a ceremonial dance, each following the other along the side of the pool.

      Now inside, he sits on a plastic pool chair with a small wooden flute they have clearly handed him as one of their members as they sing a quite sexy song, the lyrics beginning:

 

                    From my little window

                    I see big things

                    and life looks good from here

 

                    Now everyone’s in rush

                    to buy a few more things

                    before closing time

 

                    haste, they say, is from the devil

                    and I am the little bunny

                    who is constantly late….

 

     Sitting, a bit awkwardly, in his chair, stripped to T-shirt and boxer shorts, he watches almost transfixed, observing their half-naked bodies and gyrating hips as they move around the pool in his direction. As the lyrics now involve the song-narrator’s desire to play the flute “and smile at them like a jerk,” he’s ready to pretend to play on his small flute as the lead singer, now crawling on his hands moves forward intoning, “blow, blow, blow the flute.” As he has been coached by the group, he puts it to his lips, afterwards wishing their friend a good enlistment, smiling as best he can in his confusion.

      The song (“Ya Hilili” by Lithuanian-born Rafi Perski), with its choruses of “ya halili, halili,” is quite homoerotic, particularly given its references to a “bunny” and “blowing the flute,” (presumably meaning, “sucking cock,” the singer’s preference to the consumer products the masses are buying). But Meir seems almost completely oblivious to the metaphors, if completely cognizant of the sexual maneuvers of the lead singer.

      Finished, they discuss the “weirdness” of the ending of the clip, and even suggest they give their teacher another part. He is perfectly willing to shoot it again, obviously now invested in their performance.  “I’ll do it better this time,” he states. But they insist it turned out just fine.

    Soon after they appear to be interviewing him on the camera, describing Meir as a family man and a history teacher, but by night “an incorrigible anarchist.” He laughs, somewhat uncomfortably. They attempt to get him to say they were best students, while the others were dumb, pushing him even so far as to admit that we would rather hang out with them.

       But Meir chooses a middle path, ultimately saying he would “hang out” with himself, a diligent student, an obedient being who would “go to school, serve in the army, work.” After some discomfortingly quiet moments, they ask him one last question—about his hair. They admit they couldn’t resist. But one of them quickly takes out some hair jell, runs to Meir, puts his hands to the man’s head and transforms his hair into a punk-rocker look. They offer him a marijuana joint, and he hesitatingly takes of short toke. The interviewer asks, “Won’t your wife be mad if you come back stoned?”

      A moment later they are all joyfully playing in the pool, while Meir looks off, seeing a reflection of himself in the glass of the pool walls, perhaps contemplating how all his life he has played it far too safe, been far too correct and conventional in his decisions, missing out on the joys these boys seem to have in each other’s company.

      He too takes off his shirt and joins them, the boys at first wrestling with one another, but gradually involving him as one rises from the depths on his shoulders while another appears on the shoulders of another boy, representing an eerie few moments of bonding, both generationally and sexually.

      A few seconds later, however, they calling out to him, “Meir, come out!” The police have arrived, and when Meir comes up for air, they all have abandoned him. Hearing the police siren in the background and speakers announcing the break-in, he hides half-naked behind a tree now outside of the pool enclosure. He steals a bicycle and hurries on down the road to home and society once again—but obviously rejuvenated and, perhaps, even transformed by his night with the boys.

      The film reminds me of Clu Gulager’s wonderful 1969 short film A Day with the Boys, also involving a dangerous encounter with an older man and young boys, although in Gulager’s film the boys are in junior high or even grade school and the danger is much more serious since it ends in the older man’s death, whose very willingness to consort with the boys hints at possible pedophilia. It also reminds me of a comment my writer friend Sam Eisenstein once made regarding the film, On Golden Pond of 1981: “Doesn’t everyone know that all an old man needs to bring him to life again is a day alone with a young boy?”

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).