locked up in family love
by Douglas Messerli
Andrew Ahn (writer and director) Spa Night / 2016
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
their 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
boyfriend’s 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 rub each other’s backs in a kind of
cleansing process after their sweat in the spa.
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.
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 do not exist.
Los Angeles, September 4, 2016
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