Amid the halcyon glow of a raucous underwear party, searching for the space between thumping house music beats, Fire Island moves like a wistful summer sigh, finding the meaning beneath the veneer of the so-called queer paradise.
Not in a ponderous way, to be sure: the new romantic comedy, concocted by comedian and actor Joel Kim Booster, embraces the gregarious acidity of contemporary gay humor, with jokes about Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, characters accusing each other of being “class traitors,” and a particularly delicious barb about someone’s boutique-label Speedo-style bottoms. Whatever its subcultural nuances, the film achieves the baseline requirement for its genre: it’s funny.
But Fire Island, Booster’s riff on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, also has something else rumbling within it. As the camera winds through planked walkways, spacious real estate, and sweaty, marble-bodied queers, it conveys a sense of outsiderness, as if the film itself has to wade through uncertainty to gain access to these people and this culture. It’s an apt visual embodiment of Booster’s character, Noah, who makes an annual trip with his friends to the gay vacation destination. As the film follows Noah’s friend group through a series of misadventures, Booster’s script zeroes in on the the sociocultural and political divides that are drawn within queer communities along lines like race, gender, class, and masculinity.
Yet Fire Island’s success in articulating these ideas cinematically is due in no small part to its director, Andrew Ahn, who imbues the film with a deeply felt sense of doubt, turning Fire Island into a droll satire of bad gay manners and a treatise on intracommunal otherness. For lack of a better analogy, Ahn is the secret hit of ketamine at the underwear party that gives parts of the film their buzzing, emotional, sad, out-of-body beauty.
“I think I’m always really interested in the secret sad moment you have in a super happy space, you know? Or what should be like a super happy space,” Ahn tells me over Zoom, wearing a baseball cap and displaying a trademark geniality that may initially seem at odds with the kind of contemplative dramas he has made in the past. “I love that the big Netherfield Ball in this movie is the underwear party in Cherry Grove, and I loved that Joel’s script found the drama within the swirling drug-induced euphoria.”
Fire Island follows Noah, his best friend Howie (Bowen Yang), and the rest of their crew as they seek to wash off the unpleasant interactions they’ve had with Will (Conrad Ricamora, the film’s excellent Darcy) and a coterie of rich white muscle gays they met at an underwear party on Cherry Grove. Both Noah and Howie want to make something of their time there, but find themselves caught up in a social circle that is simultaneously enticing and unwelcoming. The only handheld sequence in the film stays close to our lead characters, vibrating with the thrill of the hunt, quivering with a yearning that is not guaranteed to end in fulfillment. These moments of juddering longing, of an Asian American queerness trying to burst through and reconcile with itself and assert itself, are paradoxically crystal clear at communicating the instability and inarticulateness of identity. Rarely have such fraught feelings been conveyed this confidently.
Ahn, the child of a mother who works as an acupuncturist and a father who does financial consulting for businesses in Los Angeles’ Koreatown, is perhaps the best-kept secret in queer and independent cinema. His 2016 feature debut Spa Night, about a second-generation Korean American teenager navigating his identity and his future in the haze of Korean spas where men hook up, is a tincture of a particular diasporic queerness in which desire and uncertainty are at times inseparable. Ahn, and cinematographer Ki Jin Kim, linger on the lead character, David (Joe Seo), as he struggles to situate himself against other men, the austere lines of the spa’s tile walls, and, ultimately, his own reflection.
