My friend, Arthur Lazere, once told me about his experience when he joined a group of seniors on an Alaskan cruise arranged through the California Academy of Sciences. As introductions were being made during their first dinner at sea, it became obvious that two of the men were in an intergenerational relationship. One of the older men at the table cluelessly asked the younger half of the gay couple "What's a handsome, athletic guy like you doing on a cruise with a bunch of alter kockers like us?" With a very sweet smile on his face, the man replied "Having a fabulous time!"
Does youthful optimism have the power to bridge any cultural divide? In a curious twist of fate, three films from three of San Francisco's most popular film festivals depicted vastly different ways in which men and boys react to cultural challenges. Ironically, each film reaffirmed the sentiments expressed in Oscar Hammerstein II's lyrics to a pivotal song from 1949's South Pacific.
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Screened during the 2019 Frameline Film Festival, Hugo Kenzo's 15-minute short entitled Delivery Boy focuses on the interaction between an eager East Asian delivery boy and a British expat who, in the brief time he has been working in Hong Kong, has found himself becoming more and more like the kind of privileged wanker he used to despise. |
| Cheuk Piu Champi Lo (Chunho) stars as a young East Asian with a crush on a British Expat in Delivery Boy |
Several times a week, Chunho (Cheuk Piu Champi Lo) delivers an order of mushroom and leek dumplings to Eric (Philip Smith), who is usually on the phone troubleshooting one of his employer's problems. One day, after Eric finishes an angry conversation, he offers the delivery boy a weak apology for the tenseness of the situation. Hoping to start a conversation, Chunho suggests they both quit their jobs the following Monday.
Momentarily intrigued, Eric asks what they would do after quitting. Chunho excitedly suggests forming a band, after which the two men discover they share a passion for disco music. But when Chunho returns to Eric's apartment that night, he sees a sign on the door with an arrow pointing to the stairs that says "You're almost there." Following the arrow, Chunho enters another apartment where Eric's obnoxious boss, George (Mike Leeder), is hosting a cocktail party. Totally misreading the situation, George bullies Eric into giving Chunho money to go out and purchase cigarettes and vodka for the guests at his party.
The hurt look on Chunho's face sends a clear message to Eric. The next time he orders dumplings, Chunho's friend Jasper (Thisby Cheng) delivers the order. With Eric desperate to patch things up, Jasper drives a hard bargain before sharing Chunho's address. As the expat and delivery boy attempt to start over, the camera pans to Jasper, who is seen strutting down a street wearing Eric's leather jacket.
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| Thisby Cheng (Jasper) and Cheuk Piu Champi Lo (Chunho) in a scene from Delivery Boy |
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Accompanied by the Club Foot Gamelan ensemble, the 2019 San Francisco Silent Film Festival offered a rare screening of 1932's Goona Goona: An Authentic Melodrama of the Isle of Bali. Filmed by André Roosevelt and his son-in-law Armand Denis, the film seems like an exotic travelogue until the melodrama kicks in. In his program essay, Michael Atkinson writes:“Goona Goona reveals in graphic terms certain details of two separate cultures. The first, right on the surface, is Bali’s society of the 1920s and early 1930s, weathering but seemingly unfazed by Dutch colonization, and still in a state largely uncorrupted by the tourism that arrived (thanks to popular reports by visiting anthropologists like Margaret Mead). Since Balinese daily life entailed ubiquitous female nudity (bare breasts), we also get a taste of a second culture, America in the early ’30s, a naïve but restless middle-class heartland of narrow-minded churchgoers and (publicly) monogamous small-towners, modest immigrants, and buttoned-down Everymen to whom a stag reel would be a freakish object, and for whom a film filled with casual tropical nudity represents a tantalizing demi-pornographic itch that they could not scratch in any other way. That might be the most educational aspect of a film like Goona Goona, that reveals an America so sheltered and limited in its experience that the film’s utterly chaste visions of lovely Balinese flesh exploded in their heads as if a gloriously taboo gift from Satan.”
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| Poster art for 1932's Goona Goona |
“The male and female pulchritude on view is uniformly toned and young and unabashed (except when it is, on occasion, flabby and aged and unabashed). But the difference between 1932 and 2019, in terms of semi-illicit sex media, is like the difference between the telegraph and FaceTime. It’s a truism we know in our bones, even if perhaps we weren’t aware of it back then: the less we had at our disposal, the more electrifyingly delicious it seemed. The film is boldly exoticist, no-frills, quasi-informational, clumsily melodramatic, and most of all wide awake to naked womanhood (and girlhood, actually). Roosevelt and Denis, on the other hand, were expressly taking advantage of censorship laws stating, for anthropological reasons, that ‘native’ nudity would not be outlawed, and thus helping to establish a disreputable subgenre of sexploitation that sold so many tickets in the 1930s that the Hollywood industry and press gave the films the moniker ‘goona-goona epics.'”
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| Poster art for 1932's Goona Goona |
Though it takes a long time getting there, Goona Goona revolves around a melodramatic love triangle in which a slave girl named Dasnee is betrothed to a coolie in her village. When the kingdom's prince returns from studying abroad, he marries a woman from his own caste but develops the hots for Dasnee. The prince's sister feeds Dasnee a goona-goona drink (made from a narcotic plant), allowing the prince to rape the slave girl while she is under its influence. The prince carelessly leaves his sacred sword (or Kris) in Dasnee's bed. When her husband returns home, he figures out what happened while he was gone, becomes overwhelmed with jealousy, and murders the prince. You can watch the entire film in this video clip on YouTube.
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There are many moments during Fernando Grostein Andrade's family drama, Abe (meticulously written by Lameece Isaaq and Jacob Kader) when the first word that comes to the viewer's mind will be "formulaic." In this story of a precocious adolescent whose passion and talent is not taken seriously by his parents (and frequently drowned out by the constant arguments amongst his relatives), the glue that holds the film together is food. And not just any food. |
| Noah Schnapp stars in Abe |
As he nears the age when a young Jewish boy might start preparing for his bar mitzvah, Abe (Noah Schnapp) finds himself in a curious situation. His mother, Rebecca (Dagmara Dominczyk), is Jewish. His father, Amir (Arian Moayed), is of Palestinian descent. Though Abe's parents are trying to raise him as an atheist, any family gathering at their home in Brooklyn soon deteriorates into age-old accusations and recriminations regarding Israel and Palestine that make it nearly impossible to enjoy a meal. Despite the fact that each side of the child's family has so much to be thankful for, the older generations are bitterly wrapped up in their emotional wounds and political agendas. As a result, they barely pay any attention to Abe.
Abe's maternal grandmother died two years ago but, when he visits his paternal grandmother, Aida (Salem Murphy), she tenderly explains the ritual of fasting to him and helps her grandson understand that the word "semitic" refers to a group of languages, not any specific people.
Unlike many kids his age, Abe approaches the challenge of educating his taste buds as a marvelous adventure that allows him to be much more focused than his peers. One afternoon, while walking through an outdoor street food fair overlooking the East River, he is fascinated by a pop-up stand serving Bahia cuisine. After the chef, Chico (Seu Jorge), takes a few minutes to tell the boy about Brazilian cuisine, Abe starts to realize the potential for expanding his awareness of fusion food.
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| Noah Schnapp stars in Abe |
When Rebecca decides to enroll her son in a summer day camp, Abe hints that a cooking camp might be a good idea. However, on his first day of "camp," he realizes that (a) his cooking skills and knowledge of food are much further advanced than the younger children in the program, and (b) his mother has no idea who he is or what interests him. As a 12-year-old child of the Internet, Abe already knows how to use a search engine, find cooking videos on YouTube, participate in discussion groups about food, feed himself when left to his own devices, and use his phone to photograph dishes he has created so that he can quickly post them to his Instagram account.
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| Poster art for Abe |
Having quickly deduced that he could learn a lot more from Chico than from day camp, Abe lets his mother keep dropping him off at camp but, as soon as she leaves, turns around and heads to Chico's industrial kitchen to learn about food work from the bottom up. When Rebecca learns about his deception from the day camp instructor (Debargo Sanyal), Abe gets grounded by his parents: no more time spent working with Chico, no phone or computer privileges until school resumes.
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| Noah Schnapp and Seu Jorge in a scene from Abe |
After several weeks of being isolated (and with fusion food still on his mind), Abe asks his mother to let him do all the cooking for the family's upcoming Thanksgiving dinner. Researching dishes that are popular with Semitic peoples, he plans a dinner menu that will reflect both Palestinian and Israeli cuisine, and begins the meal with a multilingual prayer in Hebrew and Arabic. But when everyone at the dinner table starts arguing before they've even gotten to the main course (and all of his hard work is ignored), Abe literally throws in the towel and disappears. Only when people smell smoke and discover that the turkey is burnt to a crisp does anyone realize that he is nowhere to be seen.
A frantic search through the neighborhood proves futile until Chico shows up to work early the next morning and finds Abe sleeping atop several cartons in the chef's kitchen. After his parents take their son home, Amir and Rebecca realize that they need to take a good hard look at their marriage and the effect all of their relatives' vitriol has been having on their son.
The film's cast is clearly broken into Abe's biological family and his newfound cooking family. Mark Margolis shines as an elderly Jewish relative with Daniel Oreskes offering a more cynical view of life as Ari, the family's resident wise-ass. Tom Mardirosian has some tender moments as an elderly Palestinian while Chico's kitchen crew includes Alexander Hodge as Roy Wang, Teddy Coluca as Donny the Thief, Gero Camilo as Mandioca, and Victor Mendes as Cadu.
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| Chico (Seu Jorge ) and Abe (Noah Schnapp) in a scene from Abe |
Despite many moments when viewers may be itching to cue the next plot development, Abe does a solid job of depicting how parents who are deeply involved in their own problems can become oblivious to a child whose curiosity and talent they should be nurturing. Andrade's film achieves something quite intriguing by taking the standard formula for a coming-of-age story and making it both gender-specific and genre-specific while highlighting the value of a lonely child having the good fortune to stumble upon a mentor who understands him better than his parents. Here's the trailer:
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