Spa Night: Teen Angst in Koreatown

If you know you’re going to be wrestling with your sexuality, you might as well get paid for it. Essentially, that is the decision David Cho makes when he takes a part-time job at an all-male spa in Koreatown. It draws traditional clients from the Korean-American community, who see the health spa as a place for a good scrub and the latest gossip, as well as multi-racial, multi-ethnic customers, who frequent the establishment to quietly prospect for sexual encounters. Cho has a foot in both worlds, which causes him considerable inner turmoil throughout Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night (trailer here), which opens today in New York, at the Metrograph.

Cho is gay (most likely), but he is only just starting to be honest with himself and he is not about to come out of the closet with his traditional Korean immigrant parents anytime soon. Rather inconveniently, this is not his most pressing problem. Cho always assumed he would be a good son by taking over the family restaurant, but when it shutters due to his father’s mismanagement, it leaves his future in a state of limbo. Suddenly, his parents’ expectations change drastically. Despite their precarious financial position, they expect him to become an overnight academic achiever, who can score a scholarship to USC. Unfortunately, he does not have the necessary grades and test scores, nor do his parents have the money for cram school, but they enroll him anyway.

Although Spa Night has frequently been positioned as a sexual coming of age story, it is really more about the disconnect between first and second generations within immigrant families. Sexual identity just happens to be a conspicuous wedge to potentially divide them. Yet, what makes the film so poignant is the compassion Cho shows for his problematic parents: his mother Soyoung tenaciously clinging to her dignity and his father Jin slowly succumbing to shame and desperation.

In any event, it is easy to see why Joe Seo won the Special Jury Award at this year’s Sundance for his lead performance. He avoids all the easy clichés, playing Cho as a confused but ever so human and humane plugger. He also has the perfect physicality, looking simultaneously nebbish and bulked up. He comes across as a man between worlds in every sense. Both Haerry Kim and Youn Ho Cho thoroughly humanize Soyoung and Jin Cho.

Granted, we basically know where this Theodore Dreiser-esque tale of family tribulation is headed every step of the way, but the maturity and fundamental decency of the performances still makes it feel fresh. It is a sad story, but it is not bereft of hope. (After the first twenty minutes, most viewers will have the same realization: this kid needs to move to New York ASAP). Recommended for those who appreciate a coming of age story with economic and sexual identification dimensions, Spa Night opens today (8/19), at the Metrograph.

Koreatown on DVD: West 32nd

West 32nd
Directed by Michael Kang
Pathfinder Entertainment

I have been to Manhattan’s fashionable Koreatown many times to hear jazz gigs, but I have never been harassed there by Korean gangsters. It must be my easy-going demeanor. Of course, I was not frequenting the exclusive room salons that appear to be entirely mobbed up in Michael Kang’s West 32nd (trailer here), now available on DVD.

Manhattan’s Koreatown is almost entirely a commercial district, directly adjacent to Herald Square. It is where Jin Ho Chun used to manage the syndicate’s elite salon rooms, before he was gunned down one fateful night, while his lover Suki Kim watched from the window above. She saw it all, but as a “geisha” like salon hostess, she is virtually an indentured servant and knows only a scant bit of English.

Attorney John Kim will want to talk to Suki. He has taken on the case of a teenager accused of Jin Ho’s murder. His plan was to sign up a winnable pro bono case to build his tony law firm’s standing in the Asian community, eventually parlaying a courtroom victory into a junior partnership. As counselor Kim investigates the case, he falls in with Mike Juhn, an ambitious Korean mob enforcer who briefly succeeded Jin Ho as manager of the salon rooms, only to be sabotaged by his own impulsiveness.

Though ostensibly working his case, Kim spends an awful lot of time hanging with Juhn’s crew in salon rooms, playing Korean drinking games, and wining & dining Lila Lee, the beautiful sister of his client. Nice work if you can get it. Of course, it is also more photogenic than filing briefs.

Recognizable from the new Star Trek reboot and TV’s Flashforward, John Cho has a much more terrestrial role in West 32nd as the striving attorney. While he is not terrible in the part, his character is not that swift on the uptake. Though the film’s lead, the bland Cho is largely upstaged by some strong supporting performances, including Jun Kim, who brings the proper mean streets intensity as Juhn. Grace Park is also quite engaging as the concerned sister. The film’s real standout though is the luminous Jane Kim, who conveys a nuanced vulnerability as the distressed Suki.

There are a lot of stupid gangster tricks in West 32nd, but it does present an intriguing picture of a supposedly pragmatic Korean crime syndicate. Despite the subservience of the room salon hostesses, West 32nd is not a sexually explicit film (that kind of thing does not go in salons). Yet, it still holds a certain voyeuristic fascination with the illicit gangster lifestyle. At least on DVD (which also includes Heather Park’s music video for “Leave Me to Dream,” a song from the film), it is an entertaining look at underground K-town, with some quite notable supporting turns.