Though you will see them swaying above a slight layer of haze from atop almost every LA rooftop, palm trees are not native to sunny, beach-side California, and neither is a strong portion of the city’s population. Korean American filmmaker Justin Chon, director/co-writer of the phenomenal film, “Ms. Purple,” is not indigenous to Los Angeles either; he was born in Orange County. The expressly assured way in which he shoots the LA city lights – or lack thereof – that color Koreatown, visually compress an insular life experience inside the confines of a larger cultural landscape, one that’s shaped the very identity of a person, planted seeds of unconscious emotional kernels, and defined who they are based on where they come from and what is expected of them.
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Los Angeles sometimes seems like a city made up of monochromatic viewpoints – people like to dismiss and define what determines what makes an Angelino based on their own personal experiences. “Ms. Purple,” somehow manages to compress a cinematic color palette of LA nightlife into a cultural point-of-view, the very concept of time into a capsule of vital essence, ethnic communication, and personal acceptance. Inspired by his own relationships with his family — his sister, most specifically — Chon’s film opens with a proud Korean father (James Kang) doting over his daughter Kasie (Tiffany Chu, the titular Ms. Purple), showering her with praise and calling her a princess. The story jumps ahead to when Kasie’s all grown up, caring for her bedridden father by day and serving rich K-Town bros at a karaoke bar/gentleman’s club by night.
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After her Latin American caretaker quits suddenly — maintaining that her father needs to be in hospice care — Kasie calls her estranged brother Carey (Teddy Lee), who has been ignoring her voicemails, begging for his assistance in tending to their dad. Their father soon goes into a coma, but Carey agrees to watch over him in order to take some of the burden off Kasie – who is refusing to put him in hospice and insists on bearing the burden of responsibility. Cleaning up around the house, Carey tries on his dad’s old clothes in his walk-in closet, finding childhood wounds and memories that have lovingly been stored away, including his sister’s plastic piano. Kasie gave up her music dream at a young age. Almost unknowingly, she has trained herself to be a comfort girl. Hospice goes against every fundamental value she’s been taught, that’s now cornered her. She was her father’s whole world once, so how can she abandon him to be cared for by strangers?
Desperate for money in order to pay off medical bills, Kasie starts seeing a high end client (Ronnie Kim) outside the club, regularly, but the life of a call girl/comfort companion becomes more and more demoralizing, and, more and more dangerous, as a lurking sense of toxic sexual subjugation casts a looming shadow over her life. In contrast to the tragedy of Kasie’s situation, Carey gets inspired to wheel his father around town in his bed (set to a very specific tune that shall remain unnamed for intended emotional impact); the juxtaposition in how the siblings go about ensuring their father keeps on living might bring anyone whose ever cared for a dying loved one to tears.
This sequence — as well as another that contrasts upbeat Latin music against Koreatown nightlife — evokes the specific style of Hong Kong auteur, Wong Kar-wai, with the film also uses making great use of invisibly adjusting its shutter-speed, swaying between different lighting exposure styles. One dinner scene finds Kasie and Carey framed between two lit columns, switching between green and red, every time a car drives by, the color and in-camera motion changes. It almost feels reminiscent of the night light pillars that line part of LAX’s arrival terminal. Nearly every composition relies on one specific color — or a contrast between two — for its aesthetic palette, and the editing is always seamless, never jarring.
Much like Asian American-driven TV programs, “Warrior,” and “The Terror: Infamy,” “Ms. Purple,” also uses language in an expertly nuanced manner. While never expressly stated, the movie implies that first language attrition has perhaps occurred inside the family. Kasie may no longer speak Korean fluently, but she did as a small child. In elliptical flashbacks subtitles are present in her scenes; in the present day, a translator helps her negotiate her availability to clients inside the karaoke club, where there are no subtitles for dialog. Carey, by contrast, still speaks Korean with the patrons of the cyber cafes he always seems strung out in front of; but when approaching his estranged mother when he spots her in a parking lot, Casey is so emotionally frantic that his dialog is not subtitled, as if his mother can no longer understand or recognize him.
The film also has a simple but profound romantic subplot between Kasie, and a K-club valet named Octavio (Octavio Pizano), who has witnessed the young woman get screwed out money by clients at the curbside and feels a sea of empathy towards her. He asks Kasie how young girls often are when they start working there. She tells him that she’s known girls who were 15 who pretended to be 18. This shocks him, telling her that his little sister is about to have her quinceañera, inviting her to attend when he realizes she’s unfamiliar with the concept. On their first date, she mishears the “v” in valet as a “b” sound, and asks Octavio if he also does ballet; it’s an authentic moment of miscommunication, of opening oneself up to the details and accents of different ethnic cultures, and it feels like an awkward and real first date.
Chu’s performance is astonishing. Toward the end of the film, Kasie wakes up on the couch, still wearing her dress from the night before. The camera holds position as she rises and moves out of the frame’s headspace, lingering on her stomach breathing. It’s a touching and tearful moment of exhaustion and inner turmoil that plays like a compound version of Rooney Mara’s pie-eating one-taker from “A Ghost Story.” Confident moments of such as this illuminate Chon’s keen sense of pace, filmmaking confidence, and storytelling composition. It’s a remarkable creative collaboration.
There’s a brief window at twilight, that brief time when the sun is falling and a spectrum of color scatters across the sky before the lights of the city turn on and all the dark secrets come out. There is a brief, fleeting moment, where the sky turns purple and different shades of violet cast dark shades in front of trees emigrated from the tropics when palm leaves become silhouettes. But in “Ms. Purple” time dissolves like an invisible barrier across the narrative. Light doesn’t hit the camera lens or strike the back of Kasie’s hair very often. More often than not, Ms. Purple is shot in profile and half shrouded by shadow. Being brought up to believe old ghost stories of a woman’s role: to forever hold the hand of man after the sun goes down. [A]
Here’s an exclusive clip from “Ms. Purple.” The film opens in theaters in L.A. on September 6, in NYC on September 13 and additional cities on September 20.