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.
In his more recent film, 2019’s Driveways, grief forms the foundation of a friendship between a young boy, Cody (Jucas Jaye), and a Korean War veteran (Brian Denehey, in his last onscreen role) as the boy’s mother cleans out her late sister’s home. Even when Cody isn’t surrounded by mountains of his aunt’s belongings, the feeling of being trapped is painted across his face, only to be gradually allayed by an unexpected intergenerational bond.
Ahn’s films are, each in their own way, portraits of precarity. Fire Island gets to be one of emergence and awakening as well. It makes sense that there’s a more rousing feeling to this entry in his growing filmography: Fire Island has given him the opportunity to marry the arthouse sensibilities of his filmmaking with the mainstream influences of his childhood. The director’s first cinematic memory, he tells me, was of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, which he obsessed over as a child. “I wonder if it has anything to do with Prince Philip, or magical fairies?” he laughs.
Ahn grew up in a film-loving family, renting three or four VHS tapes to watch over a single weekend. This ritual performed double duty, giving Ahn a cinematic education and an American one, too. “That was a big part of my kind of education into American culture. My parents are immigrants, and I wasn’t getting it necessarily directly from them,” he says. “I was very fortunate to have an older brother who was really obsessed with films. We went through a Pauly Shore phase. We went through an Attack of the Killer Tomatoes phase.”
His tastes have changed since his childhood, notably after his first film class at Brown University taught him that cinema could be a form of expression, an artistic practice, and ultimately a career. Watching films like one-take arthouse film Russian Ark and Claire Denis’ homoerotic fever dream Beau Travail revealed to Ahn that movies could be “literary, in a way.”
“You have to engage with them; they challenge you,” he recalls. “It wasn’t about escapism, it was about confrontation.”
The approach Ahn developed to cinematic confrontation is unusual and subversive in a distinct way, less bombastic than Denis or, another film he cites, Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen; rather it’s reminiscent of something being unlocked, an awkward truth pressing up through one’s pores, breaking the skin. But as a person, Ahn doesn’t consider himself that confrontational. Well, save for one moment when he was showing his CalArts thesis film Dol (First Birthday) at an Asian American Film Festival.
At the screening, one Asian American audience member hid his face during the film’s final moments, which show a gay Asian couple embracing behind a frosted glass door, and then muttered to his friend, “Ugh.”
“I was so angry about it,” Ahn recalls. “And partially because I was like, You’re missing the ending of my movie!”
The man left the theater in the middle of the shorts program, and Ahn followed him out to ask him why he covered his eyes. The man gave him a “know-nothing answer,” but the experience, though scary, was “edifying” for Ahn.
“That was, for me, really intention-setting, [helping me] understand how my work could affect people — both, you know, good and bad.”
The Asian American and queer film festival circuit have had a monumental impact on Ahn as an artist and filmmaker. It’s in these spaces that he can engage directly with an audience for whom his work, and his specific perspective, is deeply resonant.
Ahn came out to himself and his friends in college and spent his early queer youth in gay Asian American spaces, like pan-Asian queer organizations and support groups. He would eventually come out to his parents via Dol (First Birthday). These experiences in spaces meant for queer people of color helped shape the ways his characters search for community. They also trained him, Ahn says, to look for “healing, perspective, and distance” in his work.
Despite the uneasy tranquility with which he infuses his films, Ahn excels in intense situations. Spa Night, which he developed at the 2013 Sundance Screenwriters Lab, nearly had to stop production. Investors unexpectedly backed out, leaving Ahn and his team to launch a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. “[It was] so exhausting; you spend so much time and energy just trying to get your film made that when you actually get to making your film, like you’re already a little depleted,” Ahn says.
But the challenges of his first feature were not just logistical — solving financing problems, finding the right locations, doing the Foley work for an opening door — but also personal and creative. “I was so focused on trying to define a Korean American culture within itself, as opposed to [one] defined by its difference from mainstream white culture,” he explains.
Ahn’s dedication was not for naught: Spa Night premiered at Sundance in 2016, winning the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Performance for lead Joe Seo and later taking home the John Cassavetes Award at the 2017 Film Independent Spirit Awards.
His speech at the Film Independent Spirit Awards noted the urgency of supporting “stories told by and about marginalized communities,” an ethos that also shaped 2019’s Driveways. The main characters in that film, Cody and Kathy (Hong Chau), were originally written to be white by screenwriters Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen. But as Ahn set about telling another narrative of foreignness, this time in small-town upstate New York, he wanted to externalize that feeling of otherness — that distinct discordance between the space and the people who inhabited it — and reflect it in the casting, brining in Asian American talent to play the lead roles.
Ahn ultimately translated that familiar mistrust between neighbors into a subtler cinematic language. Hence a white neighbor’s (Christine Ebersole) question — “Where are you from?” — carries a familiar astringency for Kathy and Cody without being overplayed. The neighbor’s grandchildren regard Cody’s unconventional masculinity with a sort of egotistical defiance, while gentle Cody finds solace playing bingo with his older friend. Cody isn’t explicitly written as queer, but Jaye gives the character a willowy quality, one of a wisp winding his way through the world, his body language hesitant in the face of machismo.
This question of defining an Asian American queerness and culture is one that Ahn became preoccupied with again while making Fire Island, but in a new way.
“How do we define queerness without having to talk about straightness?” he wonders aloud, pondering the way in which LGBTQ+ people categorize and regard each other. “I really loved that kind of environment to talk about queerness,” he adds. “There’s something about how queer people understand being judged. And so we very quickly do it to each other.”
Ahn seems to have an ability to extract that kind of vulnerability from his performers in a way that is both culturally specific but universally appealing. Early in the film, Noah, the film’s Lizzie Bennett, walks with his friends toward the Fire Island Pines home owned by Erin (Margaret Cho) where they stay every summer. The group discusses the hard choice between preserving their dignity and having sex with horrible people who probably don’t like them anyways. On the way, the friends pass an attractive couple, and as they do, Ahn holds his camera in close-up on Luke’s (Matt Rogers) face: Luke gives the hot people a friendly salutation and is, on that basis alone, rebuffed. The focus stays on Rogers, an actor and performer with an elastic face, and here it contorts and betrays something visceral, much more intense than your garden-variety social rejection. Ahn heightens this moment to establish the exact kind of environment he and Booster are ushering us into, and it’s the juxtaposition of that piercing disappointment and the search for queer beauty that gives Fire Island an unexpected immediacy.
Part of that urgency also comes from getting inside of its writer, star, and executive producer’s head. Booster has long described himself as sensitive growing up, and Ahn in turn is a “sucker for vulnerability,” so it was easy for the pair to collaborate.
In one of the first meetings Ahn and Booster had, Booster tearfully opened up about his dating life, which made an impression on the director. “I think that that vulnerability for me was so powerful and beautiful to witness just between us, and I immediately knew that this was something that I could connect to, like, here’s a vulnerable soul,” Ahn says. “I’m really drawn to that, because I think that’s my M.O. as well. And I also knew that it would be really powerful in the film: this is a character who is constantly trying to protect himself. It was comforting for me to collaborate with someone who understands the necessity and the value of opening up.”
Booster and Bowen Yang (the film’s Jane) are a bricolage of cracked armor and sensitivity, their real-life friendship recontextualized for the pathos of film. Ahn captures small gestures between the two of them, like looks and glances, but also a recurring finger tap, drawn from real life, that doubles as an expression of deep love. “They had such a hard time doing that on camera,” Ahn laughs. It's just one of many moments of gay movement that pervade the movie, an attention to expressiveness shaped by Ahn’s admiration for the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.
“Finally, I get this opportunity where I can portray gay movement,” the director tells me excitedly. “I remember we were talking about stunt doubles for the various pratfalls, like Bowen going down the steps for that meet-cute moment with Charlie (James Scully). And I remember talking to the stunt guy saying, ‘I kind of don’t know how else to say this, but like, he really needs to fall like a gay person.’ Ultimately, Bowen did his own stunts!”
Ahn wanted to ensure a comfortable environment in which gay gestures and expressiveness would reveal themselves naturally on camera, without having to “filter or portray anybody else besides who they are when they go to Fire Island.” Some of this involved some fun sense memory work: “It’s like: You’re on the island, you’re on the island, what is the feeling of being on the island? You’re on Molly, what is the feeling of being on Molly?”
Ahn comes to Fire Island, the real-life place, as somewhat of an outsider, feeling an attraction to the “age of the place: the planks of wood, so worn and weathered, the buildings, the boardwalks.” That the gay mecca is overwhelmingly white was, for Ahn, both a challenge and a project. “Even in this kind of space, the story of the film and Joel’s perspective [asks], How do we make this space our own? To me, that was very exciting.”
Fire Island represents not only a tonal change for Ahn but also a deepening of his directorial interests. If Spa Night and Driveways’ queer Asian characters shiver as they come into themselves, Fire Island’s protagonists rumble, are galvanized by their rawness, and, by the end, bask in possibility. “I think what I loved about Fire Island is that it made being queer and Asian feel kind of mythic, ya know?” Ahn says. “There’s something about how big our emotions can feel, how expansive our existences can be. I want to continue exploring that.”
Ahn is currently in the process of developing a film about a gay Asian party in West Hollywood called GAMEBOI. He sees his work going forward as a continuation of a lineage that can be traced back to, among others, Hong Kong-American filmmaker Wayne Wang, who has been credited with making the first widely-distributed Asian American film, Chan is Missing (1982), an inverted neo-noir that probes the meaning of Asian Americanness. Ahn, too, is passionate about his continuing quest to understand queer Asian Americannes.
“I’m constantly looking for more things, and in some ways each individual queer Asian American person is an embodiment of that. Every time I encounter a queer Asian American person, I’m like, ‘Hi, what’s your story? What’s your deal?’” he says.
But then, much as Fire Island moves seamlessly between poignancy and humor, the director can’t help but crack a joke: “My housemates here in L.A. have a reputation for gathering queer Asian Americans, like Pokémon. You just want to collect them all! So it’s a constant search for this intersection existing in people, in places, in objects, in art. It’s always going to be something I’m scanning the world for.”
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