There are a hundred coming-of-age love stories like Alice Wu’s The Half of It. There are also very few. It delicately walks the line of familiar and new with impressive grace as it tells the story of a teenage love triangle in a small conservative Washington town. At a base level it’s the latest in a trend of classical literature being appropriated for a contemporary high school setting, in this case Cyrano de Bergerac, right down to the lead character actually writing physical letters. But the movie does display a deeper meaning in that, using the familiar story to explore maturely new ideas of love and relationships.
Of course right off the top it all hinges on Ellie Chu, not a large-nosed French cadet, but an equally poetic introverted seventeen year old from an immigrant family, played with aplomb by Leah Lewis. She’s a booksmart girl who makes money by doing her classmates’ homework for them, and also happens to be closeted, with a crush on the popular girl Aster (Alexxis Lemire). Immediately, you’re settled into her head space, not just with the conventional establishing voiceover, but in the way the movie is broken up by acts distinguished through inter-titles of famous musings from the likes of Sartre, Camus, and Wilde, representative of both her intellectualism and her relevant strain of contemplation. You’re privy to the way her mind works and how she sees the world. Even in the instances of her absence, the film feels very subjective, very personal, and without needing to bludgeon you with exposition or explanation. Wu’s script allows her to simply express what comes across as natural aching poetic romanticism on paper. Lewis’ performance deserves a hell of a lot of credit though; carrying much of the film as she reflects every teenage experience of unrequited love, the difficulties of being an outsider in a drearily homogeneous environment, and conveys the impassioned weight of the correspondences she takes up with Aster in the name of Paul (Daniel Diemer).
Theirs is the films’ most enriching relationship, an unlikely but strong friendship that develops between this insecure jock with a passion for food and Ellie the wordsmith. As they spend more time together and learn more about one another, they impress positively on each others’ lives -whether in Paul being driven by Ellie to push himself intellectually by reading The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro’s themes of longing are regularly brought up), or in Ellie being encouraged by Paul to perform in the school talent show, putting herself out there in a way she’d never been before. For a movie that opens on an ancient Grecian concept and directly quotes Plato, it’s maybe too appropriate that the film would be a kind of celebration of platonic love. Ultimately, we’re shown a really healthy friendship between a queer girl and a straight guy that is allowed to be loving if not intimate. And it’s very refreshing to see that kind of relationship, which I can personally attest to the validity of, represented well.
One of the cardinal themes of the film in fact is the legitimacy of different kinds of love, needlessly spelled out though it may be, and demonstrated not just in the relationships the three leads have with each other (independent of their letters, Ellie and Aster form a friendship of their own late in the film), but in the familial ties and obligations Ellie feels for her solitary father (Collin Chou), and she and Paul do for their deceased relatives, despite their wanting very different things. Ellie’s isolation and feelings of entrapment in this backwater town are very visceral, her discomfort with how heavy religion is in this community (Aster is a pastors’ daughter) and how normal racist taunts towards her are. Though it’s certainly a less pronounced element of this film than in other recent Asian-fronted vehicles, Ellie’s racial identity is significant. It’s what sets her apart more than her personality, the antisocial tendencies of which possibly stem from an ostracization as the only person of colour in this town. Her being both Asian and queer in a place where neither seems wholly welcome is an underlying context for that immense chasm she sees between herself and Aster. Yet the film normalizes things such as her casual Mandarin in conversations with her dad and their penchant for watching movies together to help him with his English -which is quite fun for a movie fan. The films we see run the gamut from Casablanca to The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday to City Lights and even Wings of Desire; though the most important is a scene from the Hindi thriller Ek Villain, commented on by Ellie and Paul with a nice pay-off.
Not everything translates so seamlessly. As far as romantic-comedies go, this one doesn’t check that second box all that much, not being particularly funny. There are awkward scenes and a tendency for the script to meander, and there is one choice in the ending that rings false. However the stuff that might be the most tenuous is often the most successful: the theatrics, the sentimentality of teenagers, the misunderstandings -they’re all good. And Wu’s story particularly siphoned through Lewis’ performance holds it all together.
We seem to be in a renaissance of Asian-American cinema, with this film coming so soon off the heels of movies like The Farewell, Always Be My Maybe, and Tigertail (the latter two also Netflix originals and all very good movies). Obviously The Half of It is significant for its intersection of Asian and queer representation, just as Wu’s last film, 2005’s Saving Face was. But the many facets of that cultural identity amount to a wide pool that we’ve only just dipped our toes into. And I want to go for a swim.
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