The Yellow Peril

Margaret Yang in Rushmore still ranks as modern Hollywood’s best-known, most endearing Asian-American character. As played by the actress Sara Tanaka, Margaret Yang was the sweet, brainy, barely noticed Asian girl who is usually on the margins of movie consciousness (as well as high school cliques). It was Wes Anderson’s peculiar whimsy in Rushmore to bring her type inside the loop so that her sweetness and braininess could be recognized; she was seen in a way that accounted for one’s understanding of Chinese teens’ marginality–as an equal, though less anguished, match for Jason Schwartzman’s innocent, displaced Max Fischer. In Better Luck Tomorrow, Chinese-American teens resembling ace student Margaret Yang finally command the screen, but the effect is different. Margaret Yang’s individuality–which was her charm–is traded for wannabe hipster antics.

If director-writer Justin Lin’s intention was to show the all-American yearning inside these ethnic teens, he fails by rendering them no more than stereotypical wannabes. This dreadful, pandering movie essentially falsifies the ethnic teen experience. Ben Manibang (Parry Shen), a college-bound senior who wears a Freddie Prinze, Jr. haircut, gets bored with academic excellence and falls in with the wanton exploits of four other Asian youths. Along with saturnine Virgil (Jason Tobin), geeky Han (Sung Kang) and cynical Daric (Roger Fan), they make the least feral group of juvenile delinquents you’ve ever seen. Maybe Lin (and co-writers Ernesto M. Foronda and Fabian Marquez) haven’t listened to enough Wu-Tang or Eminem CDs. Their characters are like business school majors trying out for the NBA–more likely to manage keyboards than become party-crashing, murderous toughs. And the girl among them, Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung)–both cheerleader and honor student–merely out-flirts and out-bitches Margaret Yang, setting up rivalry between Ben and playboy Steve (John Cho). Yet Stephanie–a name redolent of assimilation (she’s an adopted Oriental)–isn’t nearly as credible as Margaret Yang. Lin’s idea of a Southern California femme fatale–like his notion of high school bad boys–owes more to the pretenses of a film like American Beauty than to actual teen recklessness, rebellion and hormonal explosion.

"It was suburbia, we had nothing better to do… Our grades were our excuse," is the way Ben explains his group’s attraction to crime. Give us a break, it’s 2003! This lame rejection of middle-class values doesn’t ring true to the ideals we know are repeatedly impressed upon most Asian-immigrant kids as a principle of their culture and tradition. Oddly egotistical, Lin would have audiences believe that Asian youth are natural pedants; that their scholastic behavior isn’t the result of family indoctrination–the conscientiousness to which white and black youth are inured. And yet Ben and his gang reject the Asian-American virtues of overachievement as though no one ever told them about the risks in behaving just like all the other young American wastrels.

In Lin’s sly plotting, the story of Ben’s corruption is structured around his diligent study. Concentrating on raising his SATs, he vows to learn a new word a day. Each multisyllabic koan–such as "punctilious," "quixotic," "temperance"–sets up a scene in which the gang’s behavior perverts the word’s meaning. Ben is obsessed with learning words, not concepts or virtues, but Lin is only interested in the facile irony, not the spiritual result. Lin suggests that teenage license is the finest path Ben and his friends can follow. (I was alarmed to read Roger Ebert in the film’s press kit defend Chinese-Americans’ right to demonize themselves. It’s a new low in advocacy criticism. I prefer the hilarious utopia Missy Elliott describes–including Chinese–in the hilarious "all types of boys" verse of "Work It.")

Truth is, American movies are predicated on teenage audience taste. (Variety recently reported that last year’s pre-teen and teenage leisure spending amounted to $250 billion.) White and black kids have their cliche pigeonholes that Hollywood eagerly endorses–disregarding any resulting promotion of teenage ruination. It’s plain freaky to see Asian-American teens slide into those same pre-sold slots. Better Luck Tomorrow offends mostly because it doesn’t recognize Asian teens’ desperation to be hip as a result of cultural racism. Lin–perhaps having swallowed all of MTV’s seductive advertising (the film is a production of MTV Films)–probably thinks he’s zeroed in on some secret Asian-American ambition. But he never questions it; he accepts the aberrant susceptibility that Asian kids have for the commercialized enticements of American pop culture. (This is Hong Kong decadence come home to roost.) The perverse pleasure he gets out of showing Chinese-American teens acting black (one calls another "nigga") and antisocial (the boys resent participating in a canned-food drive and cleaning up a local beach) covers up his participation in today’s teen exploitation. That’s why no parents are on view (simply doing away with the parental influence a youth-pimp like Larry Clark falsifies) and why Ben’s disaffection inevitably leads to thrill-killing.

A movie that dared to explore the tragedy of Asian-American academics (through an updated Loeb-Leopold story) might have had genuine interest as a portrait of self-destruction. But Lin doesn’t risk ethnic self-questioning or demonizing. The violence in Better Luck Tomorrow is stylized in order to be enjoyed. (Steve’s murder is shown in a flashy 360-degree pan.) It’s shock without awe. Plans for the murder occur haplessly, evoking the portrayal of heedless youth in Godard’s 1964 Band of Outsiders (as well as that film’s influence on sensei Quentin Tarantino) but the way Lin endows Asian youth with the hippest visual style (extreme close-ups and hyper-intense sound-effects) attempts to make this gang a Band of Insiders.

Film enthusiasts will reject Better Luck Tomorrow’s fashionable nihilism out of hand. Gregg Araki’s Nowhere portrayed Asian and bi-racial youth as automatic heirs to pop dissolution and alienation. Plus, Nowhere was funnier, sexier and dared to be poignant. No doubt Lin’s title refers to the stylish violence in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, but there’s another Gregg Araki title that is actually more fitting: Totally Fucked Up.

Better Luck Tomorrow Directed by Justin Lin

Lilya 4-Ever

In Godard’s Breathless, the duplicitous heroine (Jean Seberg) has a narcissistic moment in which she wonders: "Am I unhappy because I’m not free? Or am I not free because I’m unhappy?" To praise Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever is to forget Godard’s social and spiritual insight. Critics have fallen for Moodysson’s version of youth-pandering at the risk of indulging teen-cult mindlessness. Though Lilya 4-Ever’s weepy story–a teenage Russian girl (Oksana Akinshina) abandoned by her mother winds up a victim of white slavery in Sweden–is convincingly grim, it falls apart upon reflection. Moodysson doesn’t honestly account for Lilya’s choice to rebel (and thus fall to ruin) nor does he detail the specifics of the newly capitalist Soviet Union that limit her freedom of choice. Despite the harsh, unpretty settings and irritating eruptions of Eurodisco and Rammstein on the soundtrack, Moodysson is primarily interested in sentimentalizing teenage disaffection. That’s been his stock-in-trade since his debut feature Show Me Love about teenage lesbians (predating the Russian pop duo tATu) and Together, his puzzlingly overrated look back at a 70s Swedish commune.

Lilya 4-Ever doesn’t hold its heroine to account for her life as Godard did because Moodysson keeps to a lachrymose view of Westernization. You’d have to be a naive teenager to fall for the angelic conversations between Lilya and her only friend, a younger boy abused by his own parents. These actors’ rapport is convincing, but Moodysson pushes it so far that the movie loses a detached, analytic view of new Russia and heartless Europe. It becomes as fatuous as a Christina Aguilera record. Moodysson isn’t sufficiently tough about modern alienation. And though you can go back to Godard for the high standard, the circumstance Lilya faces involving unemployment and disenfranchisement was more recently told by the Dardenne brothers in La Promesse, a farther-reaching tale of trans-cultural despair and empathy. It may be a tragic new global fact, but the Dardenne brothers expressed it more credibly.

Lilya 4-Ever Directed by Lukas Moodysson