An American in Paris

An American in Paris

I have seen the second film of Eric Byler who is self-assured not only about movies but also about life, named “Americanese”. The characters in the movie are people who had a long journey called life and tried to apply what they learned from it into their lives. Their romances are careful rather than reckless; there is lots of bargaining. Betty tells Raymond “we can stay friends or be more than that.” It’s up to them. But they must decide and see it through with their eyes open. And with the knowledge that they have at the beginning.

This isn’t an Adult Teenager Movie where romance consists of candlelight montages and sailboats; no substance conversation between any characters is needed in those movies either. Don’t these people know that you need to be able to talk with another person for hours, days and years? If not relationship over before it even started! After watching ‘Failure To Launch’ then seeing this one I felt like I’d wandered into grown up cinema.

Raymond Ding (Chris Tashima) meets Betty Nguyen (Joan Chen) on a double rebound. He’s a San Francisco university professor, his first marriage ended in divorce. He lived with Aurora Crane (Allison Sie) for three years but now they’ve broken up in some strange sad cool way that isn’t quite over yet. They’re still “friends.” She kept their apartment. On days he knows she’s not home he goes inside and looks around like he’s searching for clues as to what went wrong or something. She knows he does this.

Raymond’s Chinese-American; Aurora’s dad was white, her mom is Asian; Betty is Vietnamese she tells him before they make love for the first time, “you’ll find scars on my legs.” Later on, they talk about that: “Did you get them all at once?” “Yes, all same time,” she says quietly. And later: “It’s not your job to heal me.” In her sleep she says the name Amy; Amy is her daughter by her first marriage, to a long-haul trucker in Houston. She lost custody because she messed up. Byler creates a character who was hurt in Vietnam, came here, had a bad marriage, left it, went to UT to start over again, now lives in San Francisco and is strongest at the broken places.

But Betty isn’t even the main person in this movie. It’s like a short story writer how Byler establishes his characters with a few words or brushstrokes. He doesn’t beat anything into us. These lives are still being lived. One of the things we learn that caused Raymond & Aurora’s break-up is that he never believed she really accepted her Asian identity as they were growing up together.

There’s a scene where Aurora goes home for a weekend with her white father, Asian mother and sister (who is engaged to be married to a black man whom we meet and like good guy). Her dad doesn’t want him coming to his retirement party; wants to save possible embarrassment.” “I’m not racist; otherwise I wouldn’t have married your mom” he explains himself . That’s when she realizes he is racist

He’s just telling her, he says this as casually as he can, that her dad thinks of her as white. In his mind, she tells Raymond, there’s a difference between him marrying an Asian woman and a black man marrying his daughter. “When you let something slide,” he tells her, “you’re essentially passing as white.” Until Aurora can embrace both sides of herself, Raymond will not feel embraced. So it comes as no surprise to him when Aurora shows up with a white boyfriend. “When am I gonna meet your new guy?” Raymond asks her one day. “You’ve met, actually,” she says. Three words that do the work of a scene in somebody else’s movie.

The movie revolves around the performance of Chris Tashima handsome without thinking about it playing an introverted man whose relationship to race is more observational than confrontational. He wants to be good and the breakup with Aurora hurts. With Betty (Allison Sie), the Vietnamese woman, he feels another kind of gulf: She does accept her Asian identity all right but when she looks at him she sees not an Asian but an Asian-American more American than Asian.

Which is true enough “I don’t read Chinese,” Raymond casually reminds his father, Wood (Sab Shimono). So Raymond is shocked when Wood announces that after 20 years alone since his wife died, he has decided to go back to China and look for a wife. Just like that? Why not? To Raymond marriage appears as nothing less than a mine field of emotional and intellectual challenges but to Wood it’s “not good to live without a wife.”

I’ve been writing as if “Americanese” were about nothing but the theory and practice of race in America. It’s not based on a novel by Shawn Wong (who co-wrote with Byler), it’s most fundamentally about people trying to find love and happiness in their lives. I’ve spoken with Byler a number of times since seeing his “Charlotte Sometimes” (2002), and I know that when he was growing up in Hawaii he sometimes felt like an outsider because, like Aurora, he is half-Asian. Standing on the divide, he opens his arms and his artistic imagination to those who would let it separate them.

That they are Asian in one way or another is a fact of their search but not a condition of it. It’s a funny thing about characters in movies: The more “universal” they are, the more provincial. The more specific they are, the more they are exactly themselves and the more we can identify with them.

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