Finally watched Gina Kim’s _Never Forever_(2007). I lucked out. I don’t think it’s been released on DVD yet, but the movie was released in the theaters in Korea last June (and such movies are easier to get in Korea than in the U.S.). It premiered at the 2007 Sundance film festival and was screened at various Asian American film festivals in the U.S. I wanted to see it when it was screened in NYC as a part of the city’s Asian American film festival last year, but didn’t get around to it.
Gina Kim is an interesting feminist film maker. Her takes on female sexuality and the body don’t always sit well with me, but I like her movies nonetheless. _Never Forever_ is a melodrama through and through. It was fresh to see Vera Farmiga paired up with Jung-woo Ha. The pairing, despite its initial awkwardness, grew on me. The genre of the melodrama helps me suspend disbelief and just go with the flow of the budding love affair. Gina Kim talked about influences in a couple of interviews. She suggests that she brings to the movie the melodramatic traditions of both the U.S. and Korea, represented by Douglas Sirk and the 60s Korean melodramas (The Houseguest and My Mother; gee, that made me chuckle).
I was reminded of Susan Choi’s novels, _The Foreign Student_ and _A Person of Interest_ when I was watching the movie. The fantasy around interracial romance in these works intrigue me. All three works feature romance between Asian men and white women. Kim talks about how she came up with the idea of exploring a love affair between a wealthy, married white woman and a poor, working class, illegal immigrant as a way of challenging the stereotypes of Asian men in the U.S. Choi kind of does the same in her debut novel, _The Foreign Student_, as gives interiority to an alien and “humanizes” him (to borrow from what one of my classmates had said when we read the novel in a class). What’s somewhat disturbing to me in the premise of these romances is that the white woman is always and inevitably a social misfit. In other words, they are women who are uncomfortable in their own skin. Nothing wrong with sensitive and unsure women engaging in romance for self-fulfillment (and aren’t we all flawed in our own ways anyway?), but the equation of the romance asks the foreigner fill in the white woman’s desire for security in love if not in society. Is it really that impossible to imagine a socially well adapted white woman falling in love with an Asian alien? This is a rhetorical question.
