![]() ![]() For me, that was the film.īetter Luck Tomorrow, now streaming on HBO Go, follows a group of teenagers in Southern California as they navigate high school. Of all the scenes in this scene-filled movie, this is the one that got me thinking back to Better Luck Tomorrow, and to the subtle shock of transgression I felt watching it 15 years ago. The camera is unhurried the moment is otherwise unremarkable. The light glints off their faces as they share a moment of relief from the melodrama around them. Constance Wu’s NYU professor protagonist, Rachel Chu, exhausted by the machinations of her Singaporean boyfriend Nick’s powerful family, lies in bed with her mother, played by Tan Kheng Hua. There’s a similar moment near the end of Crazy Rich Asians, the movie based on Kevin Kwan’s satirical novel that’s exuberantly storming the box office and furthering an ongoing conversation about representation in Hollywood. ![]() That visual, the unwavering love the camera gave Shen and Tobin, was significant, I knew. As the scene moved on, introducing viewers to the strange double-world of Justin Lin’s film, in which the cutthroat domain of teenage suburbia takes on the tenor of a mobster story in bitingly dark ways, my mind lingered on that light, on those faces. Watching the movie in a theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2003, I remember noticing the way the light caught their cheeks and hairlines and noses-the faces of young Asian American actors-with what felt like a radical sort of affection. Ben, played by Parry Shen, has soft, boyish features Virgil, played by Jason Tobin, is all angles. In the opening scene of Better Luck Tomorrow, the camera pans over the faces of two teens as they lie baking in the sun, in some backyard. ![]()
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