Charlotte Sometimes (2002)

Walking into Charlotte Sometimes means walking inside. It might be a bedroom or a bathroom, a car or motel. The camera lingers on the reflection of light through apartment windows, on flaking white paint, on a garage door, opening and closing. The characters too internalize their conflicts, waging silent emotional dialogues with each other and within themselves.

It’s only appropriate, then, that the film concerns longing, a most private affair even in the most public of spaces. First-time feature director Eric Byler grounds his story of sex, lies, and desire less in plot than in mood. Unlike most films about the lives of tragically hip 20somethings, however, this one doesn’t rely on Aaron Spelling melodramatics. Instead, its characters are imbued with complex emotional entanglements that sometimes make them victims of their own making, but without any heady self-martyrdom.

At the center is Michael (Michael Idemoto), a classic strong-but-silent type, with a perfect poker face. He dutifully looks after his aunt (Shizuko Hoshi), works at his auto garage, and lives alone in the duplex his late parents left him. He rents out a smaller space downstairs to petite Lori (Eugenia Yuan), whose sweet countenance and sex appeal make her the Madonna/whore object of Michael’s infatuation. Alas, Lori has a live-in boyfriend, Justin (Matt Westmore), a smug asshole who comes home from a yuppie job to fornicate with Lori, Michael hearing all through his thin walls.

Even more masochistic is Michael’s waiting up every night for Lori to take a prompt, post-coitus shower (read: cleansing), and then rap on his door. She drops by to hang out, oftentimes falling asleep on his shoulder as they blankly watch anime movies. Justin, despite being a cold, selfish bastard, is apparently not the jealous sort, as he retrieves Lori from her surrogate friend/brother/confidant every morning.

This twisted arrangement gets thrown a wild card with the arrival of Darcy (Jacqueline Kim), an enigmatic, attractive stranger Michael notices at his local bar. In contrast to Lori’s apparent naïvete and cloying passivity, Darcy is forward and worldly, an enticing challenge. She tells Michael on their first encounter, “Men don’t really want to be with me, they only think they do,” which might be understood as supremely arrogant if it wasn’t for the unsettling mystery that hangs around her.

Darcy knows she has Michael’s attention, but when Lori interrupts their nightcap, she realizes that he’s in love with his tenant. This game of hearts is played in the aforementioned interiors. Even Michael’s back patio feels claustrophobic as he and Darcy measure each other up. When Lori shows up, oblivious to Darcy’s presence, she and Michael exchange an awkward conversation, framed by his doorway. These closed-in spaces dramatize the characters’ inner conflicts. Michael, for example, is ostensibly a decent person with indecent lusts; with two women tugging at his attentions, his yearnings wind so tightly inside it threatens to snap.

In trying to choose between Lori and Darcy, Michael reveals as much about his own character as the two women’s. He’s infatuated with the literal girl-next-door yet he’s blinded to how Lori remains in a dysfunctional relationship while exploiting his own desires for her. Darcy is also a mixed bag, offering herself sexually while refusing emotional commitment. Yet, her cutting candor with Michael is at least a match for his stoic honesty. Darcy is what Michael needs, but he wants Lori. His conflicting attractions reveal his own frailties, yet his quiet intensity helps balance out his weakness.

Michael is the mirror opposite of James Spader’s Graham in Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies & videotape. Both men struggle to work out their own desires but while Graham pushes his video subjects to reveal themselves, Michael is all about restraint and silence. Idemoto could stand to be more expressive, but that blank slate also makes it easier for the audience to project their feelings onto him.

Michael’s dilemma recalls Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love. Like Charlotte Sometimes, it deals with couples whose mutual attractions are tempered by personal moral codes to which they hold firm. More importantly, both make effective use of space, whether it’s Wong’s cramped stairwells or Byler’s car seats. Of course, Byler’s use of digital video can’t convey the saturated warmth of In the Mood of Love, but the cool tones of Charlotte Sometimes suggest the characters’ detachment, from themselves and one another.

What’s gone unmentioned up until now is that the cast and director are Asian American. This is neither incidental nor unimportant. By coincidence, Charlotte Sometimes opens nearly a month after Justin Lin’s wildly successful Better Luck Tomorrow; I don’t think there’s been another moment when two prominent Asian American feature films have been released so close to one another.

The two films are entirely different in plot and pacing, but they share a key similarity: they delve into the muddled arena of popular perceptions of Asian Americans. Lin takes the whole model minority myth of overachieving Asian super students and gives it a Larry Clark makeover, while Byler explores Asian American sexualities, a topic that Wayne Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea addressed, but way back in 1989.

Lori and Darcy provide the primary vehicle for this exploration. Cast as opposites (the lotus blossom and dragon lady), they embody danger and desire. As well, Michael is a twist on the stereotypical asexual Asian male. He is never explicitly sexual, unlike his rival Justin, but he exudes a masculine charisma that is intensely sexual precisely because he keeps it bottled up.

Like Better Luck Tomorrow, Charlotte Sometimes avoids becoming an Asian American Studies 101 lesson. Race and ethnicity are almost entirely absent in any of the film’s conversations and while it’s impossible to remove race from the characters, nor is it their sole defining marker.

Audiences unfamiliar with the convoluted history of intra-Asian American romance won’t suffer for it. Michael’s turmoil of longing is a universal theme in any race, color or creed. That said, Charlotte Sometimes is an important step forward in a recent trend in Asian American filmmaking, in which stories are self-knowing without being self-conscious of race and ethnicity.

If the film is self-conscious anywhere, it’s in how much it withholds information from the audience that we know the characters are privy to. While Byler’s script is designed to keep us intrigued, at times it feels like he dangles secrets in the air, teasing us with their import. After a while, this deliberate fog feels a little frustrating. This is minor, though. The film left me with the visceral sensation of longing, lasting traces of Charlotte’s web of desire and desperation.