My last trip to Fire Island was in 2019, a buggy, fraught week during which I felt woefully alienated from my housemates (by my own doing, not theirs) and altogether lonely and old and gross and tired. Such is the peril of going to a place like that—a gay retreat that promises the comforts and excitements of familiar company, but also holds the potential for dire jags of self-doubt. At the end of my time there, I got on the ferry back to Long Island and decided I’d finally had enough. I had tried to make Fire Island work for me, but I’d failed, time and time again.
It’s a lot easier to return there in virtual form, confronting an idea of the place from a digital distance rather than experiencing the real, vodka-soaked thing. Which is just what the new Hulu film Fire Island (June 3) offers to both Fire Island veteran and virgin. Directed by Andrew Ahn and written by Joel Kim Booster, who also stars, Fire Island is a romantic comedy of manners based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Given the strict and vexing hierarchies of Fire Island, Kim Booster’s choice of template is an apt one. All of Austen’s coy and prickly social maneuvering easily maps onto the particular gay ecosystem depicted in the film—interrupted, of course, by very modern bursts of sex and drugs.
The greatest asset of Fire Island is the island itself. Much of the film was shot on location in the late summer and early fall of last year, which gives the film a crucial specificity. Those of us who’ve been to the island before, for better or worse, may more potently recognize the strange significance of seeing, say, the Ice Palace looming large in a glossy, buzzed-about movie released on a streaming platform owned by Disney. But even if these places mean little or nothing to a viewer, I’d think they’ll still feel the enveloping pull of the film’s granular texture, the keen sense of place that so many movies—filmed on Atlanta sound stages or Canadian cities dressed up to look like something else—seem to lack these days.
Ahn bathes this thin, scraggly line of sand in aching hues. He and cinematographer Felipe Vara de Rey have captured the rosy haze of magical summer, kissed by warm sun and flecked with twilight darkness. (The film’s woozy, Instagram-filter look is perhaps reminiscent of the short-lived gay HBO series Looking—though I realize that comparison may read as negative to some. I mean it in a good way.) Ahn has set a lovely stage for budding romance and for the dull pangs of vacation malaise. Fire Island presents a world both sprightly and somber, befitting of this party mecca where even a quiet afternoon by the pool carries with it an anxious itch.
Kim Booster plays Noah, a handsome, bed-hopping nurse who is making an annual pilgrimage to Fire Island with his dearest friends. Howie (Bowen Yang) is visiting from San Francisco, where he has decamped to for a job in tech. Zany sidekicks Keegan (Tomás Matos), Luke (Matt Rogers), and Max (Torian Miller) have made their way out from the city, ready to whoop it up and offer cutting commentary. These characters are, as they might be in a novel, detailed for us by Noah’s narration, which also gives the uninitiated a quick overview of the lay of the land—a bit of probably necessary exposition given that Fire Island is not an accessible place for most people, geographically and financially.
Money is one of the film’s persistent concerns. The boys’ host, earthy-kooky lesbian Erin (Margaret Cho), will have to sell her beloved house after losing most of her money by investing in Quibi. (A funny evocation of the doomed streamer that was once meant to be the home of a TV series that later became this film.) That puts these friends in stark contrast to the rich guys on the oceanfront side of the island, snooty muscle gods who are, the film pointedly recognizes, almost uniformly white. As Asian men on an island—and within a broader community—that is often noxiously prejudiced against them, Noah and Howie must contend with being ostracized in a place that is, ostensibly, supposed to be a welcoming haven. The pain and frustration of that is spoken aloud in the film, but Kim Booster also lets it hover quietly, but insistently, in the subtext of many other loaded conversations.
Fire Island is not meant to be a panacea for this problem—it is, after all, not Noah and Howie’s, nor Ahn’s and Kim Booster’s, problem to solve. The film is instead a narrative about people navigating a difficult reality, trying to wrestle a good, fulfilling time out of a circumstance that sometimes seems determined to deprive them of that. That seriousness is in interesting dialogue, if not always perfect balance, with the film’s bawdier, raunchier dimensions.
