Fire Island Review: A gay spin on Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice-Entertainment News – Firstpost

Still from the film film Fire Island

If you loved watching Joel Kim Booster’s stand-up comedy special Psychosexual (2022), you might enjoy his performance in the film Fire Island (2022) that is currently streaming on Hotstar. Booster has also written the script based on Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice (1813). The setting, however, is not rural England of the 19^th century. This is a contemporary American rom-com featuring gay men vacationing on Fire Island in the state of New York.

The historical significance of Fire Island has been documented by Esther Newton in a book called Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town. It was first published by Beacon Press in 1993. Duke University Press published a revised edition with a new preface in 2014. More recently, Jack Parlett has written Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise (2022) published by Hanover Square Press.

Knowing the history will certainly add to your appreciation of the film but it works on its own. This is partly because of director Andrew Ahn, who is skilled at telling compelling stories with gay protagonists. His film Dol (2012) revolves around a gay Korean-American man who attends his nephew’s first birthday party, accompanied by his partner and their dog. Ahn has also directed the film Spa Night (2016), which explores the life of a gay Korean-American teenager who works at a spa in Los Angeles to support his parents financially.

Booster plays Noah, a character based on Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet. Bowen Yang plays Howie, a character based on Jane Bennet. While Elizabeth and Jane are sisters in the conventional sense of the term, Noah and Howie are sisters in the sense that gay men use this term. They think of each other as family. They visit Fire Island every year as part of a group of gay men hosted by their lesbian “house mother” Erin – a character based on Mrs. Bennet, and played by Margaret Cho. Conrad Ricamora plays Will, based on Fitzwilliam Darcy.

You do not need to have read Austen in order to follow the plot of Ahn’s Fire Island. This film engages thoughtfully with many themes – the search for love and companionship, the tension between monogamy and polyamory, loneliness, deception, body shaming, and much else. The discussion around consent in gay parties has been dealt with maturely. Recording people in the middle of a sexual act, without their permission, is neither funny nor legal. It is also an explicit violation of someone’s trust in a moment when they are most vulnerable.

Booster and Ricamora have amazing chemistry, and so do Booster and Yang. Cho shines despite the limited screen time she is given in a film full of men. It would be unfair to say that they have all been cast only because of their sexual orientation. They fit the roles perfectly. James Scully plays Howie’s love interest, Charlie, but there is not much to say about him.

After Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) which had Indian actors like Aishwarya Rai, Nadira Babbar, Anupam Kher, Naveen Andrews, Indira Varma, Namrata Shirodkar and Sonali Kulkarni, it is inspiring to see many actors of Asian heritage in Ahn’s adaptation.

Booster was born in South Korea, and adopted by a white American couple when he was a baby. Yang is Chinese-American. He was born to Chinese parents who migrated to Australia. Cho was born into a Korean family in California in the US. Ricamora’s father is of Filipino descent while his mother is half-German and half-Irish. This casting is also important in terms of the statement it makes about racism in Hollywood and in LGBTQ communities. Asian actors lose out on roles because they are seen as not relatable enough. On the dating scene, LGBTQ Asians are either dismissed as undesirable or fetishized for their foreignness.

I wonder how Austen would have responded to his gay adaptation of her classic but I guess that does not matter because she is dead and gone. The novel has tickled the imagination of numerous storytellers in different parts of the world. Every adaptation, spin-off, parody or retelling further strengthens this novel’s unique position in the canon of English literature.

Chintan Girish Modi is a Mumbai-based journalist.

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