Bedford Park review: Two Korean-Americans navigate family obligations and find love in a hopeless place
Bedford Park review
Cast: Moon Choi, Son Sukku, Won Mi Kyung, Kim Eung Soo, Jefferson White
Director: Stephanie Ahn
Star rating: ★★★.5
Love is worth the fight. Despite the incessant pressures from family, the need to prove one’s worth, and the harsh socio-political realities of survival. Love is the answer. Bedford Park, the wonderful new film from Stephanie Ahn, playing at Sundance Film Festival, understands this.
The premise
Here, we meet Audrey (Moon Choi), but there’s nothing wrong with her at the outset, except the intense disorientation of how her life has turned out to be. She is a Korean-American physical therapist who uses the app for rough sex, even if it threatens her ability to bear children. A chance accident bumps her into Eli (Son Sukku), who is hardened by his own circumstances. He is a local security guard who is finishing school.
Their encounter starts off on a hilarious note, but ends tragically as Audrey suffers a miscarriage right outside his New Jersey apartment and rushes to the hospital with him. She has not told her parents about it, or about the fact that she has been suspended from the clinic for three weeks. Audrey offers to help in return for this favour, driving him to work every day. What begins as just another interaction grows into something deeper.
What works
Stephanie Ahn frames this love story with a keen eye for detail and authenticity. Both Audrey and Eli share that instantaneous connection because they deeply understand what it means to be misunderstood. The sense of disorientation that comes with not being able to find a connection away from one’s home. How it not only affects how we communicate but also what we choose to run away from. Audrey and Eli, as well as her parents (played by the wonderful Won Mi Kyung and Kim Eung Soo), are superbly drawn out to reflect that passivity. Ahan’s image-making here is revelatory in how it presents America as a circumstance that washes over its protagonists in an unperturbed gaze.
However, Bedford Rock shakes under its own weight at times. Ahn introduces too many subplots and supporting characters, which tend to accumulate and inevitably squeeze out the central force of the film, which are the moments that are shared by Audrey and Eli. The latter half also becomes a little too neat and predictable, deliberately untangling the messiness which made the film so thrillingly authentic.
Bedford Park breathes and expands when the two lost souls occupy the frame. Son Sukku tones down to play Eli and gives a richly controlled turn. The one particular scene where he hides his face to sob is indelible. He is matched beautifully by Moon Choi’s superb performance as Audrey, whose grief and anger are entirely her own. When she finally breaks into a smile as Eli teaches her a wrestling move on the sofa, the whole frame lights up. There’s suddenly hope. You root for the two of them to take a step forward, to wonder how they can make life better for themselves together. It is always worth the fight.
