


The word utopia sometimes gets thrown around to describe spots like Fire Island, and leaving the straight world behind really can feel miraculous for queer people. At one point, they all count down as the sun sinks over the ocean, culminating in Matos’s character pointing at the horizon and saying, “I’m proud of you, girl! You set!” The line is gay nonsense that, like so much gay nonsense, implicates the entire cosmos as ridiculous. They chatter with a believable lack of pretense. Noah’s “sisters” are diverse in race and personality, and include foolhardy partyers (played brightly by Matt Rogers and Tomás Matos), a bookish bear type (Torian Miller, acting mostly in shrugs), and a world-wise house mother (Margaret Cho, giving a layered performance of vacancy). Or rather, and better, it allows its characters to be funny. The script does not judge drugs or sex, but it is attuned to the comedown, and moreover, to the what’s next that yawns between highs.
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Whether portraying the prickly etiquette that rules the hamlet’s narrow boardwalk or the price gouging at the one market in the area, the movie mostly succeeds at making a subculture’s inside jokes legible to a broader audience. Here, sunlit meet-cutes can be oddly suspenseful and awkward, shaped by preconceptions and pettiness. Filming on location, Anh tries to document, rather than stylize or sanitize, the gay-male milieu of Fire Island Pines. Thankfully, the rom-com beats are just that: beats, against which a complex tune is playing out. Read: The shadow that queerbaiting casts on gay romance You know what happens next, and may feel impatient as will-they-won’t-they plot points-gleefully self-conscious though they are-unfold. He counsels his best friend, Howie (played by SNL’s Bowen Yang in a tender performance), to ditch his trad romantic ideals and spend their annual week in Fire Island hunting for hookups. He could also be, Noah’s alarmingly basic opening monologue suggests, Jane Austen’s “single man in possession of a good fortune,” except for the fortune part, and the want of a marriage. The film uses cliché and wackiness cleverly, as a cover for bittersweet realism.īooster’s Noah, a hunky and self-assured nurse who lives in Brooklyn, is the film’s Elizabeth Bennet figure.

Reworking Pride and Prejudice, director Andrew Ahn and writer Joel Kim Booster (also the film’s star) target society and the soul. Now streaming on Hulu, the movie scans as a gay-male Bridesmaids or The Hangover, but goes light on the operatic raunch and humiliation of the Judd Apatow canon.
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Joining a crop of movies and TV releases timed for Pride month, Fire Island is an example of how representation-that watchword of campaigns for onscreen diversity-can be a piercing, even unnerving, thing for the viewers it also lifts up. His friends-who, like him, are recovering from a night of drugged-up partying in their underwear-immediately hound him for gossip. In one scene, a character wakes up poolside. But it also captures a stillness in the air, an emptiness in the landscape, and an ambient sense of tension and futility. The smart new comedy does depict the New York vacation spot’s famously titillating amenities: outdoor dance parties whose rhythms echo for miles, ornery drag queens wearing cheery colors, physiques buffed and flaunted like Ferraris.

What Fire Island, the movie, understands about Fire Island, the place, is that paradise can feel like purgatory.
