Review: A case of the blahs with ‘Bedford Park’
Stephanie Ahn’s Sundance drama follows a suspended physical therapist into a listless romance that never finds its pulse.
Bedford Park premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and screened Oct. 26 at the Denver Film Festival. Stephanie Ahn’s bleak character study is a rumination on the experience of Korean Americans in the New York area, with a thirtysomething woman at the center of the action.
Moon Choi plays Audrey, a physical therapist who’s been suspended from her job and who returns to her parents’ home after her mother (Won Mi-kyung) is slightly injured in a car accident. In flashbacks, we see that her father (Kim Eung-soo) was a not-so-nice drunk back in the day, and he’s not much improved now. But while these simmering family dynamics inform some of the scenes, the real story is about Audrey and the other party in the car accident: a grim fellow named Eli (Son Suk-ku).
When Audrey and her mother go to his crappy home in New Jersey to settle the matter outside the world of auto insurance, it doesn’t go well. Audrey winds up smearing the grapes from their conciliatory fruit basket on his window as he tells them to fuck off. Audrey also has casual sexual encounters and a history of miscarriages, and when she returns a second time to hassle Eli about the car repairs, she has another one mid-argument.
She gets him to help her out and ends up offering to drive him around while his own beater car is still in the shop. This in turn leads to a remarkably uninspiring love affair, with Audrey brushing off other, perhaps more eligible suitors from her mother’s circle to take up with this guy.
The problem is that Audrey and Eli have zero chemistry, and neither offers the other anything of value. In the absence of anything resembling sparks, we’re left with a blah romance in a blah story about blah people.
There are some places that hold out hope of something to juice the story. There’s the disabled man in the neighborhood whom Eli goes out of his way to help, as well as a subplot about his job as a security guard at the mall, where he helps his booty-call acquaintances shoplift. But a more important subplot, about the young daughter he’s estranged from, gets short shrift as the film shuffles in an annoying half-brother and a possible return to a coaching job in Florida.
In the end, Bedford Park stands as a series of vaguely connected scenes that never resolve into a tangible arc. The filmmaker may want to tell a story about modern ennui in a particular immigrant community, but along the way she forgets to give the characters stakes we care about or a compelling narrative to hold it all together.
