| HOME | FILM | ESSAYS | WUYUETIAN |
After finishing his landmark Asian-American feature Yellow in 1998, Chris Chan Lee left Los Angeles for TV and film work in Asia. His return to the city resulted in Undoing, a movie about returning from overseas and one that's in love with LA's film noir heritage. Once again, Lee examines guilt and betrayal, as well as the intersection of the straight-laced and the criminal Koreatown.
Coming home from Korea, to which he fled after a tragedy involving a close friend, Sam (Sung Kang) wants to get back together with girlriend Vera (Kelly Hu) and undo what he did to hurt her and others. Once he's done a couple of deals, he'll leave town with her and start anew. Naturally, there are complications, and Lee's writing and Kang's superb performance keep us guessing whether Sam really knows what he's doing. The supporting cast is excellent, too, especially Tom Bower as Don, an older white man who seems like a substitute father to Sam.
Undoing mercifully steers clear of the settings we're so used to seeing in films that take place in Los Angeles. There are palm trees off in the haze, but this is strip-mall-and-bungalow L.A., simultaneously older and newer than the shiny Westside locales of more conventional films. Lee and cinematographer John DeFazio bring Koreatown, a drab section of midtown made colorful by bright Korean retail signs, into the universe of noir L.A.
Unfortunately, until the final act, Undoing is too busy visually, and too busy being noir, to get us fully involved in the story. The filters, grainy textures, dim lighting, and rapid-fire still shots are relentless. Much of it looks wonderful, but added together it becomes distracting. However, once the characters' real motivations become clear and the film starts closing in on its not-quite-Hollywood ending, the power of the story and of Kang's performance stand out in sharp relief.