The Fencesitter's Dilemma

The opening scene in Randall Park’s directorial debut Shortcomings is a film within a film, in which an Asian couple buys a hotel as a show of power after being snubbed by a racist concierge. The scene is a direct allusion to the film that started the current wave of Asian American representation, Crazy Rich Asians. The camera zooms back to reveal the audience of an Asian American film festival clapping and cheering—except for Shortcomings’ main character, Ben Tanaka. The film then cuts to a scene where Ben tells his girlfriend Miko that he thought the movie glorified capitalism too much and only served as lowbrow entertainment that appealed to mainstream Asian American moviegoers desperate for identity-based representation. This scene serves not just as a preview of Ben’s bluntness but also as a meta-commentary on the question of representation in general: Shortcomings itself is the kind of indie film that a film connoisseur (or “filmbro”, as some may put it) like Ben—who manages an arthouse film theater in hipster Berkeley, California—would like to see.