By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Shirley Chen, Mckenna Grace and Amelie Zilber
Written and directed by Amy Wang
Bleecker Street
The comparison hinted in that headline may be overly easy, but it’s inescapable. Coralie Fargeat’s THE SUBSTANCE was such a galvanizing marriage of body horror and social critique that any similarly themed films to follow had some big shoes to fill. Even judged by its individual goals, though, SLANTED doesn’t quite succeed in its combination of meaning and the macabre. Where the latter is concerned, its visceral component is so mild that the film barely qualifies as body horror.
SLANTED is more successful, in its early going, at conveying the more psychological trauma of otherness in childhood. Writer/director Amy Wang introduces her Chinese-American protagonist Joan Huang as a young girl (Kristen Cui) navigating her first day at a new school in 2015, where she’s mocked and dismissed by her classmates. When she subsequently visits her dad Roger (Fang Du) at his job as a high-school janitor, she wanders into a prom in progress and is transfixed by the crowning of the queen, and that honor becomes her life’s ambition. A decade later, as a teenager (Shirley Chen), she carries a large binder devoted to the subject and idolizes popular blonde Olivia (Amelie Zilber), who’s already a successful influencer and rising actress.
Joan has been rebelling in small ways against her Chinese identity, like using a smartphone filter to make her features more Caucasian, which leads to targeted DMs by a company called Ethnos, Inc. Visting their offices, Joan is sold by slick-talking co-founder Willie Singer (R. Keith Harris) on an “ethnic modification” process that will help her overcome “the injustice of being a person of color in this country.” In other words, in just two hours, Ethnos can turn Joan white.
The particulars of how this transition can be achieved in such a short time aren’t addressed (even John Woo’s FACE/OFF better defined a similar process), nor are the practical ramifications of how this will impact Joan’s life, school attendance, etc. All that matters to Joan and the film is if and how, in her new guise as Jo Hunt (now played by Mckenna Grace), she will be accepted into Olivia’s inner circle and realize her prom-queen dreams. There are scenes, which are the movie’s most affecting, in which her mom Sofia (Vivian Wu) and Roger confront Joan/Jo about her decision and abandonment of her culture. Occasional observations along the way land as well, as when we see Roger in his current employment cleaning an upscale gallery—higher-class surroundings, same humble job. Quite a bit of SLANTED, though, plays as a step removed from what the reality of a situation like Joan/Jo’s might be.
The film does contain gestures toward heightened satire, such as glimpses of überpatriotic business signage (’Merica Lite Beer, etc.) and a school hallway dominated by towering portraits of past prom royalty. On the other hand, an amusing “It’s Good to Be White” music-video interlude proves to be a dream and not part of the movie’s actual pop-culture landscape. And for the most part, Wang’s evident intention to create an incisive sociological statement keeps SLANTED grounded in a straightforward reality that’s at odds with its fantastical basic premise. Beyond that, its heroine’s zeal for the prom honor above all else in her life risks making her seem as shallow and self-centered as the white mean girls, and if that was the point, Wang doesn’t push it nearly hard enough. Instead of interrogating Joan’s literally life-altering decision, SLANTED just takes it at (pardon the expression) face value.
There are eventual complications, including Jo’s new face starting to physically fall apart, which nudges SLANTED toward genre territory without ever reaching it. Most of the developments are common to those seen in any number of teen dramas and comedies about girls who abandon their friends and true selves in order to fit in, and that’s a shame, given that SLANTED’s setup could have been spun off into so much more. There is one major development toward the film’s end that adds quite a bit more resonance to the central themes, and would have been much more beneficially introduced earlier, and built upon from there.
SLANTED features sensitive performances by its two leads, and strong support by Wu and Fang as parents dealing with a child who seems determined to abandon both them and their heritage. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, on the other hand, is underused as Joan’s sensible bestie, who gets left to the side as Joan ascends the social ladder. Wang comes up with some visual gambits that work, including the presentation of Joan’s life in boxy Academy ratio that expands to widescreen once she becomes Jo, yet the movie overall is undermined by its uncertain combination of tone and content.
