Writer: Gorman Lee
Director: Jason Karman
Some films that are presented at BFI Flare often come with a single plot: a teenager comes out to his family and friends or an older person must learn to live without their same-sex partner. However, Golden Delicious, set in Canada, is choc-a-bloc with stories; so many that one was even left on the cutting room floor. Director Jason Karman suggests that ‘queer people do not live in a vacuum’ and so his coming-out movie is richly layered, but this comes at the cost of focus.
Jake wants a place on the school’s basketball team more for his father’s sake than his own. His father is a tough coach and, at the beginning of the film, he slams the ball so hard into Jake’s hand that it is covered in dressing for most of the rest of the film. But when handsome next-door neighbour Aleks shows off his basketball skills, Jake has a more urgent reason to make the team.
Aleks is also openly gay, and Jake is intrigued, secretly watching him through the lens of his broken camera. Jake though is engaged to Valerie; they’ve been going out for two years, and she has mapped out their future, starting with the universities they should apply for. She’s eager to have sex, and Jake reluctantly acquiesces.
This might be enough for a story but writer Gorman Lee gives complete narrative arcs to all of Jake’s family. His father is having an affair and his mother hates working in their Chinese restaurant (the Golden Delicious of the title) while his sister, Janet, is desperate to work there, cooking recipes that her grandmother used to make. Jake and Janet’s parents have worked hard in the hope that their children won’t have to take up the family business. They see it as a step backwards if Janet wants to work in the restaurant.
However, none of these other plots is examined in the same detail as that concerning Jake and his attraction for Aleks, and their determination to make the basketball team. There’s a wonderful scene in the dressing room where Aleks is very imaginative in the way he handles the school bully, and it’s refreshing to see that Aleks’s queerness is simply accepted by his schoolmates.
Karman is also interested in the way that social media influences teenagers, and here, in the key scene at a party, everyone pulls out their mobile phone to record the drama, emphasising the fact that there is little privacy in today’s world, especially for the young. People barge into rooms to see things they shouldn’t. If these teens could learn anything, it should be to lock doors behind them when they can.
As Jake and Aleks, Cardi Wong and Chris Carson are solid as the confused teens, and they are well supported by the ensemble around them. But it’s a shame that writer Lee wraps up every character’s story. Everything thing is too neat and tidy, and some resolutions ring hollow, especially that of Jake’s girlfriend. And Jake’s bowtie at the end is an unnecessary symbol of self-acceptance. It’s great to see East Asian actors leading a film, but Golden Delicious lacks crunch.
Golden Delicious is screening at BFI Flare Festival 2023 from 15 -26 March.
