Ms. Purple is a less than ninety-minute movie about Kasie, a daughter struggling to care for her dying father and with her parents’ legacies. She reaches out to her brother, Johnny, for help. Her brother responds ambivalently because he never came to terms with his relationship with their dad, but also realizes on some level that his sister shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of his father’s actions. Will the siblings be able to move on or remain tethered to their past?
I can’t decide if Ms. Purple is brilliant or screams of baby filmmaker trying too hard. Every time that I was ready to write it off, it would work, and just when I thought that it found its rhythm, it would do something that was belabored. Visually I did not like it. It felt as if the person that shot it just got a new camera, discovered different modes and was experimenting with it. I’m not sure what the term is, but it isn’t exactly slow motion. It is supposed to convey that Kasie can’t escape the gravitational pull of her obligation. It felt as if they were not being meditative, but trying to run the clock.
I did adore how Ms. Purple showed how even childhood compliments could be lifelong curses. Kasie’s beauty becomes this devaluation of her self worth and overshadows her true self. It is literally the rent that she pays to exist. While the movie is clearly set in the twenty-first century, it feels as if she exists in a different time and place where men can openly own and abuse women as if women did not have any other option than to depend on men’s financial largess. Kasie seems trapped in a world in which her existence must always be tied to another man. She is trapped literally and figuratively in a traditional robe/role.
Ms. Purple also shows the flip side of how these imposed gender norms are damaging to men. The narrative judiciously divides the flashbacks throughout the film, and when we first see Johnny, he is at the margins of the screen like the opening title. Kasie is an obvious, accidental victim of parentification, but if you shift your perspective slightly, the viewer will realize that Johnny is either neglected or forgotten or his existence is simply seen as a threat. His stillness is not only because he does not attract attention, but it is also a defense mechanism because when boys attract attention, it provokes physical hostility. His coping mechanism then carries over as an adult with damaging consequences.
Johnny is one of the few examples of a good man in Ms. Purple. By the standards of the world, Johnny superficially appears to be an irresponsible loser, but he is the only man that does not want something from Kasie and the only one who seems civilized in his view of the world. He is also the only person to discover a world where he can experience genuine feelings even if it is not a sustainable one. He does not judge her for her work like the men who directly benefit from her profession. Those men would be considered superficially successful, but are self-centered, callous, abusive losers who are just as frozen in the past, a toxic adolescence in which teenage boys are incapable of socializing with anyone dissimilar from them, do not see girls or women as real human beings and are incapable of having a romantic relationship that does not involve a commercial transaction because of their lack of maturity.
Even though Justin Chon, the director and writer of Ms. Purple, is a Korean American man, I wonder how other Korean American men will receive his images of Korean American men, especially when compared and contrasted with the one male character who is not Korean American who is depicted as the only normal, average guy not psychologically damaged in some deep way. The brother may be suffering from depression and PTSD from abuse. The father’s illness is never explicitly stated, but we get an idea of his pathology and self-medication, which later became a twist on a generational curse transmitted to his daughter explicitly referenced near the end of the film. Kasie’s customers belong in jail. Warning: the frequent examples of casual physical abuse against women could possibly be triggering to viewers so don’t say that I didn’t warn you. I instantly grimaced at how blatantly dehumanizing her job was.
Octavio, a Hispanic man, is the only person that Kasie interacts with who isn’t part of her particular immigrant ethnic community and isn’t functioning as a support system for her dad. While I was not thrilled that the only moments of escape was another man (doesn’t she have any women friends), and it felt contrived that they probably worked together for a long time, but only started talking when the movie started, it was also a much needed relief to see Kasie find joy and simply live as an autonomous human being without performing some preassigned relationship function such as being a daughter, a sister, a worker. Kasie did not really have a choice in her assignment of roles except for Octavio. Octavio is clearly interested, but also wisely lets her take the lead by giving his phone number to her.
It was interesting that Chon made a choice to basically omit majority culture. There are no white characters in this film. Chon seems to be saying that in order to escape the pain of your past, you don’t completely abandon all your identities, but explore others that share similar socioeconomic experiences. Octavio and Kasie are both Americans from possibly immigrant families trying to hustle and survive, but because Kasie hasn’t always been a part of Octavio’s community, she can fully be herself in a way that she can’t in her own community in which she is greeted with disproportionate hostility whenever she expresses any individuality or autonomy. To be fair, we don’t really know Octavio’s relationship with his community, but it appears to be warm, inviting and loving. The machismo issues illustrated within Kasie’s community seems to be blessedly absent in Octavio’s, but misogyny is a universal problem that knows no borders so we know that it is an outsider’s view looking in, and familiarity would soon make the cracks appear.
At times, Ms. Purple did not trust the audience to pick up what the filmmaker was trying to convey so the characters would pull a Molly’s Game and explicitly explain the significance, which I did not always mind because it was informative, but yeah, I understood that the palm trees were important. Other times it would be so ridiculously melodramatic such as the parking lot scene. The filmmakers should have asked Care.com to sponsor them because that kind of desperation is stupid in the Internet age. I’ve been there so I speak from a place of knowledge and experience. Then the film left other things unexplained such as the title. Purple is allegedly a color of mourning in Korea, which I did not know until after I watched the movie. Also eagle-eyed viewers will notice the disappearing bed sores. I will give credit for the brief magical realism moment at the end, which I found touching.
Ms. Purple’s heart was in the right place, but the actual visual style and filler detracted from the overall excellence of what the film was trying to accomplish. With tighter editing, I could have loved this movie that was blessedly comfortable with fully exploring the full range of human experience even if it was uncomfortable.
