'Post Office' An American Tragedy
There’s something uneasy about a smartphone projecting a blonde-hair filter onto the face of an Asian American child. But writer/director Courtney Loo and co-director David Karp certainly weren’t interested in making a movie that was easy to watch. Their new short Post Office (2021) is streaming on Vimeo, and it kicks us right in the culture. The performances are excellent, a testament to not only the cast but to the direction of Loo and Karp. There are a few good looking frames in this one, in addition to a few interesting insert shots, but there’s no doubt it’s a concept-driven picture.
Caring for one’s own children is hard enough. When our protagonist, a Chinese-American mother of two, encounters a seemingly abandoned child on the side of the road… well, even the best intentions can yield disastrous outcomes. The mother is played by Julie Zahn, and played tremendously. Zahn is brimming with motherly instinct, you’ll find it very easy to buy her as a protector. The way she interacts with the kids, the police, a fellow mother. Her son and daughter, aged roughly four and six years, respectively, are surprisingly composed in front of the camera. While they only have a few lines, their interactions with each other are completely organic. One of the three children in the cast was a toddler, who obviously isn’t going to be open to taking directorial notes on performance. Real divas, those toddler actors. Thus, it is incumbent upon Loo and Karp to orchestrate a situation around this child, that elicits the kind of reaction that they aim to capture on screen. That is to say, the directorial vision needs to be crystal clear. Somebody ends up getting arrested, and this little girl is sobbing. I mean the kind of scream-crying that sounds like it has its roots in physical pain. It feels mendacious to call this acting, watching a young child react to a situation that they don’t understand. Rather, it feels as though kids are brushes with which directors can paint.
The theme of Post Office centers around heritage, and identity. Nobody is interested in my take on which characters are the incarnation of cultural representation or ancestry. But whether it’s a small field or an entire ocean, the film tells a tale of cultural estrangement. This review contains spoilers beyond this point. Focus on this theme may have even been a bit too much, as a matter of fact; the film actually ends up being fairly predictable. As soon as this lost girl’s mother enters into the frame, panicked and rushing to her daughter, the film gives away its destination.
Moreover, Loo and Karp didn’t make available to us any target at which we can point our frustration with the situation. If the idea is to condemn Americanism for its staunch rejection of Chinese culture, for example, throwing a few lines to the police officers in the film in order to establish them as antagonistic would help put a fine-point on that analogy. This is not a difficult endeavor, and doesn't demand any long winded expositional dialogue. It could be as simple as one of the officers saying something rude. It plants a flag where we all can see it: America’s abject attitude toward China and its culture. But instead, the Americanized police promptly showed up to a call that was placed by a Chinese American woman, in order to assist a lost Chinese girl. They asked for identification, and it felt completely necessary given the nature of the situation, but the woman did not have any to present. And the idea that the police should’ve allowed this unidentified woman to literally sprint away with a child that had been seemingly abandoned on the roadside is silly. What a terrible thing, a mother and child being ripped apart by blithe, heartless bureaucracy. But by failing to prop up an embodiment of the problem, how does one respond to it aside from a simple sigh, and a shake of the head.
Don’t worry, there are diamonds in this mine folks. There are a handful of shots that captured a beautiful lens flare. A couple of excellent medium shots, where the ‘hair in the face’ sings in dramatic harmony with a sparkle in the eyes. The thing that I liked most about Post Office, is how often I thought about it afterward. It birthed several questions in my mind. Questions I’d felt embarrassed that I hadn’t asked myself before. At only fourteen minutes, these questions come at a bargain. Sure, some strengths and some weaknesses. But if there’s one thing you can count on Post Office to do, it’s send a message.