Centring on the unlikely friendship between a tomboyish African American girl named Kamilla (Simone Baker) and the big brother figure she finds in Korean-American family friend Eli (Justin Chon), Gook takes place in 1992, in Paramount, Los Angeles, against the backdrop of the riots that occurred in the days after the Rodney King verdict was announced. “What does ‘gook’ mean?” asks Kamilla, gesturing at the racial slur graffitied on the bonnet of a car. “It means country,” replies Eli. Writer, director and actor Chon’s remarkable debut feature recontextualises that word, corrupted, as the title card explains, by the US military during the Korean and Vietnam wars.
When Eli sends Kamilla to Mr Kim’s corner shop to break a $50 note, he pulls a gun on her, recalling the murder of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was shot in the back of the head by a Korean shopkeeper (the shooter was famously sentenced to five years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a $500 fine). Boldly, it rejects the common notion of Asian Americans as a model minority.
Shot in lustrous black and white, and paying close attention to the bubbling interracial tensions between LA’s immigrant communities, Chon’s film directly references Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 banlieue movie La Haine, though there are also detectable traces of Charles Burnett and John Cassavetes in its character-driven drama and jazz score. Yet in rooftop conversations, an impressionistic dance sequence that takes place in a parking lot and a devastating conclusion that teeters on the edge of melodrama, Chon finds a tone all of his own.
