Directed and co-written by Jennifer Phang, ‘Advantageous’ is a surprisingly touching and purposeful film that revitalizes certain elements of the sci-fi genre while presenting two powerful voices in women filmmakers: Jennifer Phang and Jacqueline Kim.
You may remember when I first mentioned Advantageousamong several other Sundance films I was anticipating this year. Well, full disclosure, I kinda forgot about it until it popped up in my “recommended” Netflix queue last weekend. Why didn’t anyone tell me it was out this weekend?! Anyway, I caught up with it and I have to tell you, it exceeded my expectations. It’s a small film that tackles a massive issue in a very vulnerable way, yielding a story about a mother’s love, self-worth, and youth obsession.
Advantageous is set in a not-so-distant future (actually, if not for the flying cars, it would be identical to modern times), and follows Gwen (Jacqueline Kim, who also co-wrote the screenplay), a woman working for a technically advanced wellness company that equates beauty with youth and helps women sustain their value by offering a unique procedure that preserves their age. Ironically, as the spokesperson for the company, Gwen finds herself in the position where she has to consider this procedure for herself once she is let go from her job due to her “advanced age.”(By the way, she’s probably, like, 40 — if that — but still bad for business). As I said, not very far off from today’s times.
Though the basis of this film is familiar, what makes the film so special are the relationships between the characters and Kim’s compelling performance of a woman drawn to desperate measures. As the mother of a young daughter in a society quick to invalidate women, Gwen sees a hopelessness in Jules’s (her daughter) future and wants to be able to at least be a role model for her, someone she can be proud of. Through Kim’s visceral performance, you feel the agony of each passing day which is only making Gwen older. Another day without work, without promise, and without a real life for herself. You feel that in every scene Kim is in (which is most of them, if not all), the utter claustrophobia of Gwen’s life.
There’s a heart-crushing moment in the film in which Gwen admits that Jules is the only thing that makes her happy. You feel this most in the quiet, bittersweet scenes the mother and daughter share, which ultimately serve to hasten her life-altering decision. But it is only toward the end of film that we realize the cost.
Directed and co-written by Jennifer Phang, Advantageous is a surprisingly touching and purposeful film that revitalizes certain elements of the sci-fi genre while presenting two powerful voices in women filmmakers: Phang and Kim. I look forward to seeing what they have in store next.
Creator/blogger of Reel Talk Online, Candice Frederick is a writer for hire, lover of snark, former magazine journalist, and co-host of the podcast, “Cinema in Noir.” She is also a Personal Lifestyle Contributor for Black Girl Nerds, and member of the Online Film Critics Society, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and LAMB (Large Association of Movie Bloggers).
In these moments, and in those unspoken moments when she savors placing long sweet kisses on Jules’s cheek, we see Gwen’s resistance. “Know your value,” Gwen tells Jules. It’s not found in good grades, not in getting into the best school, not in a newer and “better” body, but in sensory and emotional human pleasures.
Gwen and Jules talking in the park, surrounded by green grass, tall trees, and the river.
Written by Colleen Martell as part of our theme week on Dystopias.
Advantageous, which began streaming on Netflix on June 23, is a dystopian science fiction film that asks, “Are women really going backwards going forward?” It explores this question through the relationship between a single mother, Gwen (played brilliantly by Jacqueline Kim, who co-wrote the film), and her daughter Jules (Samantha Kim, also brilliant), and the painful choice Gwen makes in order to give her daughter a chance at succeeding in a misogynist, racist, ableist, and economically unjust world. It’s a subtle and slow film, as visually beautiful as it is haunting.
Writer and director Jennifer Phang first produced Advantageous as a short film in 2013. The short offers some helpful background information: we learn that the year is 2041; the world population is 10.1 billion, and the U.S. unemployment rate is at a staggering 45 percent. Technology has rapidly advanced. The significance of these facts is fleshed out in the full-length film. Homeless, destitute women people the world of Advantageous. Child prostitution is on the rise. Income inequality has been made drastically worse by the dismantling of the public school system. The only educational opportunity for children who aren’t from elite families is to win a spot in the few remaining magnet schools. Jules doesn’t get into a magnet school, and at the same time Gwen loses her job as the spokesperson for the Center for Advanced Health and Living because they are looking for a younger, “more universal” (which, according to Phang in an interview with Mark Asch at The L Magazine, in this case means “non-specific, multi-racial”) face to market the company.
Advantageous struck me as an incredibly embodied, earthy story. Jules and Gwen are outside in parks a lot, walking through green grass and sitting under tall, shady trees. They listen to music together, eyes closed and breathing deeply. They play piano and sing together sitting shoulder to shoulder; they sleep cuddled in bed together; and they eat pecan pie out of the pan together. Jules is often dancing or drawing. She wants to have children; she wants a big family. Gwen and Jules play a guessing game in their apartment: is it the woman upstairs or downstairs who is sobbing? Sometimes the answer is both. Sometimes the answer is Gwen. We see women sleeping on park benches, living in flower beds. The physicality of women, Asian American, Black, and white women, and of Gwen and Jules’s bond, is palpable.
Jules listens to women cry, above, below, and in her apartment
In contrast, the Center for Advanced Health and Living promises freedom and liberation from bodily limitations: “Be the you you were meant to be.” The Center encourages people of economic means to discard their diseased or disabled bodies, or even just their disliked bodies, and to transcend “race, height, or health” by transferring themselves into “better” bodies. A new body is “a pragmatic response to today’s unforgiving job market,” they promise. Economic disparities and unfair hiring practices got you down? Become someone who is hirable. Their message, propagated by Gwen, is one of empowerment: free yourself from anxiety and depression by overcoming your disadvantages in a new body.
This contrast is one of the film’s most deeply felt questions: if women could change their bodies to fit the latest trend, could they succeed in a discriminatory, patriarchal society? But at what cost?
Gwen’s answer to these questions is complicated. Unable to find work elsewhere, Gwen agrees to be a test subject for the Center’s mind-body transfer so that she can keep her job and put Jules through school. An experienced spokesperson in a younger, more ethnically desirable woman’s body: the perfect employee. Although we might celebrate her sacrifice for her daughter at whatever cost to herself, this act shows Gwen playing along, putting her faith in a system that has not really served her. In agreeing to undergo an extensive, self-altering procedure she in effect tells Jules to also keep playing along. “I can’t let her become one of these women who would do anything,” Gwen explains her choice to her boss at the Center. And yet Gwen is now one of those women, willing to do just about anything the system asks her to do in order to stay afloat in it.
Gwen and Jules entwined in thought
On the other hand, Gwen spends much of the film offering Jules a different narrative. Jules asks her mother, “Why did you have me, when you knew the world was so bad and you had to struggle so much?” She agonizes, “I don’t know why I’m alive.” Gwen answers that life is worth living because of music, good food, and being loved by your mother. The head of the Center, Ms. Cryer (Jennifer Ehle), undermines Gwen’s optimism about finding another job at her age when technology has advanced so much. Gwen pushes back: “There must be something in a mere human existence that has value.” In these moments, and in those unspoken moments when she savors placing long sweet kisses on Jules’s cheek, we see Gwen’s resistance. “Know your value,” Gwen tells Jules. It’s not found in good grades, not in getting into the best school, not in a newer and “better” body, but in sensory and emotional human pleasures.
This double message is what makes the film so heartbreaking: Gwen shows that life is worth living because of all of these embodied experiences, but then she gives up experiencing those things in her own body so that Jules can compete in the socioeconomic system as it is. What we as viewers are witnessing is the deal Gwen strikes between her resistance and her compliance. We are left to wonder if what she got (economic security for Jules) was worth the price she paid (her body).
Gwen grieves as she prepares to say goodbye to her body
There are hints of civil unrest all throughout the film. A broadcast refers to a rebel group called the “Terra Mamona” (according to my subtitles) bombing (corporate?) buildings (is this some sort of ecofeminist activist group? A girl can dream). Her boss Fisher (James Urbaniak) informs Gwen that corporations fear what might happen with so many unemployed desperate men on the street, and so “there is talk among recruiters about letting women stay unemployed” and forcing them back into the home in favor of hiring men. In other words, there are dissenters, and if recruiters are afraid that unemployed men will revolt, it’s easy to imagine the unemployed women we see sleeping in flower beds and on park benches organizing their own revolution. Women — specifically women of color — have long been at the forefront of resistance movements in the U.S. and elsewhere, after all.
As a result, I fantasized about a different narrative, one in which Gwen perhaps joins or starts a rebellion, fighting for her right to hold her daughter in her own arms, against exploitative corporations and cost-prohibitive schools and unemployment, fighting with and for the homeless women in the parks. But that is not this story. This story is an allegory of the terrible decisions disadvantaged women are often forced to make in order to survive in a corrupt social structure, clinging desperately to the hope that if they do certain things “right” the next generation will succeed in a system that was set up to fail them. In an interview with Emily Yoshida at The Verge, Phang said that, “most of my life I’ve been trying to humanize and normalize perceptions of people who are not your standard Caucasian-looking American.” If there’s any hope in the film, then, it’s that the loss of the tactile inter-generational bond between Gwen and Jules is so striking that it makes those relationships all the more meaningful in our own place and time.
Colleen Martell, a writer based in Pennsylvania, is apparently obsessed with watching dystopias this summer (see here and here). Find her on twitter to talk about bodies and film and the end times: @elsiematz.
Jacqueline Kim co-wrote the screenplay for Advantageous and also stars as its lead, Gwen Koh.
A version of this post by Leigh Kolb previously appeared at Bitch Mediaand appears now as part of our theme week on Dystopias. Cross-posted with permission.
“Are women really going backwards going forward?”
Advantageous, the new film by Jennifer Phang, paints a dystopia that shows a version of the future that is regressive for women. Perhaps one of the most poignant aspects of the film is that it barely seems futuristic at all; when daughter Jules asks her mother, Gwen, “Are women really going backwards going forward?” we can’t help but involuntarily nod our heads yes, bombarded with the realities of the fictional world in front of us.
In the film, Gwen Koh (played by the incredible Jacqueline Kim) is a single mother to Jules (who is played with remarkable talent by Samantha Kim). Gwen is a corporate spokesperson for the ominous Center for Advanced Health and Living. As she pitches their new technology, she says, “So many of us enter this world with disadvantages beyond our control.” The Center for Advanced Health and Living isn’t limited to face lifts and breast augmentation. Its slogan—”Be the you you were meant to be”—doesn’t merely mean an enhanced you. Instead, this vague empowering message means their technology is ostensibly meant to give you control over your physical disadvantages.
The film—which was awarded a special jury prize at Sundance and started streaming on Netflix June 23—features stunning cinematography, excellent acting, and beautiful writing (albeit sometimes heavy-handed, which I’d prefer to writing that does not attempt to say anything). Advantageous tackles a laundry list of feminist concerns. Gwen is told that she has aged out of her role as a spokesperson, especially considering the “new you” technology they want to sell. It’s noteworthy that the head of the corporation—and the one who seems to have made the decision about letting Gwen go—is a woman of a similar age. Ms. Cryer (Jennifer Ehle) pulls the strings, which shows that it’s not just male forces that destruct and construct the feminine ideal. The world in Advantageous is one that has been designed by women, too, but it’s still a capital of misogyny—radio broadcasts reference the rise in child prostitution, middle-aged women are homeless due to unemployment, and employers prefer to hire men lest they dangerously roam the street. Gwen’s single motherhood is a source of sharp judgment from her peers and her parents. Many of these examples aren’t futuristic at all (see here, here, and here) and Advantageous does a compelling job of showing how while we may advance technologically, we have a lot of social progress to make.
Samantha Kim plays Jules, whose mother faces hard choices about how to give her the best opportunities.
Advantageous is billed as a science fiction film, but it doesn’t feel sci-fi much of the time. Every once in a while, a drone or flying vehicle will jet past, the buildings will look futuristic, or the person on the other end of a phone conversation is a hologram. But for the most part, Advantageous is that kind of chilling dystopian science fiction that looks incredibly familiar. One scene that felt like it could have been any period in the past or present comes when daughter Jules asks Gwen, “Are women really going backwards going forward?” We can’t help but involuntarily nod our heads yes, bombarded with the realities of the fictional world in front of us.
As Gwen is let go from her job and has difficulty obtaining any new prospects (except for selling her eggs, since fertility rates have sharply declined due to pollutants—another not-so-futuristic plot point)–she asks, “Am I too old to be of use?” Again, we nod our heads, agreeing that in the world she lives in—a world that looks much like ours—the answer is yes. The Center also tells Gwen that they are looking for a more “universal look” to be their spokesperson. We assume that means “white” (and young), and director Phang addresses this in an interview with The L Magazine:
“In my mind the phrase ‘universal look’ wasn’t exactly a euphemism for ‘white’ (though it often goes that way), but for a non-specific, multi-racial look. … Jacqueline Kim is Korean-American. The subtext is that Gwen’s look was a benefit to the company for a moment, but that moment had passed.”
This “universal” look that Gwen is supposed to embody is an interesting end game of beauty standards: while beauty ideals may move toward a multicultural aesthetic, they’re still impossible to obtain without the winning genetic lottery ticket. We can hope that whiteness equaling “universal” will eventually change in the future as our population changes, however, Advantageous suggests that almost everyone will always be born at a physical disadvantage in a society that worships the unattainability of eternal youth and beauty.
It’s important to note that in Phang’s created world, “otherness” is highlighted mostly through age, gender, and beauty, and less about ethnicity. At The Verge, Emily Yoshida points out that “Advantageous also happens to have a mostly Asian cast without overtly being about Asianness, which makes it some kind of rare unicorn.” Phang critiques the desire to conform to a universal ideal while at the same time providing an excellent example of how storytellers and filmmakers don’t have to cast white actors for a story to be universal.
Gwen’s ethnicity isn’t what is most disadvantageous to her—it’s her age. How can a naturally aging woman convincingly sell a technology that promises to stop aging? The “ideal woman,” then, is seen as incredibly young and ethnically ambiguous.
Gwen must change so she can save her career and afford opportunities for her daughter. In the film, a woman’s sacrifice and a mother’s sacrifice are woven together to reveal that society continually sacrifices women—older women especially—at the altar of “never good enough.” While Phang beautifully addresses so many issues facing women in our society, she has highlighted her focus on women’s pressure to change. She says:
“One of the deeper concerns that I wrestle with in my work is how women around the world are encouraged to change themselves in many ways to carve out a place and survive. But it was also important to me to investigate, through Gwen, whether the act of choosing to change your surface appearance somehow altered your inner qualities. I wondered whether our self-respect might become altered for better or worse after we commit to a surface change. And does our respect for others increase or decrease if they don’t follow our example? And then… is this a world we can be at peace with? Can we accept a world in which these concerns occupy so much of our energies and potential for productivity?”
In Advantageous, Phang asks many questions, not only of the characters, but also of our own culture. Can we accept this world? Advantageous—and certainly feminists—would resoundingly answer “no.”
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
Though this happens in a future in which cosmetic surgery has become much more than a matter of lift and tuck, Koh’s struggle with whether and how to change her body for the sake of her daughter and her career, combined with the behind-the-scenes machinations of the corporation, casts a complicated light on the present struggles of women trying to succeed in both career and motherhood while facing the social pressure to stay young and be perfect.
This guest post by Holly Derr previously appeared at the Ms. blog and appears here as part of our theme week on Dystopias. Cross-posted with permission.
A sighting of that rare bird called feminist science fiction is truly a thing to celebrate. It does exist, sometimes by accident (see Alien), and sometimes on purpose (see almost anything by Octavia Butler). With Advantageous, a film written by Jacqueline Kim and Jennifer Phang, directed by Phang and starring Kim, the feminism is entirely purposeful.
Influenced during her studies at Pomona College by the work of such experimental filmmakers as Cheryl Dunye and Alexandra Juhasz, Phang has always tried to represent a diverse world in her films and to tell stories about identity, specifically Asian and Asian American identities. Speaking on the phone from her San Francisco office, she told the Ms. blog that when the Independent Film and Television Service approached her seeking proposals for science fiction shorts, she jumped at the chance to make an Asian American woman the center of the film. When actor Ken Jeong (The Hangover, Community) saw the short, he was so moved that he offered to help turn it into a feature, and that feature went on to win the Dramatic Special Jury Award for Collaborative Vision at Sundance.
The central character in Advantageous, Gwen Koh (Kim), is the spokesperson and head of The Center for Advanced Health and Living, a cosmetic surgery company that has developed a way for the aged and infirm to move their consciousness into a younger, healthier body. When the center decides that Koh is too old to continue as their spokesperson—just as her daughter is entering an elite and very expensive private school—she decides to undergo the body-changing procedure herself.
In reality, she has been manipulated into making this decision by the real head of the center, played by a (somewhat ironically) beautifully aging Jennifer Ehle. Though this happens in a future in which cosmetic surgery has become much more than a matter of lift and tuck, Koh’s struggle with whether and how to change her body for the sake of her daughter and her career, combined with the behind-the-scenes machinations of the corporation, casts a complicated light on the present struggles of women trying to succeed in both career and motherhood while facing the social pressure to stay young and be perfect.
Not coincidentally, Koh, in collaboration with the company, chooses not only a young body into which to transition, but also a more ethnically ambiguous one (Freya Adams). Phang said that she cast Adams “not just because she’s a great actor, but also because she was able to play someone with a universal look. So the audience has to explore what is it about her that makes them want her to be the look of their company.”
Koh isn’t eager to take the extreme step of cosmetic surgery, so before undergoing the transition she attempts to find work through an agency she has worked with in the past. She discovers, however, that the voice on the other end of the phone is not only not a genuine supporter of her work, but isn’t even human, leading to one of the most profound conversations in the film:
Gwen: Drake, are you human being?
Drake: That’s a funny question. How do you define a human being?
Gwen: Do you have blood running through your veins? Do you get thirsty?
Drake: That is a definition of a human being?
Gwen: I didn’t know.
Drake: That sounds more like a human being. Not to know.
To say that Advantageous is a meditation on the meaning of life sounds cliché, but I can find no more fitting phrase. Both the mother and daughter at the center of the film spend the film’s duration in the pursuit of fulfillment, improvement, and a seemingly ever-elusive kind of achievement, and the tempo of the film ensures that both the characters and audience have plenty of time to think about what fulfillment really means.
Phang considers herself an idealist, and it is true that in this film, to a certain extent, daughter and mother both secure the kind of success for themselves that this near-future world believes to be paramount. But, as with the kind of feminist art that intends to make its audience think, most of the questions about the actual meaning of human existence are left unanswered. The 12-year-old daughter, Jules (Samantha Kim), states twice—once to her original mother and once to her mother-in-a-new-body—“I don’t know why I’m alive.” Though her mother offers a few answers, and different ones each time, the meditative quality of the daughter’s question and her mother’s answers makes it hard to believe that either finds much comfort in them.
In fact, even the background moments of buildings being blown up by terrorists are greeted not with terror but with an attitude of resignation that such things cannot be helped, and the process of changing bodies is more like the passage of time during sleep than the usual explosive, special-effects ridden climaxes of most science fiction movies. The most gripping moments of the film are found in the reactions of Gwen’s family to the consequences of her choice, beautifully revealing that even in a world where technology has become advanced enough to change the nature of life, being human is still a matter of feeling intimacy, love, and loss, of wanting to understand something that is inevitably just out of our reach and, ultimately, of accepting that no matter how successful or rich you are and no matter how technologically advanced our culture is, being human is mostly a matter of not knowing.
Phang is already hard at work on her next two films: One is a science fiction romance adapted from a play by Dominic Mah called Look for Water. The other is a film about climate change based on the work of real-life scientist Inez Fung, which she hopes will inspire audiences to reengage with climate change issues before it’s too late. She was recently awarded a $40,000 Kenneth Rainin Foundation grant from the San Francisco Film Society to support herself while developing these projects, something Phang told the Ms. blog she wouldn’t be able to live without:
I am fortunate to live in a time when organizations understand that in order to have sustainable media careers, women need support of some sort. The SFFS has a visionary program called Filmmaker360 that aims to change the representation of women in genre films by supporting women creators, which is a big deal for me and a big deal for women.
This review is dedicated to Michele Kort, who taught me how to be journalist and how to live in the human state of not knowing.
Holly L. Derr is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her @hld6oddblend and on her tumblr, Feminist Fandom.
