In sports, observers commonly throw around the phrase “playoff atmosphere” to describe any regular-season game or event that acquires the urgency and intensity of a must-win postseason contest. The phenomenon usually results in a sold-out venue crammed with whooping, rabid fans, and a winner who navigated a grueling gantlet of other games just to get to this one–but must hope nevertheless that there are more to come.

The Motel writer/director Michael Kang (far right) faces the Film Forum crowd with cast members (L-R) Jeffrey Chyau, Samantha Futerman and Alexis Chang (Photos: STV)
The same thing happens in cinema–or at least it did Wednesday night, when Film Forum took on a “festival atmosphere” for the opening night of Michael Kang’s sweet, miniscule indie The Motel. Kang and virtually his entire cast crammed into the front of the theater following the 8 p.m. screening, facing a packed house and disbursing Motel swag as though the film was back in its Sundance ’05 element. Another hundred viewers queued in the lobby awaiting the 10 p.m. screening. On a weeknight.
The spoiled among us know it really is the only way to watch a movie: when the intimacy of the setting compounds that of the film. Or even that of making the film, according to Kang. “I got really lucky,” he told the crowd during the Q&A..”I mean, I think it was partially because we were shooting on location–we were up in Poughkeepsie five days a week, and so we all became really close. It wasn’t just the cast. It was the cast and the crew.”
That quality penetrates most of The Motel as it spies on 13-year-old Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau), a rotund Chinese-American boy growing up at his family’s skeevy hourly-rate motel. His first-generation mother (Jade Wu) runs the joint and her kids’ lives with a wounded pragmatism, conflating the transgressions of her willful, daydreaming son with those of her delinquent customers. Ernest withdraws to the company of Christine (Samantha Futerman), an older girl for whom he harbors an unrequited crush, but is just as frequently bullied by an Anglo kid (Conor J. White) who exploits Ernest’s ethnicity and living conditions as testaments to his permanent disadvantage.
The Motel is not about permanence though. It is about transit–from child to adult, from one culture to another (and back), all the way down to the ritual of learning to drive. Only after the impulsive Korean hustler Sam Kim (Sung Kang) checks in to the motel does Ernest find the social and emotional outlet his adolescence demands. But even as Sam sees his own immaturity reflected in Ernest, the glimpse is momentary; puberty compels Ernest to root out the authenticity in his surroundings, leaving Sam as a shell of the father figure and best friend he aspires to be. Ernest is all but forced to exorcise the man from his life and his home.
“My parents divorced when I was young,” said the filmmaker Kang. “So there was kind of an absence of a male role model, and I think I was kind of exploring that. The character of Sam Kim came from me asking what kind of knowledge and wisdom could I give to a child, and I realized it was absolutely nothing. I have no good information, and so I personified that in Sam Kim.”
And as the film ambles through its 76 minutes, you cannot help but appreciate the efficiency and effect of Kang’s other tiny catharses. He eschews melodrama for a kind of weighted whimsy (Sam and Ernest leaping around a rural road shouting “I want to be happy!”) and broaches assimilation only inasmuch as the motel represents a humane (if low-rent) cosmopolis. Sexual frustration seemingly permeates every moment of Ernest’s days, yet it never inspires the cynicism that afflicts Christine, Sam, his mother or the roiling spectrum of sleaze that obscures his home. This thematic triumph alone–not to mention Chyau’s exquisite work toward accomplishing it–makes for flashes of transcendent cinema.

At Wednesday’s premiere, Chyau (right) downplayed the praise. “As everyone else said, it’s just that Mike had us really bond together as a family,” said Chyau, a native New Yorker whom Kang cast after auditioning 200 kids. “So really everything onscreen and offscreen, we were just having fun with it and not worrying whether the movie made it or not. Because making the film was worth it overall, even if it doesn’t sell for a single penny.”
Kang blanched, then smiled. The hometown crowd cheered. The pressure was off. It only felt like a festival.

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