Sherry Cola Steals The Show As The Gay Best Friend In Shortcomings

Randall Park's directorial debut premiered at Sundance Film Festival this past weekend and it featured a prominent queer storyline that had us cackling.

Shortcomings follows the story of Ben (The Umbrella Academy's Justin H. Min), a jaded attempted filmmaker who takes his girlfriend, Miko (Wrecked's Ally Maki), for granted. Their life together in Berkeley comes to a screeching halt as Ben's dissatisfaction sweeps through to everyone around him and Miko leaves for a film internship in New York. As the official description points out, "when he’s not managing an art house movie theater as his day job, Ben spends his time obsessing over unavailable blond women, watching Criterion Collection DVDs, and eating in diners with his best friend, Alice, a queer grad student with a serial dating habit."

While Shortcomings is led by Asian actors, don't come to this expecting Crazy Rich Asians. In fact, the film makes a point to declare itself as a pointedly different story in the opening scene with a hilarious call back that Ben then dismisses as unrealistic.

The film is based on Adrian Tomine's graphic novel of the same name and is led by an obnoxiously narcissistic anti-hero that will test your patience. That was purposeful, Park toldVanity Fair. "I think about representation a lot with this movie and whether it's a good thing or it's a bad thing to show such flawed characters. Across the board, every character is flawed. And to me, I think that the history of portrayals of Asian folks in American cinema, it's always been about dehumanizing. Yes, it's important that we create heroes and that we create great representatives on screen. But at least for this project what excites me the most is, it's responding to that dehumanization with humanizing, and humanizing is a lot more complex than creating the perfect representative. It's about creating complex people who are trying their best, and who are making mistakes, and who are, hopefully, growing, at least a little bit."

Out actor Sherry Cola plays Alice, Ben's loveably chaotic bestie who he talks with about girls — and who ultimately steals the show. Cola is effortlessly charming as Alice navigates her own unhappiness. In one hilarious scene, Alice asks Ben to pretend to be her boyfriend as well as Korean (he's Japanese) to impress her family who still believes she's straight – and is still traumatized by World War II.

We don't want to give too much of the plot away but as they both are in transitory stages of their lives, Ben and Alice enable each other's worst tendencies – until Alice finds the girl of her dreams and tries to change. Ben attempts to sabotage their relationship to get her back, and it's ultimately Alice's new lover who finally checks him, forcing him to see his own flaws instead of blaming everyone else for everything wrong in his own life.

It's worth recognizing how radically queer Alice and the film as a whole get to be since it's technically led by a heterosexual couple. Alice isn't just a stand-in for a bro, she feels real and their friendship is believable. The two attend queer house parties together. Ben even goes on a date with a girl (played by Debby Ryan) who openly speaks about her bisexuality. It's refreshing to have LGBTQ+ characters not just tokenized or relegated to the cliche of the gay best friend, but fully embraced and respected with their own life, story, and character arc.

Park first discovered the story fifteen years ago in a bookshop, but this story of a deeply flawed Asian American feels more relevant than ever. Even still, he says it "felt like a story that seemed impossible to make, as a movie. And here we are 15 years later and it actually got made, and I actually got to direct it. It still feels different. Despite all of the great advances that we've got to celebrate lately in terms of representation and stories from our community, it still feels special and different from what we've seen."

This review is part of PRIDE's coverage of The Sundance Film Festival 2023.