Director: Bizhan M. Tong
Writers: Bizhan M. Tong, Selena Lee, Lok-Yung Lo, Stephen Belber
Stars: Kenny Kwan, Selena Lee, Adam Pak
Synopsis: When three former classmates reunite after 15 years, a buried secret resurfaces forcing them to confront the past, each other, and the silence around accountability.
A good rule of thumb, apparently: If you describe your remake of a quarter-century old indie as a “bold reimagining” rather than the former term, you’re permitted to inflate its runtime by 30 minutes, at least. Based on Richard Linklater’s 2001 drama of the same name and similarly unfolding in a single location (save for its bookends, which unfold on a beach and add necessary context to what the secrets and lies that fly in between), Bizhan M. Tong’s Tape is a dizzyingly energetic reinterpretation of a small-scale classic while certainly feeling swollen, despite its best intentions to move at the pace of a cassette fast-forwarding through static. That’s half due to the fact that its source material is talky — Stephen Belber (who serves as an Executive Producer, along with Linklater) adapted his own play for the Austin auteur to direct, so it’s only natural to be a wordy piece reliant on its conversations to drive the story forward — and the discussions between its central characters are long-winded and full of revelations, and half due to the fact that the original might not have had any business being reworked.
Which begs the question: What does, in this day and age, warrant a remake, for lack of a better word? In a year where few have triumphed — Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest and Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun come to mind — and more, especially the shot-for-shot live-action wastes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, have failed to move the needle anywhere but the box office, a film like Tong’s is likely to get lost in the shuffle, and not least because its inspiration is one of the original director’s lesser-seen works. Where this iteration of Tape could have found its most unique sense of individuality is in its political relevance by utilizing the narrative prong of surveillance to not only fuel the drama, but to comment (albeit slightly) on Asia’s history of mass monitoring. This Hong Kong-set tale of friendships forged and bonds broken has the most in common not with any of its fellow reimaginings (as Lee also called his latest joint, a film based on Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low), but with Neo Sora’s Happyend, an excellent Japanese coming-of-ager that used visual scrutiny through the use of cameras and facial recognition to inspire change in the relationships between its teenage protagonists.
Yet where Sora’s feature reframed the concept of surveillance as a fascinating technological advancement that endangered the freedom of Japanese citizens, especially its youth, Tong positions it in the same light that Linklater and Belber’s film did: As a weapon, not merely a threat. Once we cut away from the beach on which Tape opens, we find Wing (Adam Pak) and Jon (Kenny Kwan), two old pals who have reunited after 15 years, with Jon hoping to reconnect and to revel in the glory of his new festival-bound film and Wing eager to open some old wounds, some that Jon isn’t even aware should be on his radar.
Which is where Amy (Selena Lee, who adapted her own part in the script, an unintentional nod to Linklater’s occasional creative style) comes into play as a third friend in this trio, one who has a complicated history with both men. As it turns out, Wing has invented them all there to entrap Jon in a confession for raping Amy when they were in school, and to prove his loyalty to Amy. As he attempts to (you guessed it) catch the whole situation on tape, more about each member of the dual-gender triumvirate is revealed, both through emotional conversations and their own behavioral missteps.
Tong and his team of co-writers go to great pains to make their extended war of the words transcend beyond that of a walk-and-talk, a goal partially aided by the fact that, like Linklater’s film, Tape unfolds entirely in a single location. The Airbnb where Wing stays – the new temporary home of an addict who repeatedly flies off the handle in his interrogation of the manipulative Jon and his attempts to win Amy’s trust (and heart, a more futile effort) – is employed like a boxing ring by way of a dance floor, one where the punches thrown are verbal and the steps taken are often faulty. But the intimacy that Linklater and Belber’s original picture dripped with feels sterilized here, if not entirely stale thanks to oversaturated cinematography and stilted dialogue, the likes of which truly make Tong’s Tape feel like a rehearsal, not a performance.
Blaming the trio of Kwan, Lee, and Pak is as unfair as the very act of saddling them with similar dramatic expectations to the likes of Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Robert Sean Leonard (the original film’s cast), and it’s not that any of this Tape’s players are incapable of rendering complex characters flailing with the confines of a flattened pressure cooker. It’s more that they fail to add any depth or originality to their non-original text, a principal requirement of any worthwhile “reimagining.” Otherwise, as is the case here, not only does the product fail to warrant the status of being rewarding, but to reimagine anything at all.
