BAAFF 2023: B-Side: For Taylor (by Christina Yr. Lim) | Review

B-Side: For Taylor, directed by Christina Yr. Lim, screened at the 15th Boston Asian American Film Festival. The movie parallels the lives of a teenage girl and her adoptive father with a Korean family who just moved to the same neighborhood, and comes to a very empathetic conclusion about family and acceptance.

B-Side: For Taylor, directed by Christina Yr. Lim, is not as straightforward as it seems. It opens with Taylor (Jeannine Vargas), a Korean-American adoptee living in Virginia. She’s drafting a letter to her biological parents—deleting each word she types, finding the perfect balance between saying too much and too little, over and over again. After writing an email up but not sending it, we find out that she has written twelve drafts of the same message.

Taylor lives with her adoptive father Bill (Dave Huber), and their relationship is somewhat strained—Bill’s wife, who had passed away a few years ago, was much more active in raising Taylor. Bill struggles to connect with his daughter, and seems not to understand the discrimination Taylor faces as going to public school in Virginia.

Soon enough, a new family moves into the house next door from Korea. Areum (Esther Moon) moved to Virginia so that her daughter Da-Young (Jacky Jung) can have better opportunities at school. However, Da-Young feels the pressure her mother puts on her to succeed is more than a high schooler can take.

The movie is anchored by these stories—one parent is too uninvolved with his child, the other is too overbearing. The families worlds’ collide when Areum starts to look for an English tutor, and Bill offers Taylor to take the job. What ensues is familiar enough: though Taylor takes to her new job with resistance, the two soon enough confide in one another about their parental conflicts.

Da-Young wants to be a singer despite her mother brushing it off, and is overwhelmed by the workload she is forced to take on. Taylor wants to contact her birth parents, but is unable to make any progress due to being unable to read Korean. She also worries that if her father finds out, he will feel inadequate, betrayed, or both. They make an agreement that Taylor will do Da-Young’s schoolwork so she can focus on singing, and Da-Young will help seek down Taylor’s parents since she can read Korean.

Along the journey are some expected locations: Taylor, taken in by Da-Young’s family, is allowed to reconnect with her roots in a way that her adoptive parents could never really provide. She tries Korean cuisine for the first time, and for the first time has found people who don’t consider her to be different. Da-Young, similarly, finally experiences freedom in a way that her workload never let her, and is able to pursue her true passions.

Though their parents are initially framed as stubborn, antagonistic forces, B-Side: For Taylor lends a lot of empathy to their perspectives. Part of the movie’s message is that we are all always growing, even when you’re expected to have everything together. Bill tries to contain his grief with alcohol, but it is clear he has been destroyed by the loss of his wife and feels inadequate to fill her shoes as a parent. Areum relays her own family’s expectations onto her daughter, and tries to project a life of success that she doesn’t really live.

Though most immigrant stories contain a lot of drama—and certainly the lives of immigrants can be difficult—B-Side: For Taylor does away with some of the contrivances that can make immigrant narratives sometimes feel gratuitous. The movie focuses on the core relationships at play through an optimist’s lens, showing that growth is possible and communication is key. Each of the characters are allowed to admit their faults, thanks to one another.

B-Side: For Taylor works because of its strong lead performances, playing off relationship dynamics that are so familiar to many: it takes its somewhat cliché motifs of found family and acceptance and presents them in a very clean package with a lot of empathy. Even if nothing here is necessarily new, it’s hard to leave the theater without feeling something about your own life.