'Fire Island' reimagines 'Pride and Prejudice' as a queer rom-com

For decades, Fire Island — the 32-mile barrier island that lies off the southern coast of New York’s Long Island — has become an invaluable haven for members

For decades, Fire Island — the 32-mile barrier island that lies off the southern coast of New York’s Long Island — has become an invaluable haven for members of the LGBTQ community. And in rising comedian Joel Kim Booster’s screenwriting debut, the picturesque enclave serves as the colorful backdrop for a thorough examination of race, class and sexuality in a modern-day — and unapologetically queer — take on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”

Directed by Andrew Ahn (“Spa Night,” “Driveways”), “Fire Island” follows two best friends, Noah (Booster) and Howie (Bowen Yang), who flock to the Pines, a queer hamlet on the larger island, every summer with their friends — Luke (Matt Rogers), Keegan (Tomás Matos) and Max (Torian Miller) — for a week of nonstop parties and hook-ups. But after discovering that their friend, Erin (Margaret Cho), is planning to sell the place they considered a second home, the friends are forced to make what might be their last summer on the island together one for the ages.

A happily single New Yorker, Noah decides to help a hopelessly romantic Howie find the man of his dreams, going as far as to promise that he will remain abstinent until he succeeds. Howie immediately crosses paths with a charming doctor named Charlie (James Scully), but it soon becomes clear that the members of Charlie’s affluent circle — including his best friend, Will (Conrad Ricamora), who catches Noah’s eye — seem to look down on Howie and his eccentric group of friends due to their lack of social status.

Matt Rogers, Bowen Yang and Tomas Matos in "Fire Island."Jeong Park / Searchlight Pictures“Fire Island” was several years in the making. When Booster took his first ferry to the Pines with Yang and a group of their friends many years ago, he packed a copy of Austen’s beloved Regency-era romance novel in a tote bag. As he began to revisit the storied courtship of Elizabeth Bennet, a young woman sharing a modest estate with her parents and four sisters, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, an aristocratic landowner, Booster was struck by the comparisons that could be drawn between Austen’s observations about class in 19th-century English society and his own experiences as a gay Asian man in the 21st century.

One of the biggest parallels he noticed “was the ways in which people from different classes speak to each other and the coded language that people use to be terrible to one another with plausible deniability about how terrible they’re actually being,” the writer and actor, 34, told NBC News.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-pop-culture/fire-island-reimagines-pride-prejudice-queer-rom-com-rcna31606


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