Romcoms have long been a staple of the American high school fantasy, but what happens when high school is actually kind of… messy? Mei Makino's debut feature “Inbetween Girl” presents a raw coming-of-age drama revolving around Angie Chen (Emma Galbraith), a bluntly unapologetic Chinese-Caucasian high school student. Her tough facade begins to falter, however, when things start to spin out of control. Her white mother seems inattentive at home; her Chinese father moves on to the dream Chinese American family; and her crush, school heartthrob Liam (William Magnuson), starts to whisper sweet-nothings in her ear while dating the school's most popular girl, Sheryl (Emily Garrett). “Inbetween Girl” grapples with the growing pains of a soul-searching outsider pit in an existential maelstrom amid the picturesque East End of Galveston, Texas.
“Inbetween Girl” will play at SXSW, and perhaps no festival would have been a better fit for this Texas native. Born in Austin, raised in Galveston, and then educated again in Austin, Makino's excitement was still palpable over the phone. “As someone who attended school in Austin, SXSW is like the North Star,” she confessed. “Everyone [at UT-Austin] wants to get their film at SXSW.”
For Makino, it's especially exciting that her first feature comes from such a personal place. Makino — who has a Japanese father and Caucasian mother — explains that she wanted to make a biracial film no matter what. “This may surprise you, but originally I wanted to make a film about a half Black and half Mexican American teen,” she admits. “I wanted the character to be mixed, and I grew up with a lot of Black and Hispanic friends. Not having anyone who looked like me, I really connected with them.”
However, Emma Galbraith — the awkward yet assertive star in this teen drama — just felt like the perfect fit. They first found her at Creative Action, a non-profit youth organization in Austin. One of Makino's friends was casting a short film for the organization and asked her to review the audition. Stunned, Makino invited Galbraith for a formal audition – where she performed Angie's first vlog on script. “She captured Angie's self-deprecating humor so well,” Makino recalls. “We [decided to] build the story around the characters.
“Angie is in between these two perfect girls. There's the white American perfect [girl] — Sheryl — the blonde and beautiful and morally just All-American. And then there's the Asian American perfect [girl], Fang [played by Thanh Bui], who is this traditional robotics nerd, Stanford-bound implied future stepsister who's mastered Mandarin. And then there's Angie. She just feels like she doesn't live up to either expectation. She doesn't embody these two different conceptions of perfection, but she still finds her own way.”
On the surface, “Inbetween Girl” seems to resonate with Lana Condor-starring drama, “To All The Boys I've Loved Before.” The elements all seem to be aligned: a quiet, artistic Asian American protagonist has a crush (that actually works out!) with the school stud. While Lara Jean wins over Peter through her virtuous nature, however, Angie Chen is a tormented temptress. Though Makino started her script before the series released, she admits to feeling nervous upon watching the show set precedent. “I love To All the Boys but… I don't want people to pigeonhole my film into the Asian American teen romcom box.”
It is ironic to think of “Inbetween Girl” as a pigeonholed film though, for the narrative simply spills over every moral and ethnic line possible. “There are three narratives here,” she explains. “There's Liam's, where a boy cheats and apologises for his actions and there's Sheryl's, the morally upright girl who's been wronged. But these have been done before. I didn't want to do either of these narratives. I wanted to do something different — and that turned out to be Angie's.”
Makino maintains a keen attention to detail in this four-year production, and it shows. Angie's art comes from another biracial friend, Larissa Akhmetova (IG: @lurissu) a Mexican-Caucasian artist from Makino's Episcopalian elementary school. The religious high school background reflects another oppressive presence in Angie's life, too — adding to yet another factor suppressing Angie's individual voice. Makino even had trouble casting Sheryl, played by Emily Garrett. “She was one of the last few girls we auditioned for that role,” Makino says. “On the surface, [Sheryl] has to be annoying to Angie — but she also has to be charming enough to win her over.”
When asked about Makino's opinion of Asian American representation in Texas — versus that of California and New York, two hotspots of film production in the US — Makino laughs. “I didn't even think about it that much. It's like what they say,” Makino said. “Film what you know.”
This interview has been edited and redacted for clarity.
