The Many Faces of One Identity
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“The Grace Lee Project,” a mischievous little documentary, purports to be an investigation of ethnicity and societal expectations. It might also herald the Age of Google Cinema. Filmmaker Grace Lee ruminates on her extremely popular name, wonders at all the doppelgangers she finds, and therefore resembles anyone who’s done some self-Googling.
The difference, though, is difference. Ms. Lee is Korean-American, and she shows how “Grace Lee” represents something bigger than an accident of naming. Everyone she interviews who knew a Grace Lee describes – or imagines – the same model assimilated Asian female: quiet, accomplished, polite, unobtrusive. Unpacking this puzzle, and hearing the reactions and reflections of many Grace Lees, is the springboard for the titular project. Ms. Lee presents a range of folks to confound stereotypes, even as she shrewdly recognizes that she’s cutting reality to match a desired vision of individuality.
The Grace Lees are a predictably unpredictable lot, perhaps more American in their particular diversity than anything else. There’s the A student who, naturally, rebels by making medievally gruesome draw ings, and the two devout Christians, one a budding evangelist, the other a prim stay-at-home mom. One single mother invited an abused friend and her entire family to live with her. Another subject, a vigorous Detroit-based activist in her 80s, almost overwhelms the film’s comparatively timid musings on identity.
Ms. Lee voices a number of concerns, but her strongest insight is a universal one. The personal accounts elegantly illustrate how people imagine themselves into being, growing into and against their own expectations as much as those of others. Our slacker narrator also lends a touch of self-deprecatory humor to her endeavor, which falls easily into absurdity.
As with a Google search, however, the film’s entertaining randomness can become a crutch. Predictably, Ms. Lee can’t find a satisfying ending to her quest, but the stories along the way suggest their own stirring answers to her questions of consciousness and identity.
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Happenstance also drives the not-so-short short that is screening at Film Forum with Ms. Lee’s “Max by Chance,” a spastic essay and festival favorite, is Max Kestner’s motor-mouthed song of himself. If Grace Lee probes Google Cinema, Mr. Kestner’s family hagiography-cum-nerdy-lament is closer to “Pop-Up Video,” or maybe a breathlessly footnoted Nicholson Baker ramble.
Mr. Kestner himself narrates nonstop, sounding like a garrulous, precocious child. His unusual nuclear family – radical Danish socialists who held regular family meetings, keeping minutes – provides endless fodder for jokes. One anecdote has the family voting on having a second child; the nays have it, and Papa gets sterilized.
Mr. Kestner’s is an unusually inert motion picture. Still photos, diagrams of gadgets, and family genealogies are all shuffled before the camera to illustrate his rant. If a forebear bought a machine for making rope chains, click, you will see a picture of it.
The director darkens the proceedings with ominous non sequiturs featuring closed doors and imagined arguments. He even tries for some cosmic relevance, which sounds dippier than his parents. But this film is above all a bracing psycho-tonic briskly quaffed.