Queen of the Morning Calm: Gloria Kim goes deep in strong drama about a spiralling single mom

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The debut feature from Canadian director, Gloria Ui Young Kim, Queen of the Morning Calm, is an earnest social realist Toronto-set drama, wrapped around a richer exploration of racialized sexual fantasies.

The main story follows a young single mother, Debra (Tina Jung) and her struggle to raise her ten-year-old daughter Mona (Eponine Lee). She’s paying her way as a club lap dancer, who provides sexual extras, until that job falls through, after she brings the child to the club.  

Tina Jung is a single mother working as a stripper and sex worker to pay the bills.

The tumbling dominoes of misfortune could be taken from a Ken Loach drama, as Debra faces a gauntlet of authority figures, including a moralistic school principal, employment agencies and her apartment’s superintendent who’s anxious to collect the rent. Mona keeps acting out in more annoying ways, leading to her suspension from her Catholic school. 

Among Debra’s other problems is her ex, a former soldier named Sarge (Jesse LaVercombe ), now a compulsive gambler and controlling figure, who drops in intermittently, just long enough to disappoint his daughter and pull Debra back into a bad emotional cycle. 

When Debra is about to hit the unemployed, homeless bottom, she’s saved by a friendly middle-aged neighbour named Ian (Shaun Benson), who runs a pawnshop.  He offers her a room and a job as a bookkeeper. Because Ian’s backstory is too under-written to tell for sure, it’s possible he has a creepy saviour complex. But Debra trusts him enough to talk through her issues.  In the film’s pivotal scene, Ian gazes at her in pained shock as she talks about her childhood sexual abuse, and how, confusingly, it “felt good” to be noticed.

There are some strong elements here. Fung, best known for her comic turns on CBC’s Kim's Convenience , is a good dramatic performer as well.  And her character gains depth as her arc moves from reactive and  impassive to someone calling her own shots. LaVercombe, as the antsy Sarge, is well-contrasted with the other main male, the calm and fatherly Ian. 

Some things about the film don’t work: There is an excess of plot about Sarge’s criminal problems, and the cute-but-troubled Mona’s delinquency, as well as an abrupt ending.

What’s salient here is, in some ways, undersold. Among these: Debra’s East Asian background (the film’s puzzling title alludes to Korea’s nickname, Land of The Morning Calm). You don’t have to be an opera buff to recognize that her masochistic love of a white officer echoes the plot of Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera, Madama Butterfly, the prototype for the familiar Asian exotic-erotic fetish, with its roots in military conquest and domination. 

Here, the fetish also lives in Debra’s head, and represents the high price of being “paid attention to.” When Debra tells her daughter about her first meeting with Mona’s father, the scenes have a hazy fixated romantic fantasy of An Officer and A Gentleman. He was in his dress uniform, an audience of one at her strip-tease show. She was a half-dressed teenager, twirling around a pole in a halo of light. Breaking free from the history of that perverse power fantasy is the key to her and her daughter’s future liberty.

Queen of the Morning Calm. Directed and written by Gloria Kim. Starring: Tina Fung, Eponine Lee, Jesse Lavercombe and Shaun Benson. The film opens theatrically in Toronto at Yonge & Dundas with other markets to follow.