The two estranged siblings at the center of the mournful drama “Ms. Purple” wear the evidence of their emotional impairment for all the world to see: Carey (Teddy Lee), an unemployed, borderline homeless Los Angeleno, advertises his damage via the stains on his filthy white T-shirt; his sister Kasie (Tiffany Chu) carries it around on her face.
Maybe that’s why the clients at the Koreatown karaoke bar where she works as a doumi — sometimes euphemistically called a “hostess” — are often reluctant to select her from the lineup of smiling young women in tight dresses who earn their money by catering to the whims of the club’s drunken, often lecherous male clientele.
The source of Kasie and Carey’s psychic wounds emerges only gradually in this sad but rarely maudlin film by Justin Chon (“Gook”), which carefully explores the rapprochement between brother and sister that occurs when Kasie is forced to ask Carey for help caring for their dying father (James Kang) after the older man’s home health-care aide suddenly quits.
Other things also come into slow focus, in flashbacks and in conversation between Kasie and Octavio (Octavio Pizano), the sweet young man who works at her club as a valet — and who is clearly far, far better for her than the jerk she’s dating (Ronnie Kim). Much else in Chon’s film (which he co-wrote with Chris Dinh) is equally obvious: Kasie is stuck in a pattern of giving men who don’t deserve it exactly what they want. Everyone urges her to put Dad in hospice, but she refuses, despite the fact that her father’s nastiness is precisely what drove her brother to run away as a teenager. Her predicament — one that necessitated her dropping out of music school — is by choice.
