Fire Island puts a fun queer spin on Pride and Prejudice

Despite a half-dozen film versions of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice being produced in the last decade, there is life in the old gal yet.

Here we have another modernisation featuring a queer take on the timeless love mismatch, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that a successful film plot should be milked and milked until all creativity is drained from it.

This time around the action moves from Bath and Meryton to the American queer mecca of Fire Island, with a screenplay penned by Korean-American comedy writer Joel Kim Booster.

While I'm being cynical about the repetitiveness of Austen remakes, Fire Island stands on its own as a fun and funny film with some heart behind the sex and exhibitionism.

Every summer, Fire Island is a destination holiday venue for queer America, with dance parties and public drinking.

It is something like New Orleans' famous Mardi Gras, but in Speedos.

For a decade, Noah (writer Kim Booster also stars) and his best pal Howie (Bowen Yang) and their pals Luke (Matt Rogers) and Keegan (Tomas Matos) have met on Fire Island at the home of their lesbian friend Erin (Margaret Cho).

Not much has changed in the hundreds of years since Austen penned Pride and Prejudice, and the visitor to Fire Island has as much social hierarchy and complexity to navigate as any Austen heroine.

For Noah and Howie, this includes maintaining their sense of self-worth amongst the judgey and cliquey pretty and muscled Caucasian crowd at the Island's many summer parties.

The five friends form a tight clique of their own, but this summer Noah is determined to put his own pleasures aside and find a boyfriend, or at least a summer fling, for Howie.

Howie catches the eye of Charlie (James Scully) and the two hit it off immediately, despite the disapproval of Charlie's lawyer pal Will (Conrad Ricamora). Charlie and Will are staying on the well-to-do side of the island and their two houses of friends are thrown together across a handful of parties, barely tolerant of each other but playing along for the sake of their mutual friends' blossoming romance.

Kim Booster's screenplay doesn't disguise its Austen roots. It's ridiculous how appropriate some of Austen's character studies remain, so contemporary. Like Howie and Noah, who hasn't been mortified by the behaviours of their own family or friends in a public setting? Friends Luke and Keegan, exhibitionists in crop-tops and buzz-cuts, ARE Kitty and Lydia.

Austen has Darcy making the caustic aside about Miss Eliza Bennett being "Not handsome enough to tempt me" and Booster's Noah is referred to by the hostile hottie Will as being "Not hot enough to be that annoying".

Kim Booster, a comedy writer on shows like Big Mouth, skewers queer and woke culture and race relations along the way to a trope-honouring rom-com ending, but he is also a fine actor. Yang is understated and wry, and Cho gets many laughs in the role of Mrs Bennett.

Director Andrew Anh has made a handful of intense and terrific early films and so reins in what might have been an abundance of over-the-top campiness, with an ear for the caustic barb.

Like Clueless, the film is a contemporised Austen, but there's also an homage to The Witches of Eastwick in the calling forth of a perfect man and the price it comes with.

Fire Island is out this week on the streaming service Disney+ and warrants repeat viewings to catch the throwaway dialogue you might have missed on the first watch.