1
beautiful
A great, delicate movie. 2019. Gong Yoo as a very worried husband trying to do his best for his wife and daughter. A very beautiful Jung Yu Mi, made up to not look as if she were made-up, as a woman worn out from the wild 24 hr effort it takes to be a baby's main caretaker and the main housecleaner.
The character Kim Ji Young, whom JYM plays, begins occasionally when very tired or stressed to speak in the voices of other women in her family, articulating the lives they have led as they connected to hers. Her memories in her dreams and while she is awake slide into these dissociative states, which are realistically seen from the outside by her confused husband and/or family. The beauty of the film is that KJY makes a powerful unconscious connection with that community via familial memories. What she cannot articulate for herself consciously is communicated as she enacts the perspectives of others.
She is not alone -- she sees friends occasionally and slowly begins to wonder if she can return to work. Everything seems to conspire to make it so hard for her, for mothers, to work, to take leave, to come back to work. Everywhere all over the world this is a long slow hard change to make, and it is individual people in every family who slowly one by one make those incremental steps happen.
There is nothing, nothing like the masterful way emotion is handled in Korean cinema. She suffers from postpartum depression, but the focus of the film is not clinical, but on the delicate shifts of relationships. I wept when her brother turned and said, next time I will bring you cream buns. You will know why if you watch the film.
I often say that what I love about SK cinema is its absurdist edge, but the surrealistic european heritage which is drawn on was never just about absurdity, it was always about art's journey through the subconscious of society to rescue the strengths of dreams and nightmares. The sheaves of our daily life are always interleaved with our dreams and only the very best cinema can come this close to depicting that.
The MDL list has everyone there, for once, from the cinematographer to the writer. So, take a look; the director is Kim Do Yung, the composer is Kim Tae Seong, and the writer is Yoo Young Ah.
Dont be afraid to watch this film. There was a lot of interesting fuss in Korea about it and about the book it was made from, but the film stands on its own.
ps. I try hard not to say this sort of thing but SK is no better or worse objectively in the treatment of women than the west or anywhere else in asia; its just a shock to see men so entitled as to publically try to shame women back into the Stone Age. In SK women fight and dream just as we all do; everywhere it's 2 steps forward,1 back.
Cinema has the power to shock simply by the enactment of fact. Because This Is My First Life was very first show where I had ever seen the fact that women are given less to eat as children enacted. I knew it was real, a fact, an historical fact, perhaps in the past for developed societies but definitely part of demographic data about childhood mortality, but it was a still a silent shock to see it on screen in front of me. I dont know why. Anyway, just saying...
The character Kim Ji Young, whom JYM plays, begins occasionally when very tired or stressed to speak in the voices of other women in her family, articulating the lives they have led as they connected to hers. Her memories in her dreams and while she is awake slide into these dissociative states, which are realistically seen from the outside by her confused husband and/or family. The beauty of the film is that KJY makes a powerful unconscious connection with that community via familial memories. What she cannot articulate for herself consciously is communicated as she enacts the perspectives of others.
She is not alone -- she sees friends occasionally and slowly begins to wonder if she can return to work. Everything seems to conspire to make it so hard for her, for mothers, to work, to take leave, to come back to work. Everywhere all over the world this is a long slow hard change to make, and it is individual people in every family who slowly one by one make those incremental steps happen.
There is nothing, nothing like the masterful way emotion is handled in Korean cinema. She suffers from postpartum depression, but the focus of the film is not clinical, but on the delicate shifts of relationships. I wept when her brother turned and said, next time I will bring you cream buns. You will know why if you watch the film.
I often say that what I love about SK cinema is its absurdist edge, but the surrealistic european heritage which is drawn on was never just about absurdity, it was always about art's journey through the subconscious of society to rescue the strengths of dreams and nightmares. The sheaves of our daily life are always interleaved with our dreams and only the very best cinema can come this close to depicting that.
The MDL list has everyone there, for once, from the cinematographer to the writer. So, take a look; the director is Kim Do Yung, the composer is Kim Tae Seong, and the writer is Yoo Young Ah.
Dont be afraid to watch this film. There was a lot of interesting fuss in Korea about it and about the book it was made from, but the film stands on its own.
ps. I try hard not to say this sort of thing but SK is no better or worse objectively in the treatment of women than the west or anywhere else in asia; its just a shock to see men so entitled as to publically try to shame women back into the Stone Age. In SK women fight and dream just as we all do; everywhere it's 2 steps forward,1 back.
Cinema has the power to shock simply by the enactment of fact. Because This Is My First Life was very first show where I had ever seen the fact that women are given less to eat as children enacted. I knew it was real, a fact, an historical fact, perhaps in the past for developed societies but definitely part of demographic data about childhood mortality, but it was a still a silent shock to see it on screen in front of me. I dont know why. Anyway, just saying...
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