In the last years, films from South Korea presented always a very rich and diverse film culture – if auteur cinema or mainstream. Not to mention the International Film festival in Busan which is now the most important showcase for Asian cinema in the world. Jirueo ganeun il by Yoo Jae-in film follows a good tradition of this Generation section to introduce first films of young Korean filmmaker. In this film, the main protagonist Yoon-ji, an orphaned high school student, learns that she is pregnant after an affair with one of her teachers. Most of the time she is mobbed by her class mates. The teacher, she had an affair with disappears. She shares a room at a residential home for students with Kyung-sun, a girl who sells at school illegal essences for E-cigarettes.
While thinking about making an abortion or not, Yoon-ji, alone or with her unlike roommate Kyung-sun is walking through the urban modern landscape of the city, streets, lanes, and always metro-stations, anonymous impersonal places where the individuality of the protagonists often seems lost and the film´s fiction seems to be suspended sometimes for short moments. There is both in this , the seismographic sensitivity for the complex relationship between individual and a permanent changing society based on modern capitalism but as well a hint, that Korean filmmaker are excellent story teller. Just alone the contrast between the two main protagonists is interesting. While Yoon-ji is often withdrawn into herself, her room mate Kyung-sun is the opposite, a refreshing funny and often optimistic character. Their odyssey through this modern urban landscape moves between mundane routines and dramatic twists. At the moment, I think, there is probably no national cinema which offers such a deep and honest empathy for outsiders and misfits, people who can´t follow the pressure of this modern consumer society anymore. And this empathy (which appears very seldom as imposed) is visible from auteur cinema until even a lot of this very popular Korean TV-dramas. Just to watch this unlike mates walking through this very concrete modern landscape trying hard to assert themselves in this often hostile world, is a little cinematic gem. The Korean cinema seem to have found their own specific pendant to the Japanese shomingeki-films of the 30s and 50s. Even though, like in Jureo ganeun jil, Korean mundane dramas have more conflicts and twists like its Japanese pendants. And there is as well a strange transparency in this relationship between the real, datable, exact geographically located settings and the film´s narrative and stylistic interventions. One can sense both, the effort to create a precise image of the modern world but as well an unbridled desire to fabricate storytelling.
It seems, there is hardly a zone in this film where the unhappy protagonists can find themselves. To live is always to keep moving. The permanent moving protagonists in this film are as well a metaphor for finding a path in their life. All this happens without lecturing, without manipulation. It is entirely up to us how far we go with our empathy for these two protagonists. There is no imposed morality nor any element of lecturing in this film. Instead, the film offers several ways to find an access to it. One can be absorbed by the story of the two girls which has this extremely range between clear realism and the melancholy of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. It seems, he Korean cinema created its own unique poetic realism. But one can also just watch the faces of the two impressive young actresses Sim Su-bin and Lee Ji-won. Than one can wonder how much different emotions this (compared to western acting) relative understated but sometimes almost eerily intense performances can evoke. One can follow them during their odyssey between real locations and this fictive zone where this peculiar interplay between unvarnished realism and a love for storytelling takes place. Jiureo ganeun jil, by Yoo Jaein is a great film debut and another sign why Korean films are an indispensable part of world cinema.
Rüdiger Tomczak
further screenings:
18.Feb, 19.00 Haus der Kulturen der Welt
19.Feb, 12.30, Haus der Kulturen der Welt
20.Feb, 10.15, Cubix 6
21.Feb, 12.45 Filmtheater am Friedrichshain
22.Feb, 19.00 Cubix 6
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