This Charming Girl
Director: Lee Koon-yi
Year: 2004
Rating: 6.5
Country:
Korea
This was director
Lee Koon-yi's debut film. The other day I watched his third film Ad-lib Night
and at least early in his career, it seems that he was reaching for an everyday
realism that can feel dull and random. But that is the point. His characters
in both these films are nothing special, have no dramatics, no obvious goals,
no tragedy other than the tragedy of living and dying - just real people
going through and getting through life. His camera catches the time in which
nothing is done and nothing said. The viewer almost feels like an intruder
watching the characters play out. In this one, he focuses on the life of
one particular woman Jeong-hae (Kim Ji-soo in her debut) and does it in snatches
of her fairly mundane existence. Very few set ups last for more than a minute
or two - and in the end nothing is resolved as it abruptly ends. Maybe on
a happy note, maybe not. The viewer can decide where it will go.
She works in a small post office with a
few other women and she does it with diligence, politeness and efficiency.
She eats with her co-workers at lunch, but little of importance is ever said.
She is frozen inside. Frozen in time. Caused perhaps by the recent death
of her mother or by an attempted rape years previously. When she gets home,
she carefully locks the door as if she is locking the world out. She putters
around her neat apartment, waters her plants, eats dinner and watches the
Shopping Channel until she falls asleep. Her memories flash through her mind
quickly and mournfully. She misses her mother terribly. She seems to be somewhere
in her late 20s to early 30s - a quiet casualty of modern life.
But inside, she is yearning for a connection
- she just has a hard time reaching out. She takes in a small stray cat and
later asks a man to come for dinner in a painfully awkward exchange, but
nothing is sadder than when he doesn't show up and she sits at the table
slowly eating the food with no expression on her face to show how much it
hurts. The director often intimately closes in on her face as she stares
about her. The dialogue is sparse and uncomfortable in its triteness - and
yet I could not turn away. The voyeur in all of us watching a life pass by
of no importance. A lot like us.
