Tag: girlfriend

House Of Hummingbird (Beol-Sae)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Seoul, South Korea, 1994. Less than 10 years since South Korea has become a democracy. The year of the Winter Olympics, the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the Seongsu Bridge collapse. The latter incident will leave its mark on some of the characters here.

Teenager Eun-hee’s mum and dad (Jung In-gi and Lee Seung-yeon) run a small food store, sourcing “only the finest ingredients”. On occasion, they deliver to other suppliers and the whole family is roped in to make sure the orders are prepped and sent out on time. They are fiercely proud parents who want only the best for their kids. The best, as they understand it, is doing well in the school and university system, presumably with the idea of getting a well paid job afterwards.

This message is reinforced by her school. A male teacher has the girls chant, ” I will go to / Seoul National University / instead of karaoke”. He also gets his class to nominate the top two delinquents among them, defined as those who smoke or date instead of studying. Eun-hee is the top nominee. Or, as two of her classmates with a clear sense of privilege put it when talking about her, “dumb girls like that don’t make it to college and they become our maids”

.

Her brother Dae-hoon (Son Sang-yeon) is achieving good grades at school and looks set to go to university. He has a nasty side too: he periodically bullies and hits Eun-hee, making her home life a misery. Her sister Soo-hee (Park Soo-yeon) is out a lot and looks less devoted to academic work, on one occasion hiding in a cupboard to avoid their father.

Eun-hee herself (Park Ji-hoo) is an outsider who doesn’t really fit in at school. She likes to draw and wants to b a comic artist.

She has a boyfriend of sorts, schoolboy Kim Ji-wan (Jeong Yun-seo) who she tentatively gets to kiss her who is later dragged from her presence by his overbearing mother. A later same-sex romance with the shy Bae Yu-ri (Seol Hye-in) comes to nothing.

A lump under one ear will later cause her to be hospitalised.

Her parents send her to the local Chinese cram school, but that doesn’t motivate her academically until her teacher is replaced by university student Miss Kim Young-ji (Kim Sae-byuk), first seen smoking a cool cigarette on the school stairwell, who gets both Eun-hee and Calvin Klein clothing-obsessed fellow student Jeon Ji-suk (Park Seo-yun) to talk about themselves and their interests, the only person in the film to do so.

When the two students go shoplifting and get caught, Ji-suk reveals Eun-hee’s father’s name to the understandably incensed owner. It is Miss Young-ji to whom Eun-hee talks about the crime and in whom she subsequently confides, the one person in the film who brings her out of herself and gives her good advice, e.g. to stick up for herself when her brother beats her. Consequently, they become friends. And Eun-hee becomes vaguely aware, through titles on Miss Young-ji’s classroom bookshelf, of politics and such schools of thought as feminism.

It’s a bleak period picture of an emerging democracy where almost everyone seems to be focused on career at the expense of relationships or family. At the same time, though, it’s highly affecting as a sympathetic portrait of a teenage girl’s life which also exhibits an optimistic undercurrent in the character of a teacher who goes against the grain and shows a genuine interest in her pupils.

House Of Hummingbird plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:

Mad World (Yat Nim Mou Ming)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Lorry driver Wong (Eric Tsang) lives in a cramped apartment block in Hong Kong. He collects his estranged adult son Tung (Shawn Yue) from the hospital. Tung is bipolar and the doctors say there is nothing more they can do in order to help him. He must return home.

But “home” is less simple than it sounds. His mum (Elaine Jin) was bipolar, too. Dad walked out on the family years earlier. Tung resents him for it just as he resents his brother, his mother’s favorite, who impressed her by doing well in school and getting himself a lucrative job in the US where he now lives. As he pointed out to his mother while she was still alive, it was Tung – and not his idolised brother – who stayed behind to look after her. She was incontinent and he had to help her wash and shower regularly. In the end, that didn’t work out because following a heated argument between the two of them, she had a fatal accident in the shower – an incident which keeps coming back to torment Tung.

Then there’s the matter of Tung’s former girlfriend Jenny (Charmaine Fong) who left him the night of their engagement when he unexpectedly and violently turned on her. He wants to find her and get back together. But that may not prove possible. When Tung tracks her down, Jenny explains that although she’s paid her share of their mortgage, if he can’t pay his share she stands to lose everything. She’s also managed to pay off the debts he got the couple into which she only discovered after they split up. Determined to make the relationship work, he accompanies her to the Christian church service she now attends where she goes up to the front and explains to the congregation how he destroyed her life and she hates him, but God will help her to love him. Not exactly the best basis to build a relationship, Christian or otherwise.

Tung’s one friendship which seems to work is with the trusting 10-year-old (Ivan Chan), who lives with his mother next door to Tung and his dad. She doesn’t want her boy to get his hands dirty since she thinks manual work is beneath him, but unbeknownst to her, he loves gardening. Tung helps him grow plants on the roof – until the boy’s mother discovers he’s bipolar and bans him from seeing Tung. But the pair secretly communicate through the paper thin walls anyway.

The script, co-written with Florence Chan, really gets under the skin of those living with bipolar disorder. Director Wong gets terrific performances out of his cast too, particularly Tsang and Yue. Hong Kong cinema is not generally noted for sharp movies about social issues, but this is one of those films that bucks that trend. It’s pretty obvious that none of the characters here, from Tung himself through to the housing block residents around him, are coping well with Tung’s bipolar condition. There are lots of complications and no real solutions offered except the implicit suggestion that Hong Kong society has failed to deal with this difficult issue and it might be a really good idea if people were at least to start openly talking about it. Clearly this film is a welcome nod in that direction. Wong and his team are to be congratulated on putting this extremely dirty and largely taboo issue out there in such a compelling way.

Mad World played in Creative Visions: Hong Kong Cinema 1997 – 2017, which took place in London between November 17th and 19th. This is a filthy genius movie worth keeping an eye on, and we will let you know about any further opportunities to watch it. Just follow us on Twitter!