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What actually is “an identity” and what does it mean to possess one? In Yoo Jong-seok’s psychological thriller Be My Baby (미아, Mia), an external “identity” largely seems to be defined by the possession of a document. In an odd kind of way, the film seems to imply at times that one woman is interchangeable with another. No one checks these IDs more than superficially. ID photos don’t often give much of an impression of height or build, and long dark hair seems to be enough of a defining characteristic to merit a pass. Possession of the ID equals the possession of that identity even if it is only borrowed or lent for a specific purpose.
In fact, we can’t really be sure that anyone is who they say they are. When we first meet Seo-rim, she lies. She’s taken a photo of an ultrasound seemingly swiped from the hospital where she works as a nurse to guilt her boyfriend’s other woman into breaking up with him, but Eun-bi isn’t having any of it. Seo-rim has miscalculated on one level as she assumed that she and Eun-bi were social equals, while it turns out that Eun-bi is from a wealthy family and essentially works in the bar just for fun. Seo-rim’s boyfriend is leaving her for Eun-bi in part because he wants to live a rich person’s life and has no way of earning it for himself.
In that way it becomes clear that Seo-rim and Eun-bi live in different worlds, though Seo-rim decides to try her identity on for size in order to enact a plan of revenge that involves faking her own death so she can claim on an insurance policy that lists her mysteriously absent twin sister as the beneficiary. To do this sets her sights on a young woman she finds knocked out in the street and takes to the hospital mostly on the grounds that she does not appear to have connections to other people and therefore will not be easily missed. “No one notices when a homeless girl dies,” Soo-mi says prophetically when talking about the death of the woman whose identity she temporarily borrowed. Ironically enough, Seo-rim does not seem to notice that she already has a connection with Soo-mi that makes her more than the perfect target, but perhaps also a dangerous liability.
The danger presented by those who lack a clear identity of their own is a staple of the genre, but there’s something unsettling about Soo-mi’s hollowness as if she were in search of a new home to inhabit. She asks if Soo-mi hasn’t also wanted to live a different life or be a different person, but clearly means it in a more literal sense than most. She eyes up Eun-bi’s swanky apartment as if planning to steal it from Seo-rim without realising it doesn’t belong to her either. For reasons that become apparent, Soo-mi is in search of a new identity as a means of burying an old one, so that she can live a “normal life,” rather than being in permanent hiding from an exploitative community. Seo-rim is, however, also pursued though in her case by loan sharks having accrued massive debts to pay for her sister’s medical treatment. Unable to continue paying into her “insurance policy”, Seo-rim has been embezzling from the hospital and is in any case only a contract worker rather than a regular employee. With hospital budgets shrinking, she almost certainly won’t be rehired. Given all that, it’s not really clear why Soo-mi would actively want her identity anyway aside from possessing document to tell her who she is.
In any case, we can’t be sure who Seo-rim really is, either, or how much of what happens around her is objective reality. Her friend at the hospital cautions her about using an experimental mental health medicine, while she appears to have visual hallucinations and acts in odd ways that do not always make sense. We may end up asking ourselves if Soo-mi is even “real”, or at least if she was really with Seo-rim when she began enacting her revised plan. Even if she was, perhaps she was also merely using Seo-rim so she could run away with a new identity and enough money to live a “normal life.” The only path to survival seems to be to steal from those weaker than oneself. Pushed into a corner by an indifferent society, weighed down by debts both financial and spiritual, all they can really do is fight over the discarded scraps of those like Eun-bi whose presence would very definitely be missed in a world which little cares for those without means and no currency to their names.
Be My Baby screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.
Trailer (no subtitles0
