Tag: Kim Jin-young

Silver Apricot (은빛살구, Jang Man-min, 2024)

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Money ruins everything. It eats away at even the most fundamental of human connections, rendering them all, in their way, transactional. But you need it, in the same way a vampire needs blood and it might be that the only way to get it is to suck it out of someone else’s neck. Or at least, that’s how it is for Jung-seo (Na Ae-jin) in Jang Man-min’s familial drama Silver Apricot (은빛살구, Eunbitsalgu). 

At 32 years old, she’s still being held on a temporary worker contract with her sleazy boss, who is low-key sexually harassing her, using the prospect of full, salaried employment to manipulate her working life. She works “overtime” making posters to advertise other exploitative jobs, such as gig economy delivery driver, with the cheerful slogan “anyone can do it” which she later acknowledges is probably “insulting” to those who do actually do it and are fighting for proper pay and recognition. Secretly, however, she’s working on a webtoon about a vampire, which is how she works out her anxieties and what she actually wants to do and would be doing if money wasn’t getting in the way.

The particular way it’s getting in the way right now is that she’s won an apartment lottery and urgently needs to get the money together for a deposit. Jung-seo plans on going halves with her fiancée Gyeong-hyeon (Kang Bong-sung), but he seems reluctant to put the money in and is clear he won’t make up the shortfall when she’s turned down for the permanent position and won’t be earning as much as she hoped. All that’s left to her is the bank of mum, but her mother’s fed up with her always asking for money and claims she’s saving too with the hope of opening her own restaurant despite the fact that Jung-seo suspects the owner of the place she works at now is romantically interested in her. Perhaps like Jung-seo, she’s lost the ability to trust anyone after having a bad experience with Jung-seo’s father who left them for another woman and still lives in their home town with a new family. 

Jeung-seo’s father Young-joo may also have had artistic dreams in that he was once a saxophonist but gave his sax to her mother as security for a loan he never repaid. Her mother suggests she ask him for the money back instead, but that means opening old wounds that may be better left unresolved. Young-joo (Ahn Suk-hwan) is like a vampire himself, draining those around him of their cash to fund one harebrained scheme or another from stock market speculation to spurious property investments that he swears will pay off but almost never do. Gyeong-hyeon may not be much better in this regard, himself dabbling in stocks despite Jeung-seo making him promise he wouldn’t in a way that makes it hard for her trust him and suggests that men are always hung up on potential future gains rather than what they have concretely right now. 

Predictably, Young-joo doesn’t really want to pay up and insists on meeting Gyeong-hyeon first in and old-fashioned bit of patriarchal nonsense which makes even less sense considering how little of a father he has been to her for all these years. Gyeong-hyeong, meanwhile, is instantly taken in by him and has all but fallen for one of his scams. Maybe it makes sense on paper to abandon the city and live in an area with a lower cost of living doing a less prestigious kind of job like running a cafe which would lessen your financial burden and allow more “free” time to practise your art even if would still be a side hustle, but Jeung-seo knows better than to believe her father’s lies and knows full well that he’s only changed his tune because he overheard how much profit they could make with the apartment and thinks he’s entitled to some of it if he gives them the money.

But it’s not even like Jung-seo is asking for money from him. She’s only asking for money that actually belongs to her mother. Money ruined their relationship too, and it even interferes in her connection with her younger half-sister Jung-hae (Kim Jin-young) who idolises her but also frames her for stealing her mother’s savings after asking her to secretly sign a lease on an apartment she could use for her own art, music, and as a safety net in case her mother really decides to leave Young-joo this time when his plan to redevelop a building in a nearby town inevitably goes belly up. Joo-hee (Choi Jung-hyun) may have this in the back of her mind herself, which explains her coolness toward Jung-seo, fearing her sudden need for the repaying of old debts will destabilise their family and mess things up for Jung-hae. 

Despite the familial tension, being back in her hometown where Gyeong-hyeong’s spineless pragmatism is all the more obvious forces Jung-seo to think about what the apartment actually represents and whether that’s what she wants. Once she signs, she’ll be locked into that very conventional life which is what everyone in Seoul strives for, but might not actually be right for her. Her friend in her hometown, Tae-joo, has joined the navy for the financial security and will be able to get a military apartment when he marries. He’s given up drawing webtoons, and possibly also on his romantic hopes for Jung-seo. When she makes overtures towards him, he replies that he’s not ready to give up on his civil servant girlfriend, suggesting that he isn’t brave enough to break out of this conventionality either. Jung-seo is essentially in a relationship of convenience with Gyeong-hyeon that is not based on love but solely on the ability to buy the apartment which is what he really wants from her. The question is whether she has the courage to get off this train or is willing to settle for a life of dull humiliation submitting herself to the whims of her bosses while gradually abandoning her hopes and dreams to live in an apartment that is itself not a home but an investment in a future that will never really be hers.

Silver Apricot screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Sesang (세상, Jules Suo, 2019)

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“Our life’s journey consists of both positive and negative. It teaches us to move forward and fulfil your dreams” according to Han-chul (Han Jong-hoon), a digital nomad waxing philosophical about the benefits of the unencumbered life. “Sesang” (세상) in one sense just means the world, but it can also mean “a life” or even a life’s journey, a passage through the world both a part of it and not. Han-chul, however, by the film’s conclusion is perhaps beginning to wonder if there are also costs involved in a life without connection, unanchored by his floating existence and imbued with a sense of existential loneliness as the world changes around him while he changes with it but perhaps not quite in step. 

The film opens in New York with aspiring actress Nari (Kim Jin-young) travelling to the airport to meet Han-chul, her long-distance boyfriend, at the airport. Han-chul has been working on a documentary in Japan about a divorcee who relocated there and is seemingly visiting Nari while waiting for another opportunity. Nari’s barbed comment that she isn’t sure they “share the same dreams” when Han-chul remarks on the similarity of her upcoming project about a long-distance couple to their real lives perhaps signals that she’s not entirely satisfied with their relationship, eventually sparking an argument that leads to a break-up when Han-chul reveals he’s been offered a job in Berlin annoyed with him for once again abruptly changing his plans, both in his abandonment of her and of his complete lack of consideration for the inconvenience he may cause her through breezing in and out of her life. 

Then again both Nari and Han-chul appear to be fairly self-contained. Each of them find themselves spending a lot of time home alone while living with roommates who are generally out. Nari’s New York life is spent largely within the Korean ex-pat community, often working on Korean productions, eating in Korean restaurants and going to noraebang with Korean friends. She is offended when her mother tries to send her money, resentful at the implication that she’s struggling but also finding herself at the mercy of a sometimes cruel industry that limits the kind of work available to her while normalising an abusive working environment. The one job we see her do which is presented in such a way as to mimic real life is also problematic in playing into several different unpleasant and racially charged stereotypes at once. Later she is invited to rejoin a production she apparently left because of the behaviour of a Korean producer who, she is assured, has since been fired. Her break-up with Han-chul is followed by a job offer back in Korea which sees her pursuing parallel careers, travelling back and forth working at “home” but living “abroad”. 

Staying on in New York, Han-chul too takes a room with someone who’s never in but takes the opportunity to rid himself of most of his possessions. In fact, even his hair becomes progressively shorter as time moves on to the point at which it doesn’t quite suit him, an old friend somewhat derisively commenting on his “edgy” new style. He tells a mutual friend, Eun-hye (Jina Nam), who is definitively settled in New York by virtue of owning a restaurant, that there are many things he may still want but attaining them cannot compare with the lightness of having nothing. Han-Chul’s philosophy may even extend to people as well as things. Perhaps he wanted Nari, or still wants her, but not enough to give up his life of freedom or indeed to deny her hers. He is happy to hear that she too is travelling the world, gaining new experiences and growing as a person, at this point at least convinced that life is about forward motion and the expansion of borders internal and external. 

Yet on his eventual return to Korea after experiencing a degree of disappointment, he seems lost rather than free, a man without a plan adrift without direction. His aloneness seems all the more obvious among the throng of travellers at the airport each heading somewhere or nowhere only they can know. He sees movies in empty theatres, lives in bare rooms, and wanders down empty streets. Often returning to transitory spaces such as airports and train stations, Suo’s preference for long takes with a degree of detachment hints at a cinema of loneliness asking us if this increasingly migratory existence has disrupted the natural rhythms of human relationships such as that of Nari and Han-chul who were, at least according to Eun-hye, once “so close” but now very far apart both physically and emotionally. Han-chul may be searching for the very thing that he has rejected in his floating life, but nevertheless remains on the move chasing his dreams if perhaps not quite sure what exactly they may be. 

Sesang streams in the US Oct. 23 to 31 as part of this year’s Korean American Film Festival New York.

Original trailer (English subtitles)