The film opens with Seo-Won, the protagonist, sharing the day-to-day life of her children with another mother. Despite the superfluous mundaneness of the conversation, the lament of a home left behind in a different country becomes apparent. However, before the viewer can declare the film to be the exploration of immigrant identity, the narrative deliberately fractures itself, presenting us with fragments of memory, thoughts, arguments, and forgotten troubles that lie somewhere buried in a life lived long and hard.
In the process, familial guilt, anger, resentment, loss, but more importantly, the people who get left behind, alongside those who leave, are conjured by the film. However, how much of memory can truly be trusted? The film presents the question, while emphasizing how sometimes memory, no matter how unreliable a narrator, is the only entity that you have left, the only tenuous connection to an even more fragile notion of home.
Through a competent screenplay, and equally complementary performances, the narrative conjures all of this, and some more. It spans an entire spectrum of identity, and belongingness, both ideas disrupted by disorienting thoughts, the causes of this disorientation eventually explained at the end. All of this is then very intimately tied with the protagonist's experience of not only having left a home behind but also the relentless efforts of building one in a foreign land.
Read LessIn the process, familial guilt, anger, resentment, loss, but more importantly, the people who get left behind, alongside those who leave, are conjured by the film. However, how much of memory can truly be trusted? The film presents the question, while emphasizing how sometimes memory, no matter how unreliable a narrator, is the only entity that you have left, the only tenuous connection to an even more fragile notion of home.
Through a competent screenplay, and equally complementary performances, the narrative conjures all of this, and some more. It spans an entire spectrum of identity, and belongingness, both ideas disrupted by disorienting thoughts, the causes of this disorientation eventually explained at the end. All of this is then very intimately tied with the protagonist's experience of not only having left a home behind but also the relentless efforts of building one in a foreign land.
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