Nobody’s Daugh­ter Hae-Won

Direc­tor Hong Sang-soo’s 2010 film, Haha­ha, took place in Tongyeong, the coastal base of Admi­ral Yi, a 16^th-cen­tu­ry naval com­man­der revered in Kore­an his­to­ry by the pub­lic at large. He was also revered by tour guide Seon­gok (Moon So-ri) who grew angry when a skep­ti­cal vis­i­tor asked whether Yi was over­rat­ed. Seon­gok stat­ed cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly that no mod­ern man could live up to the Admiral’s good­ness and strength of char­ac­ter, and his stat­ue fig­ures heav­i­ly through­out the film.

There’s anoth­er stat­ue of him in Gwangh­wa­mun Plaza, a new pub­lic plaza (it opened in 2009) in Seoul’s Jong­no Dis­trict, around which the urban por­tion of Hong’s lat­est, Nobody’s Daugh­ter Hae-Won unfolds. Dif­fer­ent sym­bol­ic sculp­tures are found at Sajik Park, where Hae-Won (Jung Eun-chae) sees a stat­ue of Sim Saim­dang, the moth­er of 16^th-cen­tu­ry schol­ar Lee Yul-gok, her­self an artist and poet once praised by an offi­cial gov­ern­ment web­site as ​“the best exam­ple of moth­er­hood in Kore­an history.”(Her face graces the 50,000 won note, while her son is rel­e­gat­ed to the 5,000 won note.)

Hae-Won lives in her (unseen) father’s house and spends the film’s first third with moth­er Jin­ju (Kim Ja-ok), who’s mov­ing to Cana­da the next day. ​“Liv­ing is dying,” Jin­ju cau­tions her daugh­ter, telling her to live by doing what­ev­er she wants. ​“I am liv­ing like that,” Hae-Won says, an asser­tion the film tests. For com­fort, Hae-Won turns to on/​off professor/​boyfriend Lee (Lee Seon-gyun), one of a num­ber of unhap­pi­ly mar­ried male char­ac­ters in the Hong uni­verse. Lee’s cast­ing is one of many links with 2010’s Oki’s Movie, the pri­ma­ry point of self-ref­er­ence. There, he was a younger film stu­dent who unknow­ing­ly dates the same stu­dent as one of his pro­fes­sors; the four-part nar­ra­tive end­ed with Oki’s com­pare-and-con­trast of the two rela­tion­ships as dis­tilled into hikes with each part­ner at Mt Acha.

Nobody’s Daugh­ter Hae-Won also walks twice through Fort Namhan; per usu­al, Hong delights in repeat­ing the same sit­u­a­tions and cre­at­ing either minor dif­fer­ences or (in a gloomi­er mode) observ­ing rep­e­ti­tion of the same mis­takes. Delib­er­ate­ly non-osten­ta­tious mas­ter shots, rou­tine­ly dis­rupt­ed by sud­den clum­sy zooms for empha­sis, take the edge off sym­bol­ic inter­jec­tions, allow­ing them to exist as pleas­ing records of phys­i­cal space should cul­tur­al specifics be lost on the non-Kore­an view­er. The final third is struc­tured around a walk through mist, con­duct­ed by two cou­ples com­posed of a sin­gle woman and a mar­ried man. The moth­er stat­ue serves as reminders of her new parental absence and there’s a strong chance the mist is sym­bol­ic of moral con­fu­sion. But Hong’s non- emphat­ic style staves off high portentousness.

Nobody’s Daugh­ter Hae-Won is more melan­choly than Oki’s Movie but not quite as dirge-like as 2011’s The Day He Arrives, in which joy­less­ly washed-out black-and-white suf­fo­cates char­ac­ters denied even a win­dow view onto some exter­nal dis­trac­tion while drink­ing heav­i­ly in a cramped cor­ner. Alco­hol slight­ly takes the edge off this film’s unusu­al­ly tense oblig­a­tory group-drink­ing sequence, once again unfold­ing in a win­dow­less inte­ri­or. The gru­elling cli­max has both cheat­ing cou­ples stone-cold sober, mak­ing for bleak dra­ma and repet­i­tive, tough going. There are two shots of Lee alone, hunched in despair on a moun­tain, lis­ten­ing to a syrupy waltz-time ren­di­tion of the sec­ond move­ment of Beethoven’s ​‘7^th Sym­pho­ny’. An unusu­al por­ten­tous­ness of scale jux­ta­pos­es the pro­fes­sor against stark, unre­as­sur­ing nature. Dwelling on Lee’s piteous­ness feels like an empa­thet­ic mis­step, away from its com­mend­ably plucky pro­tag­o­nist and towards the morose wreck she’s sad­dled her­self with for so long.

Here, Hong ​’s dom­i­nant POV has shift­ed from mas­cu­line to fem­i­nine: the self-delud­ing voiceover of the pro­tag­o­nist of 2008’s Night and Day was the last time a male voice was the prime nar­ra­tive dri­ver (even if the com­men­tary was from a vis­i­bly unre­li­able nar­ra­tor). No longer hap­less door­mats for male bad behav­ior, women have assert­ed their inde­pen­dence. Con­sid­er the cli­max of 2009’s Like You Know It All, where the usu­al­ly bewil­dered director’s told not to make a movie about what’s just hap­pened by the object of his con­fused affec­tions before she changes her mind: go ahead and make it if you want, she says, it doesn’t make any dif­fer­ence. Or note Isabelle Huppert’s firm­ly cen­tered exam­ple in 2011’s In Anoth­er Coun­try, who — when asked if she some­times lusts for younger flesh — replies ​“Of course, who doesn’t?” with­out blink­ing, assert­ing her right to sex­u­al auton­o­my away from her unre­li­able Kore­an suitor.

Hae-Won wor­ries about whether she’s a ​“good per­son” (a per­pet­u­al­ly unre­alised aspi­ra­tional des­ig­na­tion for Hong’s men)while try­ing to make a deci­sion about whether to end her rela­tion­ship with Lee. The usu­al fret­ting over the inabil­i­ty to con­struct a func­tion­ing eth­i­cal sys­tem applic­a­ble in real life is under­lain with a strong mor­bid­i­ty. Behind her back, one char­ac­ter wor­ries ​“mixed blood” Hae-Won isn’t ​“suit­ed to Korea” (like her moth­er), and she flirts with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mov­ing to Amer­i­ca with a Kore­an screen­writer. Her tri­umph is in final­ly defin­ing autonomous life in Korea on her own terms; a shame she has to share her cli­max with yet anoth­er one of the ​“Kore­an men” foot-stamp­ing­ly decried in In Anoth­er Country.