Yoon Hee looks tired. She works in a factory cafeteria, wordlessly pouring seaweed soup for the workers. She lives in a small apartment with her daughter Sae Bom and when she finds her ex-husband waiting for her outside the door, having just visited their daughter, she doesn’t want to spare a minute of attention for him and hurries inside, then locks the door. One day a letter comes for her – Sae Bom picks it up from the letterbox and reads it, it’s from a woman in Hokkaido called Jun and she speaks of a time twenty years ago. She wonders what happened between her mother and this woman twenty years ago, wonders what her mother used to be like, wonders who she actually is.
Something did happen twenty years ago, and this story is as much about Yoon Hee’s relationship with her daughter Sae Bom as it is about Yoon Hee’s history with Jun. Sae Bom looks up to her mother, beams when her uncle tells her she takes after her mother’s looks, yet she doesn’t know much about her. Like most children, Sae Bom sees her mother as just that, a mother. Yet ever since she opens that letter, she’s determined to learn more about her mother. After her prodding Yoon Hee with questions about her past fails, she suggests they go on a trip together. It’s the nudge Yoon Hee needs, she decides that they are going to Otaru, Hokkaido, where Jun lives.
In the beginning of the film, Sae Bom says that the reason she chooses to live with her mother when her parents get divorced is because she thinks her mother is the lonelier parent. Yet Sae Bom seems to be unable to amend that, on the contrary, Yoon Hee seems to make Sae Bom as lonely as she is. As a mother, Yoon Hee knows her daughter well, even without exchanging so many words, yet for Sae Bom, her mother is a mystery, and once Sae Bom manages to peel her mother’s outer, hard layer and sees her vulnerabilities, their dynamics change.
The film slowly builds up our anticipation, ever so gently. We want these two star-crossed lovers to unite, and we root for Yoon Hee to get out from her rut – as the film goes we come to realize that this is Yoon Hee’s journey to find herself, and how her love story serves as a catalyst. Director Lim Dae Hyun consciously puts feminism and East Asian patriarchal themes at the center, and we can only imagine the numerous other women living lives never as their true selves, just like Yoon Hee and Jun. The film also touches on how restrained East Asian families can be, how love is often not shown explicitly. One of the most heartwarming scenes in the film is when Jun’s aunt Masako, whom she lives with, asks her for a hug and tells her how awkward she feels doing this.
Director Lim said, “I once read in some book on screenplay writing something that said, without going into details, ‘Good drama ultimately shows the struggle of characters to free themselves from an oppressive environment and become themselves’.”* and I think he did just that, in the warmest, most gentle way.
*Director Lim Dae Hyung, interview by Kim Su Bin on koreanfilm.co.kr
She speaks movies. 