So Yong Kim's 2008 film "Treeless Mountain" plays out as much like a non-narrated documentary as it does a fictional film. It's a pretty common tactic for art-house style films, allowing life to play out as life does, but it's not my favorite story-telling method.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I like my stories to tell pretty clear stories. It might be due to the excessive amount of fantasy and science fiction I read, which tends to favor a tale with clear peaks and valleys of drama, action and exposition.
However, when the topic is interesting enough to me, I can really love the telling. Kim's photography combined with some pretty brilliant performances from the film's young protagonists didn't make the 90 minutes go fast, per se, but each minute was still very compelling.
Even though it's not my favorite style, films like this work really well with stories about children. They have no idea what's going on and why, just like the viewer. So even though we never find out why Jin and Bin have been abandoned to their relatives, it works because Jin and Bin don't either.
It's almost like Kim made a rule when filming that states, "If the kids don't know, the camera doesn't know." Why is their aunt somewhat warm and caring one moment only to dive into alcoholism and neglect the next? Why are their grandparents initially angry at their arrival but finally become the first sign of hope and warmth for Jin and Bin?
These questions are never answered in the traditional narrative sense. The grandmother doesn't suddenly set aside her agricultural duties to explain some tear-jerker of a sob story to the kids. It leaves the viewer to understand the real story, which is this: How do two small children survive and cope given no information and no explanation for why they're suddenly orphaned with no idea where there mother is or when she'll return?
Initially, they're forced to obsess over their piggie bank. Once filled, their mother said, she'd be back. Watching the pair sit at their street corner with a full piggie bank watching angrily as bus after bus drives by without dropping off their mother is heart breaking. But at their grandmother's house, they're suddenly participating in a busy farmstead, working and contributing to their work. With their idle hands suddenly busy, and the pair now in control of at least some of their life and destiny, Jin and Bin suddenly come alive again, shown running through the fields singing a Korean children's song as they hike across the fields.
Don't think I'm spoiling anything with this movie. It's not that kind of story. There are no great revelations that should be hidden, and no scene plays out like a surprise. When the kids hike off to the bus stop to wait for their mother, the viewer already knows what's going to happen.
I think on the whole, the film is really about two small kids coping with the reality that surrounds them, and the director adeptly shows two sides of the story: one a failure, the other a success.
Only downside: I can't remember who the heck told me to watch this movie. Was it you?
