TREELESS MOUNTAIN
Written & Directed by So Yong Kim
Produced by Bradley Rust Gray, Ben Howe, So Yong Kim, Lars Knudsen & Jay Van Hoy
Released by Oscilloscope Laboratories
Korean with English subtitles
USA. 89 min. Not Rated
With Hee Yeon Kim, Song Hee Kim, Soo Ah Lee, Mi Hyang Kim & Boon Tak Park 
 

In 2007, director So Yong Kim made her debut with In Between Days, a semi-autobiographical film about a Korean immigrant who falls in love with her best friend. Dialogue was sparse, but main character Aimie’s quiet actions allowed the audience to have a perspective that she was never capable of expressing or grasping as the result of the isolation and confusion from living in her new country.

Treeless Mountain places the same fascinations onto Kim’s early experiences growing up in South Korea. Here, she uses the tone of her first film to share the bewildered perspective of a young child—Jin (Hee Yeon Kim)—who is still learning how to add and subtract. When Jin’s mother abruptly takes her and her sister Bin (Song Hee Kim) out of school and unceremoniously leaves them at her drunkard sister-in-law’s house, Jin can sense something is wrong, but she’s still too unsure of how the world works to feel confident enough to express how she feels.

The mother left her daughters to find her husband. We don’t know why he’s left or why she needs to find him, but this is the last we see of her. Jin clings to her mother’s promise to return when she and her sister fill up a piggy bank with coins—which Big Aunt (Mi Hyang Kim) is supposed to provide whenever Jin or Bin follows her directions, though Big Aunt is too busy hoarding money for liquor to keep this promise. Unlike Jin and her sister, we know the piggy bank is not magical and that it’s doubtful that Big Aunt would ever call their mother to tell her when the bank is full. Scenes have the potential to be sad or cute, but Kim isn’t sentimental. Infrequent dialogue and close-ups of Jin’s face help steady Kim’s focus on the isolation of her characters. A lost child stripped of home, school, loving parent, and often food and basic care, Jin must also protect and nurture Bin (too young to empathize with Jin or understand their circumstances). Her loneliness can be enveloping.

Watching this film feels as claustrophobic as 2007’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, filmed from the eyes of a paralyzed man with locked-in syndrome. Cinematographer Anne Misawa frames scenes from Jin’s eye level: adults are knees, tables come to your chin, and doorknobs have to be reached above the camera’s frame. Kim’s attempt at recreating the physical and mental disorientation of a child’s world is so successful that you’ll be amazed at your ability to walk and form complete sentences after the film ends.

Jin and Bin, portrayed by two talented young actresses, lumber about a world they have no control over—which isn’t a feeling foreign to adults. Childhood is full of wide-eyed wonder, yes, but amazement is internal and due to a lack of perspective, and Kim never lets us forget that this is part of Jin’s experiential progression to a more mature clarity. Zachary Jones
April 22, 2009