A trio of award winners playing in Busan’s main competition comprises this latest dispatch. As noted in our current raiser, the main competition holds a new responsibility as one of the qualifying festivals for the Academy Awards, which allows for films to compete for nomination even if their country does not submit them. And while you’d think Busan would stack their competition with a veteran crop of filmmakers, they instead compiled a diverse array of directors who arrived with either long, distinguished careers or with exciting debut films—making for a bit of suspense regarding who the jury would choose.
The winner of Busan’s Grand Prize, which automatically qualifies for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, is Iranian auteur Majid Majidi’s bleak interrogative drama “Midday Meal.”
Set in the small village of Goorankesh in southern badlands of Iran, this aching story sees Solan (Mohammad Hahimi), a school teacher, put into an impossible situation when the benefactor who funds the school lunches for the district suddenly passes away. Not only has his heir decided to discontinue his family’s financial support, but also the education office refuses to step in as a stopgap. If Solan can’t find a way to feed his students, then many, who depend on these meals to survive will stop attending, causing his attendance to drop to the point that school inspectors will shutdown the school and discontinue his contract. And since Solan is only part time, he doesn’t have anything to fall back on.
His desire to buy a small apartment for him and his mother (Kheyri Zakeri) further complicates his already trying situation. He can only afford the place if he gets a loan, which can only happen if he’s made full-time. Though he’s been given assurances that it’ll happen in three months, if the school closes then he won’t get the position, the loan or the apartment. Consequently, he needs to find some way to feed his students during that span: Solan turns to fuel smuggling and even moves his mother into the small one-room schoolhouse so she can cook homemade meals for the children. As word of his services spread, children from across the district begin appearing hoping to continue learning under him.
Unsurprisingly Majidi, whose landmark film “Children of Heaven” was the first Iranian picture nominated for Best International Film, knows how to shoot a movie. He juxtaposes the wide cracked vistas of the southern badlands with the local blue-marble river and the craggy urban rubble of Miban. In every pocket of his detailed visual language one can see the effects of war and the promise of what could be in peace time. He also trusts his lead Hahimi, a kind of revelation here, offering his angular face arresting close-ups that animate the strain, worry and anguish this unwinnable situation draws out from this haggard protaganist.
Solan sees himself perpetually tested, pushing himself to make a couple of unthinkable decisions in a bid to navigate a brutally apathetic system. That isn’t to say “Midday Meal” is wholly dark or even miserable. Rays of hope and kindness do enter the morally ambiguous fray, illuminating the fragile humanism at the core of every man. Even by the end, Majidi doesn’t wield judgement against Solan; he elicits sorrow and empathy. “Midday Meal” satiates the soul even when the reality it surveys feels futile.
The runner-up to “Midday Meal,” is the no less harrowing maternal crusade “Ibuku” or “My Mother.” Written and directed by Eddie Cahyono, the abstract atmospheric drama takes place in a small Indonesian village where a forlorn Sumiati (Christine Hakim) lives. Her husband recently died by suicide because of mounting gambling debts; her daughter Sri (Ayushita) resides in Saudi Arabia. The latter moved there for two reasons: to get out of the shadow of her mother, a once famous Kuda Lumping dancer, and more importantly, to leave a violent marriage.
But tragedy strikes suddenly, or maybe even slowly, when Sumiati receives a letter a year late informing her that Sri has been charged and convicted in Saudi Arabia of murdering her abusive employer. Desperate to see her daughter again, Sumiati appeals to friends and neighbors for a loan to travel overseas; she prays and promises offerings; she even reaches out to the village chief Djatmiko (Landung Simatupang), hoping he might have funds. No one can help. Djatmiko can only suggest that Sumiati reach out to Parliament or an NGO, who will have the pull to negotiate directly with the Saudi government.
Cahyono conceptualizes Sumiati’s plight through a striking mix of aesthetics and metaphor. Throughout the film, for instance, Cahyono and his DP Muhammad Firdaus project images of Sumiati performing Kuda Lumping dancing on the three walls of Sri’s prison cell as the latter looks directly at the camera, explaining the wedge between her and her mother to the viewer. Shots of newly hatched birds pining for their mother in their nest hits the point a tad too solidly, while dream sequences, which feature Sumiati imagining and recalling conversations with Sri, land for a more subtle yet agonizing effect.
Hakim’s broken visage burrows deep into the psyche, pulling us into her pain. And while “Ikubu” can become lost in her distress, to the point of limiting this mother-daughter relationship to the boundaries formed by despair, the final scene, which relies on a captivating use of double exposure to blend mother and daughter together—offer a hard-earned solemnity to this weighty picture.
A veteran novelist, E-hwa (Ye Su-jeoung), meets a young Tae-ju (Park Han-sol) on the train. She bears a striking resemblance to the protagonist in the story E-hwa is writing. Tae-ju is traveling to a seaside town to stay with a friend, who owns a bed and breakfast, so she might escape several nasty rumors plaguing her at home. See, Tae-ju’s romantic dreams were shattered when she discovered the guy she loves doesn’t think they’re in a relationship—so she cheats on her with another girl. Her supposed friends gossip behind her back, accusing her of being easy, flirty, and using men sexually to fill the emotional void inside herself. At her friend’s distant abode she hopes to find kinder people, only to discover the same old problems.
Lim Ha-yeon’s spontaneous metanarrative debut “Beach Fictions,” which earned the festival’s New Currents special mention, is a captivating, perception-altering dramedy built on imaginative filmmaking. While visiting her friend, Tae-Ju meets a charming street magician, Man-hyuk (Kim woo-kyum), who’s followed by salacious chatter too. Many in town think he’s a gigolo on the side, moving from resort to resort to pick up visiting women. Tae-ju, ironically, doesn’t know whether to buy the talk, but she doesn’t ignore it either. Instead she tries to balance her growing romantic feelings for Man-hyuk with the pearl-clutching morals of the fellow vacationers also taking up residence at her friend’s home.
A knowing artificiality pervades much of “Beach Fictions,” from the pristine cinematography to the perpetual coincidences that arises during Tae-ju’s journey, teasing that we may well not be following the actual Tae-ju, but the protagonist in E-hwa’s novel that resembles her. A little over an hour into the film, in fact, the story resets itself. We begin again at Tae-Ju and Man-hyuk’s first meeting. Some details have been altered, making this iteration play out like a second draft written by E-hwa.
Even with this writerly gamesmanship, the well-calibrated performances by Park and Kim do not lose their truthfulness. Conversely, whether either version plays as more honest than the other is down to any given viewer. Instead, the pursuit of that sincerity matters more than any given discrepancy between the two parts. It’s the same search for sincerity that Tae-ju makes but finds difficultly finding that the film actualizes through its prismatic form. In that regard, “Beach Fictions” always feels like real people grappling with real worries, knowing they have real hearts to be broken.
