Hong Sang-soo’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013) is a film about a young female student who sinks into a deep depression upon the departure of her mother. The film was nominated for this year’s Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, losing out to Netzer’s Child’s Pose. This South Korean film represents an exploration of consciousness, sitting somewhere between the cinema of David Lynch and the tales of Lewis Carroll, while retaining the camera’s deceptively objective perspective.
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon confounds its own expectations through its chronological epistolary narrative, remaining eternally at odds with the film’s structure which resists a linear temporality. Reality and illusion co-exist in this film to create a disorientating result. Rather than the more obviously nightmarish quality of David Lynch’s films, Hong Sang-soo’s subtle take on the psychological effects of depression and trauma gives this film a sense of Realism-gone-wrong, as the camera’s focus switches from the external to the internal often without even being noticed.
The premise of the film centres around the mother’s notion in the opening sequence that ‘living is dying’. Haewon is figuratively and physically cast in the shadow of her mother from the very opening of the film. She is only able to measure her own identity according to how she is or is not like her mother; does she possess her beauty, her bravery, or even her ‘youthful’ posterior? Haewon says ‘you’ll always be my mum’, but even once her mother has left for Canada, she measures her identity by how much money she is willing to spend on a book, by the love she receives from her professor, or by the words she compulsively writes in her diary.
Haewon eternally attaches herself to somebody or something else in order to validate, or even re-create, her identity. She returns to the professor with whom she has already had an affair, salvaging every last aspect of familiarity in her life.
The cigarette motif is an insistent one in the film. The first time the butt is captured, it remains burning on the pavement, but the second time Haewon stamps it out, as she figuratively stamps out any new and future prospects or chance of happiness that she had left. She rejects the idea of entering into a romantic relationship with the ‘cute’ man from the car park, or her mother’s suggestion that she should enter into the Miss Korea contest. Even her relationship with the professor results in her avoiding college and endangering her dream of becoming an actress.
The co-existence of Haewon’s dreams and Haewon’s reality dictates the tension between the subjectivity of her epistolary narrative and the apparent objectivity of the camera. And yet even the cold, physical objectivity of the lens is not enough to counter the intensely personal intrusions that it makes into Haewon’s subconscious. In her dreams, she even has to imagine that she is verbalising her pain to others, as though the dreams, her diary-writing, and love affair barely constitute the escapism for which she searches.
Evidence for these dreams can be found in the very camera shots themselves. The same shots are repeated over and over to the point at which the viewer begins to question the veracity of the film’s fabric. Different characters assume the same roles in these scenes, lines are repeated, but the situations shift in dynamic slightly every time. The repetition of certain scenes in the film enacts the traumatic consciousness which it embodies. Certain episodes from Haewon’s life re-surface again and again, taking on a new significance or meaning with each repetition.
She is not only ‘nobody’s’ daughter, but ‘nobody’s’ friend, and ‘nobody’s’ lover, and without somebody to attach herself to, Haewon spirals out of control. Once she loses her mother and the professor, the dream sequences become increasingly pervasive.
In a very Lynchian manner, Haewon’s dreams increasingly distort the narrative, and there is evidence that she projects her own misfortunes onto different characters, appropriating the lives of her friends and attributing her friends with the residue of her own emotional issues. This quality of reversal is particularly evocative of the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, and, in turn, the two exceptional films The Remains of the Day (1993) and Never Let Me Go (2010) which were based on manifestations of trauma and its impact upon memory and human relationships. However, like Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), Haewon’s trauma begins to infect her dreams and their manifestation on the screen; even each shot is repeated in a new context, featuring a new character, or occurring at a different time of day. It becomes increasingly difficult to identify the moments at which the film crosses over the boundary between reality and illusion.
The man Haewon encounters in the cafe says ‘you keep facing hardships to know yourself’, and despite claiming at the opening of the film that she is ‘too strong’, Hong Sang-soo’s film tracks the emotional journey of a troubled girl who learns that she cannot cope as well as she’d thought. This Alice in Wonderland-inspired tale, in which reality and illusion co-exist in a curious world of dream and nightmare, also to some extent confounds the fairy tale, dream-like tradition in which it is set.
The premise for Hong Sang-soo’s film is certainly not original, but it is haunting. Where Alice’s awakening releases her for her nightmare into a safe-haven reality, Haewon awakens from the only means of emotional escapism that she can contrive for herself. She returns to a reality darker than before, a reality which has adopted nightmarish traits of its own, and from which its victims cannot awaken.
Nobody’s Daughter Haewon was released on DVD 4th November 2013.
Director: Sang-soo Hong
Writer: Sang-soo Hong (screenplay)
Stars: Jeong Eun-Chae, Seon-gyun Lee, Joon-sang Yoo
Runtime: 90 min
Country: South Korea
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