Indie cineaste Lee Kwang-kuk returns to Busan with his fifth film, Beautiful Dreamer, a sensitive tale of social stigma that dials down the wry humour that marked earlier works such as A Matter of Interpretation and A Tiger in Winter.
The story focuses on two women -- middle-aged In-seon in a provincial town and the young Su-yeon in Seoul -- both are quiet, struggling to express themselves in their lives, to the evident frustration of those trying to be close to them.
Switching between their viewpoints, the film soon reveals their connection and the reason for their antisocial behaviour. They are in fact mother and daughter and both are reeling from the husband and father who took his own life a few years earlier.
Not only are In-seon (Lee Ji-hyun) and Su-yeon (Hong Seung-hee) grappling with the reasons that led to the suicide and the guilt they felt in its aftermath, they also have to contend with the stigma of it in a conservative and superstitious society. One way in which this manifests occurs when In-seon has coffee with her sister, who asks her not to attend her daughter's wedding, fearing she may bring bad fortune to the marriage.
After a while, Su-yeon heads to her hometown for her father's death anniversary. In-seon has been convinced by those close to her late husband that it is time to disperse his ashes and move on. Her feelings on the matter are conflicted, but Su-yeon is apoplectic, threatening to head right back to Seoul. As mother and daughter grapple with confusing social expectations and their own tortured feelings, the rift already present between them widens.
There are several strong moments in Beautiful Dreamer, which emerge from Lee's perspicacious staging. In one scene, In-seon drives while Su-yeon dozes in the backseat, daydreaming about her father. The sequence dives into mother and daughter's separate imaginations, and suddenly connects them through quick closeups of their eyes, before an almost-crash in the outside world rips them out of their thoughts.
Despite its seemingly sober beginnings, the film is anything but, employing a mix of flashback and fantasy in its structure, with melodrama beats inserted at choice moments punctuating what is a relatively straightforward story with an emotional trajectory that we can anticipate and find comfort in.
The stigma of suicide stings all the more when we take into account that Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Brutal societal expectations are generally to blame for this reality and Beautiful Dreamer lays bare the fact that the country still isn't equipped to deal with the phenomenon.
The leads are compelling, evincing their protagonists' markedly different emotions stemming from the same shared experience: Lee as the wounded mother, who struggles to look people in the eye; Hong as the angry daughter, stubbornly acting out against anyone who crosses her path.
Despite its heavy subject matter, Beautiful Dreamer is actually the most straightforward of Lee's films, which have typically couched their narrative innovations in humour. The blurred line between reality and fantasy is still there, but here it's a flourish rather than a frame.
Perhaps this makes it the most accessible among his films -- it's certainly the easiest to follow -- but aside from a few welcome idiosyncrasies, it's also among the least memorable. Still, it is emotionally effective and thematically tidy where it counts -- look no further than the broken watch that Su-yeon inherits and doesn't know how to fix, symbolic of a broken clock of a society, stuck in the past and unable to move forward.