Review of Treeless Mountain (2009) by Raphael G — 09 Sep 2012

Treeless Mountain (So-yong Kim, 2008).

Not long ago I reviewed a failed-potential coming-of-age film called Trees Grow Tall and Then They Fall (q.v.). It has a number of things in common with Treeless Mountain beyond the titles making reference to trees. In many places where the former film gets things wrong, Treeless Mountain gets things right, and yet for the most part it still left me kind of cold; it is possible that there's simply a failing in the attempt to translate the bildungsroman to film, or that neither of these directors, both of whom seemed to be going for a kind of gritty-realism-combined-with-fantasy-escapism, weren;t quite sure how to do what they wanted to do without the fantasy-escapism bit going over into the blatantly-unrealistic realms of, say, The Passion of Darkly Noon (or, more contemporarily, Guillermo del Toro's wonderful coming-of-age fantasies El Espinazo del Diablo and El Laberinto del Fauno), which neither director wanted to do. The end result: two oddly unsatisfying movies, though in every way that matters, Treeless Mountain is the superior of the two.

Plot: Two young girls, Jin and Bin (non-actors Hee-yeon and Song-hee Kim, respectively; Hee-yeon has never acted before, Song-hee is on her second screen appearance here), are left by their cosmopolitan mother (Soo-ah Lee, also in her first screen appearance) with their hard-drinking, working-class aunt, known in the film only as Big Aunt (Jesus Hospital's Mi-hyang Kim in her feature debut), while she goes off looking for their father after receiving a mysterious letter. Or so she says, anyway; as time goes on and she does not return, her motives become suspect. Ultimately, however, they are irrelevant, as the story focuses on the two girls, who try to make their way in their new, hardscrabble society, returning each day to a barren hillock, the treeless mountain of the title, that overlooks the bus stop where they expect their mother to return.

There is a general problem with movies like this, and there is a problem more specific to this one. The general one is that nothing much really happens in such movies, and so the movie is by definition driven by characters, not plot. The choice of non-actors for most of the roles here was a bold one, but I'm not sure it was the right one given the story. To say this is not, I hope, to take anything away from those actors; they all do a very good job with what they have here, but had they had more experience under their collective belt, I think they could have turned it into a bigger, wider whole than it is. The more specific problem has to do with where Kim, who also wrote the screenplay, ends the story. I can't go into a great amount of detail without spoilers, but I think this movie woud have worked better had it ended either ten minutes before it did (before, without being spoilery, Big Aunt makes the decision that drives the last sequences of the film) or ten minutes after (in which we would have had more time to explore the ramifications of the event in question).

None of this is meant to convey that I didn't like the film. I did, and I do recommend it; just be aware that what you're getting may not exactly be what you think you're getting. (A warning for the animal lovers: there is a sequence in the middle of the film that involves the roasting and eating of grasshoppers a number of times.) ***.