As we left the movie Marvin remarked that the film made you feel good, “because your life is not that bad.”
That is true. It’s hard to imagine a life more bleak, and with so few choices.
It’s the story of an ethnic Korean widow, with a young son, struggling to make a living by running a food cart at the side of a road along which almost no traffic runs. She lives in a small town in a neglected corner of north China, and she lives in a tiny shack near the train station. Her neighbors are a group of prostitutes who cater to railroad workers. So she struggles to make a living and raise a son and not to be taken for a prostitute.
It’s a quiet movie, with a calm observant eye. It presents a life, and expects us to read the frames carefully and actively. But being quiet, it draws us close, so it can speak the harsh truth in a calm and gentle voice.
The colors are muted by the sun, and there is no clutter of commerce or advertisements. the frames are often angled to only show you part of what is going on.
the camera obscures what we don’t need to know, so it can fill the screen with the harsh truth.
at the end of the movie, we are nearly smothered by the lack of options in the life of the main character.
but even while we are glad to escape that world at the end of the film, we are full of awe at the choice made at the end of the film: by the character, by the editor, by the director.
full of awe.
(saw this in feb 2006)