Kim Soo-hyun’s distinctive way of looking at the world shines through in bursts of comic dialogue and unexpected visual twists in Ashamed (Chang-Pi-Hae, 2010). For the most part, the film is mildly engaging, rather like a teenage movie you might see on TV, but with some added moments of artistry.
The film’s central narrative is a love story between two young women, Yoon and Kang. Yoon is a wide-eyed beauty with an idiosyncratic approach to life. Kang, meanwhile, is a jaded pickpocket. They meet after a strange coincidence involving a collision between a department store mannequin and a getaway car, and despite their differences, the two women are gradually drawn to each other. Their doomed love story is told in flashbacks framed by a present-day narrative. Now, Yoon is single again, and her mysteriously melancholy air intrigues people and draws them to her. First, an art student becomes her friend; then, her art teacher wants to use Yoon as a model. But the teacher wants more than that: she is fascinated by Yoon’s past, and wants to know her story.
During a Q&A following the film’s screening at the Berlinale, the director said that he wanted this film to be a meditation on themes of love and memory. The film’s title reflects the mixed feelings of those who are in love. On the one hand, they are happy and proud about their relationship, and want to tell everyone about it; on the other hand, they would prefer to protect the relationship by hiding it from the world, a secret shared by the couple. These mixed feelings result in the shame of lovers, and it is not necessarily a feeling confined to young love. The one time that feeling ashamed is explicitly mentioned in the film is by a peripheral character: a middle-aged married woman in a little restaurant that Yoon goes to alone. After her husband briefly drops by the restaurant, the woman shares her bashful feelings with a colleague, wondering if her boss saw them together and what he might have thought: she feels ashamed to have been seen with the man that she loves.
The director uses a number of devices to explore the theme of memory, most obviously the flashback structure. Many different layers of time are explored in the film, but this is done in such an organic way that it never disorients the audience. There is the present-day story of the art teacher and her project, and Yoon’s recounting of her love story in the past. There are also flashbacks to an interim period: at her teacher’s insistence, the art student tells the story of how she met Yoon. Within Yoon’s love story, there are also flashbacks to two different periods of Kang’s past: her childhood, and her young adulthood before she became a pickpocket. Even the memories of minor characters are seamlessly introduced. Following the collision that first brings them together, Yoon and Kang are arrested by a policeman, and the audience soon becomes acquainted with his personal problems: his mother calls him on his mobile phone, telling him off for getting divorced. Then, when the policeman and the girls end up at a Chinese restaurant for an impromptu snack, the chef is a friend of the policeman, and he moves from complaining about problems with his family life to accusing the policeman of an affair with his wife.
Within the dialogue, philosophical observations about memory are introduced: Kang, for example, says that she purposely forgets the past and looks only to the future, while Yoon protests that the past continues to exist, and says that our memories make us who we are. The director plays on these two competing attitudes to the past with his aesthetic approach: when Kang recounts events from her past, flashbacks of made-up events take place against a plain white background, emphasizing their unreal nature. In other flashbacks of Kang’s childhood, Yoon appears as an observer, as though the recounting of Kang’s past allows her to take part in its persisting presence. In terms of the narrative, too, Kang’s past interferes with her present with Yoon: although her background is never made clear, there is a sense that something from her past is preventing her from forming lasting relationships.
Summarised in this way, the director’s approach to his themes sounds rich and profound but at 129 minutes the film on the long side, and the effect of his devices is diluted. Although the fluid way that he switches from one story thread to another, and from one layer of time to another, make for easy watching, this fools the audience into thinking that the film itself is quite simple. The occasionally flippant humour may also give an overall impression of foolishness, again belying some of the film’s more serious themes. Of all the films that I have seen at this festival, this one has left me with the greatest sense of ambivalence. It is perhaps one that needs to be watched twice to be appreciated, but I would still recommend seeing it once if you have the opportunity.
