Another Child is a South Korean drama directed by Kim Yoon-seok who also stars in the film as well. This was a bit of a sleeper on my original list for the festival, it looked to have promise and I was curious to see how the much exercised “affair” trope would be handled. What I can say is that the film is strongest in it’s actor’s performances, particularly in the chemistry between the two lead girls Joo-ri (Kim Hye-jun) and Yoon-ah (Park Se-jin). Beyond that the film is weaker than strong and trips up a lot in an ernest attempt at being profound and emotional.
The film is set off by the affair between Joo-ri’s father and his mistress being observed by her in secret as she watches her father visit her at the out of the way restaurant she works at. It is quiet but the woman notices the young girl through the window which spooks Joo-ri and sends her running off and into a collision with Yoon-ah who is around the same age and also the daughter of the woman, Mi-hee (Kim So-jin). This chance encounter teeters the affair into the light of being discovered, as well as the resulting pregnancy, but also throws these girls together whether they like it or not as they both grapple and struggle with the fallout of their parents’ illicit union.
As I had mentioned before the strongest part of the film comes from the relationship these two girls share. At first they are bitter towards each other and taking out the betrayal they feel from their mutual parent on each other. In an early scene that sticks out, the girls are at school when the strong emotions can no longer be contained and the metaphorical cap comes off the shaken bottle of pop. It is actually quite comical watching this fight and even though the humor should feel misplaced for a film of this tone it is often appreciated. The altercation is kicked off by Joo-ri who attacks Yoon-ah by yanking a handful of her hair and as they tumble around the hallway packed with eager onlookers, they shatter a glass window and finally knock down a classroom door. When the dust settles, they lie together as a crumpled mess amidst shards of glass and in a sense it feels like a catharsis that allows a door to be open for ceasefire.
Running alongside the story of the girls is that of their parents and how they are handling things. This is where the film slowly begins to lose steam and become disjointed. It never feels like it knows what it wants to do with them and it often shows. The adults in question are Joo-ri’s father Dae-wan (Kim Yoon-seok), mother Young-joo (Yum Jung-ah) and Yoon-ah’s mother Mi-hee (Kim So-jin). By the time the film is halfway through it has completely lost interest in the father, reducing him to a shadow of a man devoid of any backbone which leaves you scratching your head at anything these woman could have been attracted to. He is at once a coward and clown, the film came close to making me assume he’d been casually killed off and I didn’t even care when he randomly came back again.
The film tries to go for a somewhat parallel of the strenuous relationship between the girls with their mothers but it is often half-hearted. Joo-ri’s mother is arguably the one person in the movie who is mostly keeping it together and handling life as efficiently as she can despite the world she knows betraying her. Soon-ah’s mother is a bit more erratic and often acts like a petulant teenage girl to those around her and also her daughter who often has to act the adult in comparison. An altercation between the woman set off the final half of the film when Mi-hee goes into labor and delivers her baby prematurely.
At first the girls who are now closer in a sense of weathering the storm together resist the introduction of the baby but slowly grow fond of him when the adults around could care less. Yoon-ah is even compelled to go as far as stating that if need be she’ll raise the child on her own by quitting school and working odd jobs. It is almost like she sees the chance to give this new child a stable parental figure which she herself never had. In one of the most beautiful shots in the film we see a handful of scenes take place at night as snow gently falls across the city – Joo-ri and her mother having dinner together, the baby quietly resting in his incubator and Yoon-ah tenderly filling out his paperwork alongside some knitted baby booties she laid out for him.
But sadly this doesn’t last and the film takes a swerve off it’s path and proceeds with a confusing chain of events that is somewhat hard to follow as the viewer. The film lost me at this point and seemed to throw out all the strong points that it was so close to perfecting, before letting them slip away. The film tries hard, very hard, to reach what it thinks is an emotionally fulfilling ending but it all feels hollow and even oddly morbid in the very last scene.
At the end of the day I want to admire the few glimmers of heart this film strives for at time and appreciate how it handles the relationship between the female protagonists. Though when I left the screening I felt a bit hallow and wished that the film had succeeded in what it tried to aim for instead of falling on the crutch of certain tropes and becoming too predictable time and time again.
3 out of 5 stars
Toujours Katie 