Nobody's Daughter Haewon First Draft

Complete first draft for Cinema Guild.

Nobody’s Daughter Haewon: You Can’t Go Home Again Sean and Evan, thank you so much for incorporating me into this trio of pieces. As you both know, your Hong correspondences for both Seattle Screen Scene and MUBI Notebook were incredibly influential to me in my understanding of Hong, and it’s a daunting task to try to find my place within this great dynamic. I’ve always been a sap, especially for Hong, whose extensive reuse of motifs, techniques, and actors makes his body of work immensely warm and comforting (while never predictable) to me; indeed, my favorites are generally the ones that end on a happier resolution, where the pursuit of cinematic and narrative experimentation and the rush of romance are totally linked. But all three of these films, especially the one that I’m writing about, Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, end on more irresolute notes, where some form of miscomprehension or unfulfilled dream infuses the coda, even as they make grand use of his middle period humorousness. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, however, is something of an outlier compared to the other two films (though, notably, they are the only three films whose English titles mention a specific character). Those two are the key Jung Yumi works, using an ironclad structure and her innate expressiveness to convey comedy and convolutions alike, each pairing her with Lee Sunkyun and suggesting that Jung is a vivid projection of each character’s expectations and desires. But Haewon is played by the innately sad yet cagy Jung Eunchae —in her first of only a few Hong performances — and the film has perhaps the most amorphous structure that Hong has ever used, moving from encounter to encounter as Seongjoon, her past lover and the film’s other lead (played by Lee again), drifts in and out of the story. Apart from a series of Haewon’s diary entries that place the events of the film between March 21 and April 3, us Hongians are left free to sort out how the film operates. The opening of Nobody’s Daughter Haewon suggests a pivot for Hong: for seventeen minutes, it follows Haewon working through her relationship with her mother to an extent greater than any Hong protagonist thus far. This unfolds in two stages: a delightfully surreal dream where she essentially imagines that Jane Birkin (as herself) is her mother figure, and then an extended sequence where Haewon spends time with her actual mother before the latter moves to Canada. But while this unusual narrative element is firmly planted by the end of this section, the rest of the film barely invokes familial relationships, instead shifting back into the realm of fraught romance that the Jung films so thoroughly focus on. These relationships, however, aren’t nearly as clear as the love triangle of Oki’s Movie or the three suitors in Our Sunhi. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon instead moves in leaps in bounds: during the first section, Dongjoo, a bearded bookseller, attempts to flirt with her, then disappears from the film; Haewon and Seongjoon have several breakups and reunions; there is an entire section devoted to her quasi-meet-cute with Joongwon (Hong regular Kim Euisung), the strange professor from San Diego who is apparently rewriting a script for Martin Scorsese. The deeper the Hongian delves into Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, the stranger it becomes. The most obvious manifestation is the third dream sequence, the longest in any Hong film, which lasts more than thirty minutes and encompasses many of the above storylines. While the first and second function akin to those in other Hong films, as brief and absurd representations of the main characters’ desires, this one operates along thornier lines, and the correspondence of new characters — only Seongjoon and an old man (perennial Hong figure Gi Ju-bong) appear in the rest of the film — to Haewon’s state of mind is utterly ambiguous. Perhaps the clearest sign of this is the reappearance of Joongsik and Yeonjoo (repertory players Yoo Joonsang and Ye Jiwon, respectively), one of the main couples in Hong’s 2010 film Hahaha. Their situation, despite the breakthrough in their extramarital relationship in the denouement of that film, has mostly stayed the same: Joongsik still takes pills for depression and remains married, despite his vow to live with Yeonjoo. Their relationship is one of contentment, signaled by a conversation that, after briefly lapsing into disagreement, gently reconciles them, but it points to a certain sense of emotional stasis that Nobody’s Daughter Haewon embodies. In a sense, all three films share this trait: Oki’s Movie takes a retrospective view on the relationships and posits that artistic representation can only go so far; Our Sunhi offers literal liberation to its main character, but not her male suitors who wander in the shadow of her image. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, meanwhile, ends up with a much less apparent image of Haewon. It’s certainly not a coincidence that Joongsik and Yeonju’s conversation and an earlier, drunken dialogue between Seongjoon and his students at a Korean barbecue restaurant after Haewon has gone to the restroom, are two of only a handful of exchanges in Hong’s oeuvre that don’t involve the main protagonist. They both feature disagreements about the nature of her character, in direct contrast to the consensus formed in Our Sunhi. She is called aristocratic, and even her ethnicity — some characters say she’s mixed because of her taller stature — is called into question; these issues are not so much resolved as dropped in favor of other concerns. Haewon herself is only somewhat forthcoming. At the bookstore café that becomes one of the recurring settings across these odd sequences, she is told that she can pay as much as she’d like for the books. Her response is that “it’ll show who I am,” and in the second instance Joongwon responds that she should “pay enough not to show” herself. She nevertheless declines to do so, and that inability to communicate herself, even in situations that seem to demand it, manifests itself across her interactions. While she isn’t recessive in the manner of Yoo’s lead performances, she constantly deflects people’s attention to themselves or others, fatalistically noting to Seongjoon that “death resolves all” — she is seen reading Norbert Elias’s The Loneliness of the Dying, a bleakly funny sight gag in this context — and refraining from either confirming or denying the attributes that her screen partners ascribe to her. Her eyes, full of quiet determination, seem to indicate some sort of drive, but to what ends are kept inscrutable. The title of Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, then, could be taken in numerous directions: as an expression of abandonment; as a self-proclaimed divestment from ownership; as a recognition that none of these people know who Haewon is, least of all herself. The inclusion of Joongsik and Yeonju seems to suggest that the only way to understand Haewon is by invoking other Hong films — she and Seongjoon reconcile in the dream after both this encounter and her meeting with the old man, three presences that hearken back to past (and future) Hong films. But even that has its limits, especially because of their firm ensconcement inside the dream with no indication that the couple exists except in Hahaha and in Haewon’s imagination. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon ends with one of the most mysterious lines Hong has written: “Waking up, I realized he was the nice, old man from before.” Who “he” is and who the “nice, old man” is are left up the viewer to decide. The natural inclination is to assume that the former is Seongjoon — since the preceding scene was her reconciliation with him — and the latter is Joongwon, or perhaps Gi’s character, but what the statement actually means, in either a narrative, metaphoric, or even dream logic context, leaves the viewer hanging, and Haewon back where she started. Since this concludes with the dream sequence, the development or change in mindset afforded to other Hong protagonists, including Haewon herself with the Jane Birkin dream, is not granted. Instead, the thinking passes to the Hongians, who interpret all these little beats into something at least a little more legible and less mysterious. In that conversation between Joongsik and Yeonjoo, as they look at a flag, the latter observes that it allows them to see the wind, an observation the former reacts to with endearing amazement. Mid-period Hong, which is my favorite as well, can be said to operate in this same way: the reasons for these occurrences, for these romantic entanglements, for this structure, are fundamentally as difficult to truly understand as the wind is to see. What Hong offers is a means of giving a container to it, each experiment another daring way to witness how these elements, untethered from normal narrative methodology, collide with each other. Especially with the hazy canvas that Haewon provides, he finds more pathways in order to get closer to the truth of the situation. But that might be ascribing way too much overt purpose to a director so free in his own methodology. Evan, what do you think?