‘Riceboy Sleeps Review: A Graceful, Moving Immigrant Drama Lit By A Mothers Love

© Provided by Variety

In many lifetimes there comes a time when there is some sort of transition of matter in the relationship between parent and child. Like a sudden filter or size change, we see our fathers and mothers in a new way, realizing that they were before us, thinking and feeling different from us. It is almost always a flower of insight that blooms a little later than we would like, and when it does, it asks us an impossible question: what are we to do with this new knowledge, this strange stream of backward inquiry? Maybe you're on the other side, looking back through an inverted telescope at the end of the world, and if you're Canadian director Anthony Shim, you make a movie like "Riceboy Sleeps," a famous immigrant song. It sounds like a completely new arrangement with one sound so beautiful and sincere.

There's a dreamlike, floating quality to Shim's film, which was quietly praised at its Toronto premiere (where it won the Platform Award). It's a storybook atmosphere, with a Korean voice over misty sea and mountain landscapes telling the story of an orphan, abandoned in a temple as a baby, who grows up to be a strong young woman, obsessed with rice. Farmer. A few happy years passed before his mind slipped and he killed himself. Alone, single, and a newborn, the woman leaves behind the trials and regrets of her Korean past and moves to the Canadian suburbs, a setting that shows us the understated, emotional, and high regard for her son Dong-hyun. . (Dohyun Noel Hwang), a little boy, runs on a green field with a bag on his back. The time is 1990 and it's Dong-hyun's first day of school.

At school, the teacher mispronounces her name and the other kids laugh at how strange the lunch is, prepared with love. And Dong-hyun, the bystander, isn't the only one who endures these micro- and macro-aggressions. After her mother, So-young (Choi Seung-yeon), cries in the car outside of school and gently berates herself, she goes to work on an assembly line at a garbage factory, except that she is extremely isolated. She gets slapped by her strong male colleagues. . behind her as she passed. Young's response, a completely justified but unexpected tone of anger, pushed her further. While Dong-hyun finds an empty school hallway where he shamelessly tosses his seaweed rice into the trash, So-young eats alone at a different table from her chat friends.

This is the first of many spontaneous and imperfect echoes that occur in the film, as from this distant perspective Shim discovers similarities that the characters themselves are unaware of. These echoes, like much of cinematography, reside in Christopher Lew's exemplary cinematography, with beautiful movement and subtle reconstructions, which eschew overt manipulation and over-reconstruction and instead allow conversations to unfold in simple, wide frames, close-ups. As if the camera was torn - on the fly.

Mother/son echoes everything after a comical ellipsis between Dong-hyun in his big owl-eyed glasses and Dong-hyun (now Ethan Hwang) wearing his blue ties as a teenage blond teenager. The distance between them is more touching. As So-young, who gets the worst news of all, drunkenly swings to hug her new Korean-Canadian boyfriend (played by Shim herself), Dong-hyun comes home bleeding after a fight at a party, but the way they were filmed. It creates a special atmosphere. Time and again, this is how Shim overcomes the incredible difficulty of conveying the connection between such reserved and nondescript characters. Andrew Yong Hoon Lee's camera work and the minimal but slowly growing soundtrack express the mood of mother and son being deliberately controlled.

The melody of the immigration drama, the new friendships and small triumphs of assimilation, and the humiliations and misunderstandings of cultural otherness are all there. So-young is building a strong life for herself and her son, who has everything they need except knowing where he comes from. So when the perspective changes in the final third, when So-young and Dong-hyun visit Korea, it's not an unexpected move, but a satisfying one, as if the film takes a deep breath and lets itself go. "Riceboy Sleeps" is calm and respectful and doesn't reinvent the wheel of immigrant drama. But in its expertly crafted, poignant simplicity, it resonates with the most heartfelt and poignant sentiment an older child can express to a beloved parent: I remember everything and thank you.

Click here to read the full article.