You come out of the movie “A Brand New Life” by French-Korean film maker Ounie Lecomte with the same feeling you get after you’ve read a great book – a haunting bitter-sweet warmth that stays with you for days.
This 2009 autobiographical movie, debuting in Tel Aviv this week, is about nine-year old Jinhee. The first scene depicts her sitting on a bike hugging her father’s back, going on a trip. We don’t get to see the father’s face. He rides her to a cake store, tells her to pick the best cake on sale, and then bikes to an orphanage run by Catholic nuns. He leaves Jinhee there, without an explanation and without a goodbye.
The story explores the life of Jinhee – played by the soulful, wide-eyed young Korean actress Sae Ron Kim - in the orphanage. We sense her conviction that her father will come back for her; we understand her reticence to smile and to make herself attractive to potential foreign adoptive parents who come seeking for a child; we identify her determination not to be like the other hopeful orphaned girls; we cringe at her realization that her father will never come back; we drown in her sorrow as to why she thinks her father abandoned her; and we support her resignation to a new life with a new family in France.
The movie is seen through the innocent, naïve and scared eyes of the nine-year old. There is no major drama, just an artful weaving of small gestures, actions, events and expressions that gently lead us viewers into the life of little Jinhee and the South Korean orphanage in 1975.
The movie explores the feeling of loss and abandonment felt by the adopted child, and the ways she finds to cope with that loss.
I believe all children come to this world with an imaginary bag on their shoulders: a bag full of genes and experiences that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. The longer the life, the heavier the bag. Adoptive children carry two bags on their small shoulders: the regular bag and a second bag, that of abandonment. Also this bag stays with them for the rest of their lives: they learn to walk and run with the bags, but they are always there.
I recently met a 36-year-old man who was adopted at the age of six. He has a good, steady job, a wife and two children. But he admits he is not a happy man. He told me that for an adoptee the weight of abandonment is like a prosthesis, an artificial limb that replaces a leg beneath the knee. “We learn to walk with it, we learn to run with it,” he said. “But at night, when we are in bed, we take off the prosthesis and know the leg is actually not there.”
“A Brand New Life” very much depicts this feeling of loss. It is a movie that must be seen.
Photo caption: Sae Ron Kim as Jinhee.
http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/ficheFilmPhotos/id/10906281/year/2009.html
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