Treeless Mountain
Melbourne International Film Festival
Sun 26 July, Thu 30 July
Yet another gorgeous film on children, Treeless Mountain looks at two teeny tiny girls, whose mother drops them off to an aunt in the South Korean countryside, and leaves. The aunt grumbles unhappy, the girls try to make sense of the situation, the sky is overcast, they ask for lollies they don’t get, go walkabout, tell each other stories. Jin, the school-aged one, does her best impersonation of serious old sister to little Bin, who toddles around in wearing princess gown and pyjamas and understanding barely anything about the world.
The story is completely limited by the two girls: we know what they know, we see what they see, we understand what they understand. The camera stays at their height, keeps their faces in close-up. The adult world, suddenly, is an incomprehensible and worrying as it once was.
Unflinchingly direct, Treeless Mountain is knee-high in the stuff that could result in sentimental shlock for the cold-hearted, one of those suffer-little-children Dickensian tear-jerkers (and, in many ways, it a film very similar to The Grave of the Fireflies); but it balances its shocking subject by being equally outspoken about both the joys and resilience of childhood, the strength derived from taking the world at its face value.
So Yong Kim, a Korean film-maker who lives in New York, observes the world with astonishing, minimalist humility. To someone who, like me, emerges out of the theatre black box for the film festival, Treeless Mountain serves as a splendid reminder of the finest charms of cinema: it captures the fluid, incidental beauty of the world, the smallest changes in the expressions of untrained young actors, and something about the unstructured, unpredictable way in which life makes sense.
