“What can be worse than being here with you?”
This small snippet of dialog happens near the end of A Tale of Two Sisters, it is between Eun-joo (Yum-joo Heo), the soon-to-be stepmother, and Soo-mi (Lim Soo-jung) the eldest daughter. The ending reveals what set the story in motion and leads to a reveal about Soo-mi’s break from reality. Writer Yang Sung-Hee from Korea JoonAng Daily, an English language daily, wrote “… images of wicked stepmothers can be found in many … Korean folk tales. As the classic story goes, the father is tricked by the new wife, and the nice and beautiful daughter is abused.” Jee-woon Kim’s 2003 film, A Tale of Two Sisters, leans on the old story of Janghwa Hongryeon jeon, (The Story of Rose Flower and Red Lotus) a well-known Korean folktale. By not just retelling it, Kim brings an interior aspect of horror to life: what can you believe? By playing it as a psychological horror tale (are there ghosts here or worse?) he can summon our own fears of not being able to control what our minds believe. When the thing that goes bump in the night is within where does one run?
In this tale, the father, Moon-hyeon Bae (Kim Kap-su), seems to be living in a house with three women, his two daughters Soo-mi, Soo-yeon (Moon Geun-young), and his new wife, Eun-joo. Is this just a film about family dynamics, especially as it concerns the patrilineal Korean society, or is this a ghost story? As the movie opens, he has just returned to the family home with his daughters who apparently have been away and hospitalized. He engages little, when the girls don’t get out of the car, he simply walks away and we are left to meet them as they stroll around the outside of the house and run down to the wharf. When they do return to the house, they are greeted by the stepmother, who is bubbly and menacing all at the same time, menacing based on the reaction of Soo-yeon at least.
The female characters drive this movie. There are secrets and grief living in the house but what is causing the mayhem and is the mayhem real as it comes and goes between characters. The father (I daresay the men) is the least engaged of any of the characters. It’s as though what happens (what has happened) in the house doesn’t concern him. It takes until the movie’s end to allow a little understanding. In between that understanding, the sisters are haunted, things come out of wardrobes, nightmares roil through their sleep and blood appears as an undertone.
Soo-mi, Soo-yeon, and Eun-joo seemingly exist with one another while the father is an aside. Even when the Aunt and Uncle arrive (the most awkward dinner ever) the person who sees something under the sink does so as she is having a seizure. Every instance of otherworldly occurrences can solidly be psychological, these minds and bodies are stressed. These minds are broken by trauma and sorrow. The seizure acts as another doorway to the unknown, but as a vision received in this way can it be trusted?
In Laurel Kendall’s Wives, Lesser Wives, and Ghosts: Supernatural Conflict in a Korean Village for Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 43, she notes, “the haunting presence of the dead first wife is consistent with Korean religious beliefs and with Korean women's perceptions of social experience.” Of course, her study looked at shamans coming to ease the ghosts out of the home. In our movie, the women are on their own trying to explain the forces that have taken over. Yet, as it is slowly revealed, Soo-mi is re-living a horror and imagining her sister and the stepmother in these spaces. This discovery forces one to relook at the story and it feels satisfying to consider. Do we want a ghost to push these things to resolution or can we rely on the deceptions of the human heart, the weakness of the mind? In the end, I feel that Eun-joo’s words hold the key:
“Don’t you get it yet? Remember what I told you before? Remember when I said you’ll regret it someday? Know what’s really scary? You want to forget something totally wipe it out of your mind. But you never can. It can’t go away you see. And it follows you around like a ghost.”
No comments:
Post a Comment