믿을 수 있는 사람 「mid-eul su in-neun saram」
Release Date: 2023
Duration: 92 mins.
Director: Kwak Eun-mi
Writer: Kwak Eun-mi (Screenplay),
Starring: Lee Sul (Han-young), Jeon Bong-seok (In-Hyeok), Lee Noah (Mi-sun), Oh Gyeong-hwa (Jeong-mi), Park Jun-hyuk (Tae-gu), Park Se-hyun (Li Xiao),
A Tour Guide is the debut feature film from Kwak Eun-mi. A straight-forward drama, it explores the character’s alienation through engaging with the many dramatic permutations and crises that a refugee might face and mining the cultural specificity of a North Korean defector’s experiences for material.
Our titular tour guide is Han-young, a North Korean defector who lives in Seoul after a spell spent living illegally in China.
Han-young’s time in China saw her learn Chinese, a skill she leverages to get a job as a tour guide for Chinese tourists in South Korea. She guides said tourists in matters both cultural and consumerist as she is paid by commission by her company for how many goods her groups purchase. When asked why she wants the job, she answers with a cheeky smile, “I want to earn money to live well.” It may seem like a tart bit of honesty for humours sake but her smile hides difficulties that call for cash: a mother still in North Korea, a younger brother struggling to find his place in South Korea, and bills. While she gets government support, she still needs to work to live. Just living isn’t easy, however.
In various scenes of the film, Han-young deals with being treated with mistrust by authorities and employers, her fellow defectors disappear from her daily life and the constant management of sending money meant for family is hard to balance with her daily needs. A constant drumbeat of demands accompanies her. That drumbeat gets more insistent and louder as her problems deepen with her brother disappearing and dealing with competition from duplicitous co-workers, all of whom are vying for tourists whose numbers dwindle due to the MERS virus and souring national relations between Korea and China.
As the last sentence suggests, takes in recent history. The story starts in 2015 and follows Han-young as she faces major crises but viewers will see that what dogs her heels the most is the issue of trust as multiple plotlines show friends, family, and acquaintances constantly failing her. As one fellow defector states, her sole friend Mi-sun (Lee Noah), getting ahead in life is all about personal connections but the connections Han-young has constantly drag her down.
The Korean of the title translates into something like, “someone you can trust,” and that is what Han-young doesn’t have. Indeed, even she is not a totally trustworthy tour guide as she bends rules and embellishes facts but everyone else is worse. Everyone she comes into contact with already has a scheme to move on with their life or is running some scam that will secure them in society and viewers will undoubtedly feel a sense of betrayal and exasperation of Han-young as she struggles to keep up.
The constant travails she faces perfectly provides rising tension as she battles to keep her life in South Korea on track even as she is losing everything and everyone she relies on. However, despite such material the film avoids crime cliches, condescending social drama, or fiery political diatribe. It is no The Yellow Sea (2010), a similarly themed/set film. Instead, it is a considered character study that mines the cultural specificity of the lives led by North Korean emigres to give insightful looks into how they live. It can be said that it doesn’t delve too deeply into the difficulties and harshness of her situation by giving more gritty minutiae and action but what it definitely does give is a concise overview of a defector’s life and it provide satisfying character growth centred around Han-young learning not to trust others so much and to trust herself more.
Indeed, much of what makes A Tour Guide interesting, beyond the insight into how North Korean defectors live, is it has a rock-solid centre with a sympathetic performance from Lee Sul who evokes both fiery determination and the loneliness of her character in the film. In between are convincing moments of anxiety that should deepen viewer empathy for Han-young. The film also benefits from gorgeous views that grace the screen with Gyeongbokgung Palace acting as a regular and impressive backdrop while an impromptu dance with Mi-sun is captured in a long shot with gorgeous mountains shining almost pink in the evening sun as another impressive backdrop. There is also a poignant scene where Han-young scrolls through photos of the places she may want to take her mother but knows she might not be able to. The screen illuminates a face full of worry and it is hard not to shed a few tears at the sight of a person reckoning with familial separation.
Ultimately, Kwak Eun-mi offers a film that aims and succeeds in combining recent history, various political problems, and a character study of a person in a foreign land dealing with alienation. The story doesn’t go anywhere surprising but it is well handled and should prove insightful while Lee Sul’s central performance is moving.
A Tour Guide plays on Wednesday July 19, at 18:00 at the Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center with an introduction and Q&A with director Kwak Eun-mi.