This latest dispatch covers a trio of award winners competing in Busan’s main competition. As noted in our curtain raiser, the main competition now also serves as a qualifying festival for the Academy Awards, letting films compete for nomination even if their country does not submit them. And while you’d think Busan would stack its competition with a veteran crop of filmmakers, it instead compiled a diverse array of directors who arrived with either long, distinguished careers or exciting debut films—leaving the jury to choose with some suspense.
The winner of Busan’s Grand Prize, which automatically qualifies for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, is Iranian auteur Majid Majidi’s bleak interrogative drama “Midday Meal.”
Set in the small village of Goorankesh in the southern badlands of Iran, this aching story sees Solan (Mohammad Hahimi), a school teacher, put into an impossible situation when the benefactor who funds the school lunches for the district suddenly passes away. Not only has his heir decided to end his family’s financial support, but the education office also refuses to step in as a stopgap.
If Solan can’t find a way to feed his students, many who depend on these meals to survive will stop attending, and attendance will drop so much that school inspectors will shut down the school and end his contract. And since Solan is only part-time, he has nothing to fall back on.
His desire to buy a small apartment for him and his mother (Kheyri Zakeri) further complicates his already trying situation. He can only afford the place if he gets a loan, which he can only get if he’s hired full-time. Though he’s been assured it’ll happen in three months, if the school closes, he won’t get the position, the loan, or the apartment.
Consequently, he needs to feed his students during that span: Solan turns to fuel smuggling and even moves his mother into the small one-room schoolhouse so she can cook homemade meals for the children. As word of his services spreads, children from across the district begin appearing, hoping to keep learning under him.
Unsurprisingly, Majidi, whose landmark film “Children of Heaven” was the first Iranian picture nominated for Best International Film, knows how to shoot a movie. He juxtaposes the wide cracked vistas of the southern badlands with the local blue-marble river and the craggy urban rubble of Miban. In every pocket of his detailed visual language, one can see the effects of war and the promise of what could be in peacetime. He also trusts his lead, Hahimi, a revelation here, offering arresting close-ups of his angular face that animate the strain, worry, and anguish this unwinnable situation draws out of this haggard protagonist.
Solan sees himself perpetually tested, pushing himself to make unthinkable decisions to navigate a brutally apathetic system. That isn’t to say the film is wholly dark or even miserable. Rays of hope and kindness do enter the morally ambiguous fray, illuminating the fragile humanism at the core of every man. Even by the end, Majidi doesn’t wield judgment against Solan; he elicits sorrow and empathy. “Midday Meal” satiates the soul even when the reality it surveys feels futile.
The runner-up to “Midday Meal” is the no less harrowing maternal crusade “Ibuku” or “My Mother.” Written and directed by Eddie Cahyono, the abstract atmospheric drama takes place in a small Indonesian village where a forlorn Sumiati (Christine Hakim) lives. Her husband recently died by suicide because of mounting gambling debts; her daughter Sri (Ayushita) resides in Saudi Arabia. The latter moved there for two reasons: to get out of the shadow of her mother, a once-famous Kuda Lumping dancer, and more importantly, to leave a violent marriage.
But tragedy strikes suddenly, or maybe even slowly, when Sumiati receives a letter a year late informing her that Sri has been charged and convicted in Saudi Arabia of murdering her abusive employer. Desperate to see her daughter again, Sumiati appeals to friends and neighbors for a loan to travel overseas; she prays and promises offerings; she even reaches out to the village chief Djatmiko (Landung Simatupang), hoping he might have funds. No one can help. Djatmiko can only suggest that Sumiati reach out to Parliament or an NGO, which will have the pull to negotiate directly with the Saudi government.
Cahyono conceptualizes Sumiati’s plight through a striking mix of aesthetics and metaphor. Throughout the film, for instance, Cahyono and his DP, Muhammad Firdaus, project images of Sumiati performing Kuda Lumping on the three walls of Sri’s prison cell as she looks directly at the camera, explaining the wedge between her and her mother to the viewer. Shots of newly hatched birds pining for their mother in their nest hit the point a tad too solidly, while dream sequences, which feature Sumiati imagining and recalling conversations with Sri, land for a more subtle yet agonizing effect.
Hakim’s broken visage burrows deep into the psyche, pulling us into her pain. While “Ikubu” can get lost in her distress, reducing this mother-daughter relationship to the boundaries formed by despair, the final scene, which uses a captivating double exposure to blend mother and daughter, offers a hard-earned solemnity to this weighty picture.
Veteran novelist E-hwa (Ye Su-jeoung) meets a young Tae-ju (Park Han-sol) on the train. She bears a striking resemblance to the protagonist in the story E-hwa is writing. Tae-ju travels to a seaside town to stay with a friend who owns a bed-and-breakfast, hoping to escape several nasty rumors plaguing her at home.
See, Tae-ju’s romantic dreams were shattered when she discovered the guy she loves doesn’t think they’re in a relationship—so she cheats on her with another girl. Her supposed friends gossip behind her back, accusing her of being easy, flirty, and using men sexually to fill the emotional void inside herself. At her friend’s distant abode, she hopes to find kinder people, only to discover the same old problems.
Lim Ha-yeon’s spontaneous metanarrative debut “Beach Fictions,” which earned the festival’s New Currents special mention, is a captivating, perception-altering dramedy built on imaginative filmmaking. While visiting her friend, Tae-Ju meets a charming street magician, Man-hyuk (Kim Woo-kyum), who also draws salacious chatter. Many in town think he’s a gigolo on the side, moving from resort to resort to pick up visiting women.
Tae-ju, ironically, doesn’t know whether to believe it, but she doesn’t ignore it either. Instead, she tries to balance her growing romantic feelings for Man-hyuk with the pearl-clutching morals of the fellow vacationers also taking up residence at her friend’s home.
A knowing artificiality pervades much of “Beach Fictions,” from the pristine cinematography to the perpetual coincidences that arise during Tae-ju’s journey, teasing that we may well not be following the actual Tae-ju, but the protagonist in E-hwa’s novel that resembles her. A little over an hour in, the story resets itself. We begin again at Tae-Ju and Man-hyuk’s first meeting. Some details have changed, making this iteration play out like a second draft E-hwa wrote.
Even with this writerly gamesmanship, Park and Kim’s well-calibrated performances don’t lose their truthfulness. Conversely, whether either version feels more honest depends on the viewer. Instead, the pursuit of that sincerity matters more than any given discrepancy between the two parts. It’s the same search for sincerity that Tae-ju makes, but the film finds it through its prismatic form. In that regard, “Beach Fictions” always feels like real people grappling with real worries, knowing they have real hearts to be broken.
