Aloners
Director: Hong Seong-eun
Year: 2021
Rating: 7.0
Country: Korea
Korean female director Hong Seong-eun in her
debut film gently observes and indicts our growing reliance on connecting
with the world only through technology. The evidence is all around us. How
often have we seen a group of people eating dinner out and all of them are
on their phone. Look at how much time most of us spend either on our computer
or phone not intersecting with anyone in person. After a while, it can become
a life choice. It has with the main character here. Jina (Gong Seung-yeon)
is disconnected from the human touch but connected all the time to technology.
She works at a Call Center for a credit card company and all day long takes
calls from customers needing assistance or needing to vent. Either way she
is impeccably polite, never flustered and never changes the modulation of
her voice. A perfect employee for a company that measures you by how many
calls you can deal with in a given day. She is in her late 20s and attractive
but seems uninterested in dating.
When not on the phone with clients she is
unreachable - has negative space all around her. She seeks her solitude and
disdains any attempts from people trying to converse with her. Her life is
connecting to technology - outside of work she watches her TV shows with
her ear plugs in and the rest of the world out. In her apartment she lives
only in her bedroom leaving her living room and kitchen empty. As is she
- no emotion beyond irritation with people who intrude into her space - and
no personality. A micro-wave dinner, TV and falls asleep. For lunch she goes
off on her own for noodles. She luxuriates in her loneliness. It is a life
that she feels secure in. Why? We never find out.
One morning on her way to work, her next-door
neighbor says "No parting words?" and she stops, stares and goes on her way.
The next day she learns that he has been dead for a week from his massive
pile of porn magazines falling on him. This in no way really breaks through
- neither his death nor that his ghost spoke to her. This does not turn into
a ghost story though - that was more symbolic of our inability to react,
to connect, to show empathy. She is told by her boss to train the new girl
Soo-jin (Jung Da-eun) and does a terrible job - remote, uninterested, unable
to see that Soo-jin is too sensitive for the job. Her mother has recently
died and she has no relationship with her father. This is a study in how
alienated so many have become from personal contact. The film is slow, thoughtful,
restrained and refuses to give in wholly to an emotional catharsis. A small
one perhaps. The actress is remote, unemotional and yet somehow manages to
pull you into her life.
