Bora Kim’s House of Hummingbird had its world premiere at Busan International Film Festival last October, but I saw it in Berlin this week. Although there haven’t been many reviews of the film so far, the ones that have trickled into cyberspace often describe it as a quiet, coming-of-age drama. Are films with teenage protagonists always seen this way? I’m sure they aren’t, not invariably, but the phrase still feels a little tired. In House of Hummingbird, it isn’t at all obvious that there’s any age left to come into.
“Instead of karaoke, I will go to Seoul National University!” shouts 14-year-old Eun-hee’s new homeroom teacher, who, as Eun-hee later concludes with a friend, is definitely a little eccentric. The class shake their fists and lethargically repeat his words, slumped over in postures of teenage martyrdom. Eun-hee (Park Ji-hoo) lets her hand drop to the surface of her wooden desk. Will she even go to university? She doesn’t seem particularly interested in studying. Her parents run a small store that sells rice cakes. She has two older siblings: a sister, Su-hee, who prefers boys to school, and a brother, Daehoon, who beats her. Arguments are common and money is short.
“The true picture of the past flits by,” writes Walter Benjamin in ‘On the Concept of History’. He continues: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” What he means is that we are at all times determined to find ourselves in it. Though House of Hummingbird is set in the mid-’90s, the clues to our own future are everywhere. The teacher is fighting a battle he can’t win – it’s impossible for the students to pay attention, to resist the sly insinuations of the outside world. The nineties are quiet, but not quiet enough. Eun-hee’s social world unfolds via the bleeps of her pager and around them the city grows at breakneck speed. As Kim reminds us, Seoul is in an economic explosion, a construction glut. Long, meditative shots of Eun-hee on public transport reiterate the city’s scope, while the television tells them all that business is booming. But buildings built quickly often fall down. In another scene, Eun-hee finds her mother sleeping. The camera rests on the laddered material of her socks, the missing heels. House of Hummingbird is a tactile film, preoccupied by textures – of fabric, greenery, concrete, exhaustion.
At school, Eun-hee is mediocre, while outside of school her interests are those of any other teenage girl. She goes trampolining and shoplifting with her best friend Jisuk, and tentatively explores her sexuality, first with a boy and then with a girl. Despite the teacher’s warning, she also goes to karaoke. Late at night, the three siblings work away in their father’s shop for an order so big that their parents can’t manage it alone. The family unit – however dysfunctional – prevails. I think of the microscopic shifts in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, other families in faded colours. Kim, too, pays attention to minutiae. The soft sounds of an as-yet-unbanished nature make themselves known in every scene and the nights are filled with the drone of insects. The garden where Eun-hee hangs out with Jisuk is surrounded by other gardens, all unbearably and startlingly green.
It’s worth pointing out that Eun-hee’s sloth is symptomatic. Neither she nor her siblings understand what is expected of them. What their parents and teachers see as laziness is rather an unwillingness to progress. The adults haven’t accepted that the parameters of reality have changed and at the end of the film the teenage characters are as indifferent as ever. Watching the film on a screener link from the washed-out serenity of my Airbnb room, it feels as though these pressures can only intensify. When seen through the flat, affectless perspective of the central character – which is so solipsistically teenage – events acquire a terrible equivalence. A bridge collapses; Eun-hee finds a lump in her neck. The collective and personal telescope into one another. The mutable cityscape is the map of our times and Eun-hee’s fractured attention span is our own. Spaces, like feelings, merge. A doctor’s clinic on the other side of the city could be at the edge of the world.
House of Hummingbird deservedly won the Grand Prix of its section. Kim’s unwillingness to yoke her teenage protagonist to any telos or narrative of growth is coupled with the quiet suggestion that there is no longer any future to occupy. Disorder is everywhere; no one is really happy. The city booms and crashes again, and will do so ad infinitum. The image of our overburdened present is there in the past, a ghost in marginalia. Does Eun-hee learn any lessons? She asks her mother how to accept the enormity of death. She sneaks out at night with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend to look at the ruin of the Seongsu bridge. Monument to anthropogenic enterprise, the collapsed bridge is the detritus of an acceleration whose victims will be claimed discriminately, from the ranks of people just like Eun-hee and her family. Emotions play out via a topology of light. Meaning is hard to come by. The film ends with a letter from a lost friend: “The world is fascinating and beautiful,” she writes, “When we see each other, I will tell you everything.” Their meeting, like a conclusion, is forever deferred.
