Cinema September 9: House of Hummingbird

A Tender Look at Teenage Girlhood in Korea

“I didn’t really feel like society respected teenage girls”. A quote from Kim Bora, interviewed during the 2019 London Film Festival for her gentle coming-of-age drama, House of Hummingbird (벌새). And ho boy Bora, you’re not wrong. I could rant incoherently for hours, dirty little feminist that I am, about how young girls and their interests are vilified and scorned openly in both pop and high culture. I mean, what could be stupider, someone young and female? Ew, gross.

But there are already many people far more articulate than I (hard to imagine, I know) who’ve made this point better. Hell, one of my favourite video essayists, Mina Le, did a video about pretty much exactly this just this week (at time of writing). The world that actual teenage girls live in is much maligned and much ignored, unless to be romanticised into a daft romantic plot with worrying undertones where everyone is played by 27-year olds. Cough, Riverdale and every original Netflix movie, cough.

But in Kim Bora’s delicate story, we get a much more tender and honest portrayal of the difficult, tumultuous and meaningful life of a young girl. A very quiet film, House of Hummingbird tells its story naturalistically, with minimal music, minimal melodrama, and wonderful subtlety. The story is simple: we follow Eun-hee, a 14-year-old girl in a lower income family dealing with a broken, abusive household, an overbearing, brutal education system and a social life with all the highs and lows of teenage years. There is little in the way of great dramatic plot sweeps here. Even the inclusion of the very real Seongsu Bridge collapse of 1994 is a backdrop that occurs offscreen. However, the film is truly excellent in capturing the pains of female adolescence, as well as the many flaws in the Korean education system and treatment of young people.

I am always careful when I start to talk about the Korean education system and its problems, for one simple reason: I am not Korean. I didn’t attend Korean school in or outside of Korea, I don’t have Korean family, and I don’t contribute to the construction of the Korean education system in general. I haven’t had these experiences, so I can’t speak to their effect. I have, however, taught in a Korean hagwon (an after-school academy) for just shy of three years, as well as talking to several of my Korean friends about their educational experiences. So I can see little snippets, little impressions of how things work, and the key words are…intense, and impersonal.

As has been well documented in many other Korean movies and TV shows, Korean education is high pressure, with a strong emphasis on good grades, the right universities and academic strength in general. Whenever I ask my students what their favourite subject is, around 60% of the time the answer is P.E, with the same reason: “I don’t have to study/ I get to play”. Just observing a part of it shows the stress that Korean children go through, a stress that is dialled up and up as the children progress through school. Our central character in Hummingbird, Eun-hee, is 14, and part of a large class that we see doing drills and reading aloud, with a stern, vindictive teacher happily criticising his students with no room for praise, especially for our heroine. As Kim Bora stated in her interview, the school system in Korea often doesn’t see the children as people, and the portrayal of classroom life in this film demonstrates that succinctly.

This portrayal is led by Park Ji-hu as Eun-hee, in a performance of beautiful understatement and complexity. I knew I had seen this girl before, and upon googling realised that she is the star of the wonderfully bloody Netflix zombie drama All Of Us Are Dead (which I have also done a cheeky little review of). This is another critique of the treatment of young people in Korea, though with a little bit more bite. From her work in Hummingbird, for which she won several awards, I can see why she was cast in this mega-series. She’s a star.

Again, the words that spring to mind to sum up her performance are quiet and subtle, but these are not terms to be underestimated. As with so much of the best Korean cinema, the move seems to be away from great theatrical displays of *acting* and towards much more internal, considered portrayals. Kim herself stated that she wanted to steer away from sentimentality in this picture, much as it was based in part on her own childhood experiences. She has certainly achieved that here.

I think it’s this directorial decision that affords so much more respect to Eun-hee’s youth and experiences. By allowing them to just play out, highs and lows included, we are simply asked to see Eun-hee as the person she is. There are no heavy musical or visual indicators as to how we should be feeling- we’re not being instructed here. We’re just being shown.

The story itself is not free from the beats of a typical teen drama, and isn’t even without great tragedy. We have bickering, wavering friendships, an unreliable boyfriend, a fractured (to say the least) relationship to parents and siblings (side note- Eun-hee’s brother is a bellend, sorry not sorry), and even an inspirational teacher. But again, these moments are played minimally, through static shots and realistic dialogue.

These realistic touches allow the film to reach greater heights of poignancy. The student-teacher relationship, between Eun-hee and her teacher at the Chinese writing hagwon she is obliged to attend, forms the backbone of this film, in no small part because the teacher, Young-ji (played by Kim Sae-byuk) sees the reality of Eun-hee’s life. It’s a relationship that exists only in a few conversations and one night-time walk, but it is an utterly beautiful way for the film to internally recognise the complexity of teenage girlhood, to give it space and to treat it with respect. The teacher of this film, kind, compassionate and observant, is the only adult who really sees Eun-hee as a person, and she does this simply by looking and asking.

In one small yet pivotal scene, when explaining the meaning of a Chinese idiom, Young-ji asks Eun-hee and her friend how many people she knows, and then, out of those people, how many she thinks understand her. It’s not a grand gesture or a dramatic, Dead Poet’s Society monologue, but a simple question in a classroom, and yet it opens up our central character in a way that everyone else fails to do.

This failure also comes through all the more strongly in its restrained portrayal. Alongside Eun-hee’s institutionalised schooling, her family consists of an emotionally abusive father, a put-upon and inobservant mother, a rebellious sister and a physically abusive brother (see above for bellend comment). This family is shown as broken through their silences, their lack of words, and only the briefest eruptions of violence, made all the more shocking in this way. Again, it feels much more true to life, that terrible lives are built from the abuse of neglect, and displaying this through harsh asides from parents, or painfully awkward moments at the dinner table, is the perfect way to represent this.

House of Hummingbird, as mentioned, is not without tragedy. There is the tragedy of abuse, and later the very personal effects of the Seongsu Bridge collapse in Eun-hee’s life. But this revelatory climax to the film, off-screen as stated above, is earned, and again used to show the powerful effects of grief in many aspects of life, as well as to contextualise Eun-hee’s personal struggles in a very real context of Korea in the 1990s.

Ultimately, this film is a warm, unsentimental but loving portrayal of the realities of life for young teenage girls, and specifically those in Korea. Eun-hee’s struggles might manifest differently today (social media can’t be helping anything get better), but they still resonate deeply. The film reminded me slightly of Bo Burnham’s lovingly tender ode to the reality of American girlhood Eighth Grade in its unflinching respect. But it also serves, I think, as a fitting companion piece to Bleak Night, this time taking the female experience in school over the male. Both films are understated, and both give teenagerhood the exploration it deserves. Both show a tough life because that does seem to be the way that it is for Korean youth. But both also approach it with a tenderness that hopefully can bleed out from Korean cinema and into the lives of all the students struggling through it all now.