![]() ![]() Struggling to make passing grades and subject to non-stop screaming at home, she spends her time finding meaning in the love and friendships of her peers, in shoplifting, and in karaoke bars. Set in 1994 in Seoul, a touching coming-of-age drama centered around the quiet, unexceptional eighth-grader Eun-Hee (Park Ji-hu). It's in her cram school professor Yong-Ji (Sae-byeok Kim), however, that Eun-Hee finds the answers that she seeks, as the two form an unlikely friendship.-brahamdali Watch on Kino Marquee.Set in 1994 in Seoul, a touching coming-of-age drama centered around the quiet, unexceptional eighth-grader Eun-Hee (Park Ji-hu). “Dumb girls like that,” the other student continues, “don’t make it to college and they’ll become our house maids.” She keeps her head down until she doesn’t. It’s obvious that she isn’t asleep, but her schoolmate keeps talking. Behind her, pale legs glow in the blurred background. Early on, at school, Eun-hee sits in a chair, her head resting on her arms, which are draped on the desktop. The movie’s running time is a slight drag (at 138 minutes, it’s a good 20 minutes too long), particularly because Kim is so very good at compression, at using a look, a gesture or a single devastating sentence to convey mountains of meaning. In “Hummingbird,” Kim discreetly balances the personal and the social, bringing us close to Eun-hee while also letting us see the other realities and truths - a national tragedy, a news bulletin, a friend’s pain - that she is slowly starting to notice. In indieland, by contrast, a filmmaker’s vision too often becomes solipsistic indulgence, an excuse for shutting out the greater world and for unproductive narrative dribbling. Life for many is organized around the usual needs and wants, though that’s hardly the case in all those superhero soap operas (as the world burns) in which society is a disposable backdrop. It’s hard to put something like life onscreen, and harder still to make us care. But as a filmmaker she’s more interested in the quiet that can come when you’re alone with your thoughts and - like Eun-hee - believe that you’re alone in the world. She doesn’t avoid strong emotions or personal crises if anything the story has one too many disasters. This focus on the aftermath of tragedy reflects the writer-director Bora Kim’s insistently non-melodramatic approach. There are deaths, too, though these take place offscreen and Eun-hee learns of them only later. ![]() There are meltdowns, breakups, afternoon walks and family meals. Not a lot seems to happen in “Hummingbird,” though, for Eun-hee, everything does. But she has a boyfriend, who sends love notes to her beeper. ![]() ![]() (“You idiots don’t even know right from left.”) Some girls gossip about Eun-hee, whose parents run a store where they make and sell rice cakes. At school, she and her female classmates study English and endure the contempt of their male teacher. She lives with her parents, brother and sister in a flat in a slablike high-rise in Seoul. Its heroine, Eun-hee (Ji-hu Park, an expressive miniaturist), is an ordinary 14-year-old. “The world is fascinating and beautiful.” Our girl has hit several rough patches, but from the way she keeps looking at the world you know she’ll be OK.Ī delicate portrait of a girl coming into consciousness, “House of Hummingbird,” set in 1994, is the kind of movie often and sometimes disparagingly called small. As the scene continues, a woman speaks in voice-over. Often these girls look anxious while trying to get their footing in that unstable terrain called adolescence, but now, together, they seem happy, free. She’s in a throng of schoolgirls in matching uniforms, all laughing and teasingly jostling one another. At one point near the end of “House of Hummingbird,” a teenage girl stands and looks intently at the world around her. ![]()
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