Riceboy Sleeps
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(M, 117 minutes)
Four stars
After watching this migrant story about leaving Korea behind and building a new life in Canada, I found food was frequently mentioned in my viewing notes. Eating, alone or in company, frequently has key significance in some of the key scenes in this film with a title based on schoolyard taunt.
In one such significant moments, a young single mother prepares a feast for her schoolboy son. Their kitchen table is covered with a spread of traditional delectables like his favourite kim chi and jeotgal, but the boy is thinking ahead and worried about what he will find in his lunchbox the next day. He just wants the same food as the other kids at school. It's a heartrending but oh so relatable moment.
Dong-Hyun (played as a six-year-old by Dohyun Noel Hwang), is the "rice boy" to some of his crueller classmates, singled out for looking different and eating different. It's safe to assume that similar experiences while young are embedded in the memories of the filmmaker Anthony Shim from the time when he landed in west coast Canada in the mid-1990s. This is his second feature film.
The past that single mother So-Young (Choi Seung-yoon) and Dong-Hyun left behind is summarised in broad brush strokes. A young woman without family of her own had fallen in love with a young student and had their child, but when the young man took his life they were not married. Shunned by his family, she had decided to strike out for a new life in Canada.
On the other side of the North Pacific, So-Young discovers that things are not a lot easier. She secures a mind-numbing job in a factory where she is at first the only Asian person. This ratio changes over time but she still has to stand up for herself. Luckily, she is pretty good at it, during incidents that remind us how far what's acceptable has travelled in a short 30 years.
Meanwhile, Dong Hyun has had to fight his own battles in the school playground. After a distressing incident in which a child runs away with his glasses and others gang up to spit on him, he lands a punch on one of his tormentors, and he and his mother are hauled before the principal. No other parents get called in, leaving So-Young to fend for herself. She shows a proud and indomitable spirit at times, but there is also a toughness that she tries to instil in her confused, unhappy son.
There's a shift in mood nine years later with Dong-Hyun a bolshie adolescent played by Ethan Hwang. He wears contact lenses with a blue tint, an undercut dyed blond, and a tank top, and makes a good fit with his group of friends. The relationship between him and his mum is typically stressed for those daunting parenting years, though her admirer Simon (Shim) tries to make the peace.
When we get to the resolution scenes set in Korea, they are predictable yet heartfelt. It's a homecoming set among the liberating beauty of landscapes that contrast with the earlier scenes' confining dark interiors. The panning camera during long, languid single takes is interesting - and occasionally irritating when the point behind the aesthetic flourishes escaped me.
Korean-Canadian writer-director Shim has said that he made the film on behalf of everyone with a hyphenated identity. It was inspired by his own life since arriving in Vancouver as an eight-year-old.
Riceboy Sleeps is not wildly revelatory or unpredictable, yet there is an authenticity that is eventually moving and convincing. Perhaps it's no surprise it is compared with Minari, another film with food in its title, about an immigrant Korean family struggling bravely in their new home in the US. Transitions between different cultures can't be easy.
