At one point near the end of “House of Hummingbird,” a teenage girl stands and looks intently at the world around her. She’s in a throng of schoolgirls in matching uniforms, all laughing and teasingly jostling one another. Often these girls look anxious while trying to get their footing in that unstable terrain called adolescence, but now, together, they seem happy, free. As the scene continues, a woman speaks in voice-over. “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.
A 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. Its heroine, Eun-hee (Ji-hu Park, an expressive miniaturist), is an ordinary 14-year-old. She lives with her parents, brother and sister in a flat in a slablike high-rise in Seoul. At school, she and her female classmates study English and endure the contempt of their male teacher. (“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. Her brother beats her. But she has a boyfriend, who sends love notes to her beeper.
Not a lot seems to happen in “Hummingbird,” though, for Eun-hee, everything does. There are meltdowns, breakups, afternoon walks and family meals. Tempers fray; voices rise. There are deaths, too, though these take place offscreen and Eun-hee learns of them only later. This focus on the aftermath of tragedy reflects the writer-director Bora Kim’s insistently non-melodramatic approach. She doesn’t avoid strong emotions or personal crises; if anything the story has one too many disasters. 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.
Kim works like a pointillist with lots of short scenes and daubs of textured nuance that build the portrait incrementally. She also uses visual echoes to highlight ideas and to reinforce connections between characters, as when Eun-hee looks at her spread hands, an image that is repeated later, including in a scene with a new teacher (Sae-byuk Kim in a brief, haunting performance) whose kindness becomes a lifeline. Kim’s touch tends toward lightness, and the movie seems so loosely assembled that you may not notice its architecture. You may not notice, for instance, a similar long shot of students on the school’s grounds that appears both at the beginning and end.
It’s hard to put something like life onscreen, and harder still to make us care. 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. 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. 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.
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. Early on, at school, Eun-hee sits in a chair, her head resting on her arms, which are draped on the desktop. Behind her, pale legs glow in the blurred background. “She’s sleeping again,” a girl says. Eun-hee stirs. It’s obvious that she isn’t asleep, but her schoolmate keeps talking. “Dumb girls like that,” the other student continues, “don’t make it to college and they’ll become our house maids.” Kim keeps her head down until she doesn’t.
House of Hummingbird
Not rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Kino Marquee.
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‘House of Hummingbird’ Review: Picture a Girl, Picture a World - The New York Times
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