Philadelphia Film Festival 2009 - "Treeless Mountain"

A film with little to show, but much to reveal. The director's 2nd film, noticeably, about the trials of 2 sisters disallowed their innocence to play but not to dream, when their mother disappears from the picture, in search of their nameless father. A lot of dichotomous film school edits that pan from closeups of the 2 young sisters' faces (in anguish, sadness, or hope) to panoramic shots of the city, the serene speechless sky, drifting clouds. A film that is less a narrative film and more a tone poem. Yet the dramatic fragments that propel the narrative forward, from life with mother, to life without mother, and finally to life in the rural countryside with their grandparents, are sufficient to keep the viewer's attention. Reminiscent, but perhaps not as intentionally devastating, as Kore-Eda's Nobody Knows. The director skillfully attempts to simulate a child's vision by keeping adults mysteriously absent and too large to fit into the frame, hence the closeups, and the sudden manner in which their mother leaves them, and fails to keep her promise.
...
Treeless mountain
on which the grasshopper sits
and waits for spring winds.
But a mountain without a tree,
a tree without leaves,
leaves without wind -
in vain the grasshopper waits
for spring to come.
...
Their mother tells Jin & Bin,
"When this piggy bank is full of coins
given for good deeds,
I will come back."
A child will believe,
since she has no other way
of seeing. Jin's mother
so large and loving,
out of largeness vanishes
into smallness. Her younger sister,
Bin, wears her cinderella gown
& loves to eat. One day she buys
a sweet red bean bun,
and learns that a won bill
can break into many coins.
(Largeness breaks into smallness,
eventually.)

Jin's face up close
resembles the drifting cloud
of a distant overcast sky;
she cries. The plastic pig is full,
but the bus does not bring her mother back.
Instead Jin & Bin find a lone grasshopper
sitting on a mound of dirt (to these little women,
a treeless mountain from which to survey
the faraway reaches of the earth.)
They spit the grasshopper over fire.
Their only consolation is a mountain song
they sing, grasshopper in their mouths.
...