SFIAAFF: Grain in the Ear
If you think your life is bad, Grain in the Ear, the story of an ethnic-Korean kimchee peddler living in China, will either put your own misery in perspective or overwhelm you with the bleakness of grinding poverty, the Sisyphean nature of our existence and the realization that most people suck. We hope it's the former but after watching Grain in the Ear, we were ready to just crawl off to some quiet corner of the Kabuki Theatre and lie down quietly to wait to die.
The film festival representative who introduced this movie described it as "challenging," which we think may just be a euphemism for slow--but not in a bad way. If you're used to the fast paced story lines and quick cuts of conventional moving-making, prepare yourself for something completely different. The life of a single-mother and her son unfolds very slowly in a rural corner of China untouched by the current economic revival .
SFist MiHi Ahn, contributing
People move languorously in this movie walking at the most leisurely pace with their arms practically motionless at their sides. Even dialogue is used sparingly as if the characters don't have the energy to expend on speaking any but the most necessary words.
Watching a kissing scene in the movie where two people stood listlessly pressed together looking for all purposes like they were patiently trying to help each other work food out of their teeth, we wondered if maybe we'd all been porno-ized by Western cinema and that maybe, yes, sex was just another miserable chore. The camera pauses on the shot of the man with his limp penis in all its sad glory an inordinately long time andwe've never seen a man who's about to get lucky for the first time with a woman he's been pursuing look so sad and quite frankly, not at all ready. We kept thinking, "Why bother? Go home and swallow some rat poison."
We were pulling for the patient kimchee seller even though everything that seems like it could be good turns out bad. The ending is not surprising but considering the context of her life, tragedy is a relative term.