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Lee Sol-hui’s impressive debut feature is formally characterized by ellipses. Though initially presented as a psychological drama about the fragile bonds of family, Lee’s concerted habit of leaving out crucial plot information has the effect of turning the story into a thriller, and while this device in the end gets away from the director, the movie does accumulate a potent mood of comic dread. In fact, it might have been more effective had Lee played up those elements that come across as cosmic jokes and made them into real jokes, but I imagine she thought of the story from the beginning as a thriller, with every decision turning on the notion of intensifying the creep factor.

The overarching joke may be the best: Life has dealt our protagonist, Moon-jung (Kim Seo-hyung), a truly miserable hand. Kim is squatting alone in an agricultural greenhouse until she can get enough money together to rent an apartment for her and her teenage son, who is about to be released from a juvenile detention center where he is confined for an unnamed offense. The boy, Jung-woo (Kim Geon), initially seems ambivalent about living with his mother, who suffers from occasional emotional flare-ups that manifest as self-harming behavior. Unable to afford the one-on-one psychiatric care she needs, she joins a free therapy group for similarly afflicted people whose weirdly upbeat leader treats each meeting as if it were a personal accomplishment, and against her better judgement Moon-jung befriends another member, a young deluded woman named Soon-nam (Ahn So-yo), who turns out to be a bit too clingy and is in an abusive relationship with her former doctor. In order to earn money to rent an apartment, Moon-jung works as a caregiver for an elderly, well-off couple—near-blind Tae-kang (Yang Jae-sung) and his senile and paranoid wife Hwa-ok (Shin Yun-sook). Moon-jung becomes a kind of daughter to Tae-kang, who, understanding that he’s entered the early stages of Alzheimer’s, offers to help her with the money needed for the deposit on the apartment. As it stands, his own son, Kyu-sang (Seo Hong-seok), seems indifferent to his worsening condition and Moon-jung’s mother, Choon-hwa (Won Mi-won), is herself confined to a facility for people with severe cognitive dysfunction. 

The movie’s strong suit is how it supplies credible emotional connections among these various disparate characters, but, as already pointed out, Lee doesn’t give the viewer much basic background on the actual physical connections among them, which means situations play out in ways that require us to draw our own conclusions about how those connections came about without much in the way of clues. As Moon-jung’s plans fall apart and she exacerbates her problems with a subterfuge that is too laughably foolish to take seriously—not a cosmic joke, but one she inadvertently plays on herself—the viewer has to trust to inertia to get to the shocking climax in one piece. It’s still an impressive feat, because at any given moment the movie’s train of thought seems as if it’s about to run off the rails, and I suppose in the end it does, but by then the big crash is Moon-jung’s already volatile state of mind. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Greenhouse home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Korean Film Council

There’s no way that a documentary about Little Richard, the king, queen, and “architect” (his self-description) of rock and roll, was ever going to be dull, but Lisa Cortes’s study, completed three years after the singer’s death at age 87, is as deep as it is exciting. Anyone with any interest in popular music understands Richard Penniman’s contribution to 20th century culture and maybe even the contradictions within the man himself that fueled his art, but Cortes, with the help of some excellently curated talking heads, keeps her eye on the prize: the perspective of history on a grand scale to explain just how important Richard was to our sense of the way entertainment works on the soul and not just the eyes and the ears. He brought not only black music to millions of teenagers in the 1950s, but queer culture to an even larger audience who likely didn’t know what they were getting, but it wasn’t a stealth action. Richard was never coy about anything, not his talent, not his ribald sexuality, not his deepest fears and anxieties. It was all there in the music and in the public persona. He really was everything, as Mick Jagger says here.

The movie is especially instructive about the environment that produced Little Richard, the Baptist belt of Georgia where he started cross-dressing as a child, inviting derision and disgust from his own father, who eventually grew proud of his son when he showed promise as an entertainer just before he was shot to death in an altercation. Richard studied Sister Rosetta Tharpe for her gospel spirit and took style cues from the singer Billy Wright, not to mention piano lessons from the flamboyant R&B performer Esquerita. After hiring a band and touring the Chitlin’ circuit, he eventually came to the attention of white record companies, who initially thought he could be a blues artist simply because they hadn’t even conceived of rock and roll. It took a cleaned up version of “Tutti Frutti,” an original song originally about anal sex, to make them understand, and it not only turned out to be a crossover hit, but paved the way for every raveup that came barrelling down the pike, including those produced by white boys like Elvis and, the biggest insult, Pat Boone, who basically stole Richard’s repertoire while stripping it of everything that made it thrilling. Certainly the most indelible influence Richard had was on Paul McCartney, who not only learned Richard’s scream from the source, but whose band, the Beatles, received their rock education in the sinful port city of Hamburg, a gig that Richard was instrumental in setting up. But as the movie shows again and again and again, Richard never really benefited from his trailblazing idiosyncrasies except on a temporary, fleeting basis. He was constantly being cheated out of credit or royalties or both, and he knew it. It sparked his resentment and messed with his self-esteem, causing him to give up rock and roll several times in favor of Christian salvation—and then, either because he needed money or, as he once so famously sang, “the girl can’t help it,” he came back again randy and outspoken. 

He openly admitted to being gay and then denounced his homosexuality unequivocally. He gave up secular music and entered a seminary, only to return in the mid-60s as flashy and opinionated as ever. He married a good woman whom he always respected (even after the inevitable divorce) and yet adored queer acts like the trans performer Lady Java, a lifelong friend and confidante. Cortes examines these switch-ups with a clinical attention to detail that gets at the emotional extremes of Richard’s temperament, and interviews people who not only have things to say about his place in history and explain what he brought to the culture, but also how the experience affected him without fundamentally changing him. If the movie has a flaw it’s that the performances are taken for granted, but even in short clips they put paid to his boasts. He really was everything, and then some.

Opens March 1 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015).

Little Richard: I Am Everything home page in Japanese

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