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Pedagogical films, whether documentary or dramatic, always focus on the teacher-student dynamic; specifically, the way educational professionals address the personal foibles of their charges in order to impart knowledge that the charges have difficulty accessing because of those foibles. The most dramatic, and often stereotypical, situations take place in inner city milieus—the innerer the better—where the very environment works against the teacher’s best intentions due to socioeconomic deficiencies, family problems, and ambient violence, all of which are complexly intertwined. Exceptional instructors “break through” these obstacles and show their students the beauty and endless wonder of the human mind. Declan McGrath and Neasa Ní Chianáin’s documentary about Kevin McArevey, the headmaster of the Holy Cross Boys Primary School in Belfast, Northern Ireland, doesn’t even bother with classroom business. We never see the students studying, and thus the movie never provides the breakthrough that pedagogical stories rely on to draw the viewer in. It dwells solely on the task of helping the children, who are all pre-adolescent males, overcome their environment, which is in an urban area that, as one middle aged lecturer puts it, was once as prone to terrorist activity as any place in the Middle East. 

Though Northern Island has been at peace since the late 90s thanks to a hard-won political process, the majority Catholic neighborhood of Ardoyne, where the school is located, is still subject to threats of violence from loyalists, and as McArevey suggests throughout the film, the forebears of the children he teaches—mainly the fathers and grandfathers, but the mothers and grandmothers, too—carry huge chips on their shoulders for having lived through the Troubles, and these boys inherited that “anxiety,” as he calls it. Having survived a youth of “fighting and drinking” himself, McArevey devised a routine that uses classical philosophical methodology, principally the idea of the Socratic Circle, to help the boys think on their own and understand how dealing with feelings that they find debilitating not only helps clear away the fear and hatred of everyday existence but opens up new worlds of possibility. For the most part, these anxieties manifest as dustups in the schoolyard, and the routine morning philosophical exercises confront questions such as, Is it OK to take out my anger on someone else? or Is it possible to think of nothing? The intention is to impart the concept that “everyone has a different way of thinking,” and that the basis of philosophy isn’t simply challenging one’s beliefs, but challenging what one “knows.” Though this idea sounds arcane, McArevey makes it relevant to the boys in a plain way, which isn’t to say it’s automatically and consistently successful. The anxieties for some boys are intractable: one kid is so self-conscious about his diabetes that he seems to attract abuse like a magnet; and two cousins always seem to be at each other’s throats even though they understand how stupid their internecine rivalry is. 

“There are no hopeless cases,” McArevey tells his subordinate teachers, who faithfully—nay, lovingly—apply his theories, which are informed as much by his love of Elvis Presley as by the teachings of Seneca, and the filmmakers perhaps put too much store in the methodology without actually investigating its scholastic fruits. It’s refreshing to see an academic environment where grades aren’t the gauge for evaluating development, but I kept wondering what kind of young men these boys would turn into in terms of intellectual capacity. Young Plato is an affecting, stirring showcase for McArevey’s ideas, and if they seem overly specific to this particular cultural and historical situation, then it only goes to show how adaptable the canon can be in helping young people improve themselves. Long live the liberal arts!

Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

Young Plato home page in Japanese

photo (c) Soilsiu Films, Aisling Productions, Clin d’oeil films, Zadig Productions, MMXXI

Kim Se-in’s debut feature won the New Currents and Audience awards at the 2021 Busan International Film Festival, as well as the festival’s Actress of the Year prize for Im Jee-ho’s performance. The Apartment With Two Women also won the NETPAC Award, given by representatives of foreign film festivals, and the Watcha Award, a Korean prize for new filmmakers, which will give you a fairly good idea of what kind of movie it is. Im’s citation seems appropriate because the movie is, if anything, an actors’ showcase, though, personally, I felt Yang Mal-bok, who played the other woman of the title, made more of an impression. Kim’s script and direction convey a strong sense of autobiography spiked with hyperbolic scenes plucked from her imagination, and yet it’s difficult to see the protagonist, Yi-jung (Im), as a proxy for the director, who, after all, possessed the wherewithal to get into film school and make this ambitious 140-minute portrayal of a fraught mother-daughter relationship that often descends into comic albeit bloodletting arguments. In contrast, Yi-jung is the ultimate depressive offspring who just can’t leave home.

The film’s Korean and Japanese title translates as “two women who wear the same underwear,” which may have been too gross for Western distributors but I tend to think the prosaic English title was chosen because the original was easy to misunderstand. Mother Soo-kyung (Yang) and daughter Yi-jung don’t share the same panties because they’re the same size or have similar tastes, but rather because the household is so chaotic that no one really cares whose underwear they’re wearing, as long as it’s in tact and relatively clean. What’s clear from the opening scene is that Soo-kyung, beyond wishing that her daughter, who is in her mid-20s, would just move out, has never wanted her around in the first place, because Soo-kyung has always done just what she wants to do and doesn’t care what Yi-jung thinks. Having always known this since she was a little girl, Yi-jung has developed a resentment toward her carelessly carefree mother that has curdled into pure hatred when circumstances align in the worst way, as when Soo-kyung, infuriated by something that happened off-screen, drives their little Kia straight into Yi-jung in the parking lot of a supermarket, not only sending her to the hospital but also to a lawyer’s office, where she files a lawsuit accusing her mother of reckless endangerment. Such a scenario would be enough for a rip-roaring comedy, but it’s only one episode among many that show how the only end to this relationship is either one woman killing the other or Yi-jung finally getting it together and moving out.

Though the theme is hardly original, Kim earns points for avoiding much of the sentimental undertow that usually pulls this sort of movie down. She doesn’t bother with a back story, so we never know who Yi-jung’s father is or why he isn’t in the picture. Though Soo-kyung has excellent reasons for demanding her daughter move out, her abject intolerance of Yi-jung’s presence will itself be intolerable to most viewers, and while Yi-jung may evince sympathy for having to put up with her mother’s emotional and physical violence, her glum attitude is just as off-putting. Kim doesn’t want us to like either woman; or, for that matter, anyone else in the movie, including Soo-kyung’s patronizing and conniving fiancee, Yi-jung’s slightly more ambitious but no less sourpuss work colleague with whom she attempts to strike up a friendship, and the unhappy married couple who regularly patronize Soo-kyung’s shabby cross between a tea room and herbal health supplement dispensary. And yet the length never becomes a slog because of Kim’s skill in making these stereotypes fresh and often funny—especially Soo-kyung’s penchant for fashions that are not only out of her age league, but look at least 20 years out of date, not to mention her hilarious attempts at self-improvement. Sometimes off-putting characters make for a very enlightening film experience. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

The Apartment With Two Women home page in Japanese