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The edit of this 2022 Korean movie intended for release outside of Korea contains opening title cards in English that glancingly refer to the Sewon ferry accident of 2014, a disaster that claimed the lives of hundreds of children who were on a school excursion. Presumably, Korean viewers don’t need this information to appreciate the story they are about to watch, which focuses on two best friends who are somehow connected to the incident, though the first-time director, actor Cho Hyun-chul, keeps the viewer constantly off balance by circling around the matter. On the surface, The Dream Songs is a reverie on youthful ardor, the kind that best friends can feel to the point of infatuation, and is similar in tone and purpose to another recent Korean movie, So Long, See You Tomorrow, which also explores the fraught relationship between two adolescent best friends. The differences, however, are more striking. The pair in The Dream Songs are female, the one in So Long male. And while both movies trade in the kind of what-if fantasias that only cinema can deliver, The Dream Songs actually feels like a dream with its hazy, soft-filtered photography and narrative non sequiturs.

The movie starts with Se-mi (Park Hye-soo) at her school desk waking from a dream in which she imagines her BFF Ha-eun (Kim Si-eun) dead. Panicked, she begs the rest of the day off from her teacher to visit Ha-eun, who is in the hospital recovering from injuries sustained in a run-in with a bicycle. Relieved that her friend is not only alive but seemingly recovered enough to leave the hospital, Se-mi tries to convince Hae-un to join the rest of the class on the following day’s big school trip to Jeju Island. Hae-un is not going, and not just because of her injury. She doesn’t have the cash for it, so she and Se-mi concoct a plan to sell an old camcorder gathering dust in Hae-un’s father’s study. This plan leads to a series of misadventures that are sometimes confusing in their blend of intrigue and serendipity, but reveal Se-mi’s bond with her friend as something deeper than infatuation. At one point, she spies a note in Ha-eun’s diary about a mystery person whom she seems to have a crush on and commits herself to finding out who it is. This mission causes a rift between the two friends that results in Hae-un’s disappearance and Se-mi’s reckoning with her own immaturity, which peaks during a brilliantly staged scene in a karaoke box as Se-mi’s interpretation of an over-wrought love song turns into something hair-raising. 

At some point, Cho, who also wrote the script, switches the nominal POV from Se-mi to Ha-eun and it takes the viewer a few minutes to adjust to the difference in sensibility. The movie becomes more melancholy, less impassioned in its emotional contours, and the viewer comes to an organic realization as to what the movie is trying to say—not tuned to plot machinations or sudden revelations but rather to a change in feeling that’s steeped in meaning. The digressions about lost pets and mistaken stalkers make sense not in a logical way, but in how they point to truths that should have been obvious all along. Part of the mystery has to do with teen attitudes. Cho lets his young actors live in their age-appropriate speech, which we in the audience can only partly penetrate; but not understanding what each remark is specifically supposed to convey doesn’t shut us out of their world because the movie’s meaning transcends language. It’s a dream that attempts to assuage the lingering pain of loss with memories of what love really felt like. 

In Korean. Opens Nov. 14 in Tokyo at Shibuya White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).

The Dream Songs home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Film Young Inc.

October 24 marked the 50th anniversary of the Women’s Day of Peace in Iceland, when 90 percent of Icelandic women commemorated the United Nations International Women’s Year by going on strike. That means not only did working women not go to work, but homemakers told their husbands they would have to fend for themselves that day, including taking care of the kids. This short, rather plain documentary is mostly a series of talking head interviews with women who participated in the action on the day in question. Naturally, they are all much older, and the decades-long perspective is interesting in the way it reveals how uncertain they were at the time and how much they’ve gained since then. Iceland is famous for enjoying the largest portion in the world of women in government (48 percent of parliament) and as business leaders, and the movie goes to some length to prove that the Women’s Day of Peace had much to do with it, because it shows how everything changed after that.

Prior to the action, Iceland was as sexist as any other country in the world. Girls who dreamed of occupations were derided by their parents and teachers, but at the same time many women who married still worked in factories and on farms while keeping house and raising children. In fact, one woman who grew up on a farm said that she was “equal to any man” she worked beside by default, though, culturally speaking, she could never expect to advance upwards either within the agricultural community or outside it if she decided to pursue an education. Female clerical workers testify that they kept the gears moving at banks, media companies, and government offices while earning much less pay than their male counterparts. Those who were stay-at-home wives complained about the ritualistic aspect of their vocations. “Christmas was a terrible chore,” one says about her domestic responsibilities, not only toward her immediate family but toward her extended one. Of course, all these gripes were universal—it’s one of the reasons the UN made a point of declaring 1975 for women—but the fact that women from all walks of life in Iceland could organize a national strike on such short notice points to something extraordinary, and the film does a good job of explaining how the strike came about and how it operated in real time. The most interesting aspect, and one that seems only apparent in hindsight, is how successful the strike was in spite of the compromises made. “We loved our male chauvinists,” one woman says wryly, and there was unease among a great many participants of spooking the men who had oppressed them. “They assumed we wanted to take over,” said another. So while the action was a general strike, it wasn’t called that. “Day of Peace” was an anodyne concession. Anything that smacked of communism and revolution was tamped down. “We weren’t active in a nasty way,” is how one woman puts it.

The many anecdotes about husbands being forced to cook for themselves and stubborn female managers getting dragged to demonstrations for the sake of feminist enlightenment are amusing but in a sense detract from the most edifying aspect of the story, which is the power of collective action. The overarching emotional tone of the interviews is giddiness: After 50 years these women still can’t believe they pulled it off, and many admit it was the most “fun” day of their lives. In that regard I could have used more input from actual working class women as to how the subsequent changes improved their own lives. Almost all the witnesses are professionals—major movers in the business, legal, and media worlds, including Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who was president of Iceland for 16 years, the first woman in the world to be democratically elected to her country’s highest office. Good for her, but I wanted to hear more about the woman who as a little girl aspired to be a ship captain. 

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

The Day Iceland Stood Still home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Other Noises and Krumma Films