57th Meeting - Movie Talk '82년생 김지영'

Date: 8 October, 2021

Place: Zoom

Participants: Kimi, Sneha, Matthew, Aditi & 100선생

We welcomed a new member, Sneha, and had a casual chat to introduce each other. Then we started with discussing about the movie. First we compared the movie and the novel, and we thought the movie, although not very much different from the original novel, did not seamlessly rearranged or recreated the story of the novel, perhaps due to the time constraints. Sneha mentioned how the 'undramatic' or boring Mise-en-Scène in the film nicely constructed the everydayness in Kim Jiyoung's daily life in which she faces various prejudice and discriminations. Also, we talked about the role of Jung Dae-hyeon (Gong Yu) as an innocently incapable husband seems to reveal the structural nature of the crisis that Kim Jiyoung has to deal with.

100 선생 introduced two articles on how the novel was received by the Japanese and the Chinese readers. While the Japanese readers were greately moved by how the author verbalised their own sufferings in Kim Jiyoung's story, the author of the article pointed out that the Japanese readers chose to cry rather than get angry (as Korean women did), which could be the reason why little progress has been made with the MeeToo Movement and other gender conficts in the Japanese society. In China, the born-in-the 80s (baringhou) women, despite the Communist Party's abolish of traditional gender role and the One Child Policy, still experience similar difficulties once they get married and are forced to quit their job to fulfill their role as a mother. Overall, Kim Jiyoung, regardless of its literary value carries universality that widely resonates in the East Asian society and beyond.