Starring: Choi Seung-yoon, Ethan Hwang, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Anthony Shim, Hunter Dillon, Jerina Son, Kang In Sung, Choi Jong-ryol
Distributor: Icon
Runtime: 117 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Set in the 1990s, a Korean single mother raises her young son in the suburbs of Canada determined to provide a better life for him than the one she left behind.
This film is a memoir of the life of the writer-director, editor and actor Anthony Shim. It is a dramatisation of his early life, an opportunity to remember, re-enact and, especially, a tribute to his mother.
In recent years there have been many prominent films with a Korean-North American interest; for example, Oscar nominee Minari; the story of an orphan and adoptive parents, Blue Bayou; and the 2023 much-awarded drama, Past Lives. Riceboy Sleeps finds its place among this trend and these films.
Shim has invested a great deal of emotion in this film and invites us to appreciate and share it. There is a sad prologue explaining how a 30-year-old Korean woman marries, her husband mentally ill and killing himself, leaving her with a little boy, followed by some alienation from the husband’s family and migration to Canada.
The first part of the film is set in 1990. The mother is a resourceful woman. She finds a job in a packing factory, at first isolated but meeting another migrant, offering friendship and support, and building up great rapport with the other workers in the factory. Her son, Dong-hyun (Doyung Noel Hwang) is five, bespectacled, reluctant to go to school. There are tantrums, some bullying with the children mocking his Korean food (and his throwing it out and asking his mother for sandwiches for lunch), his standing up for himself in a fight, but suspended, where his mother argues about the injustice of this with the principal. And, he has to find an Anglo name, wanting Michael Jordan but his mother forbidding it. David is the compromise.
The acting of Choi Seung-yoon, dancer and this her first feature film role, is always moving, a credible portrait of a woman challenged by hardship, but loving her son.
The second part of the film takes place in 1999. David is now 15 (Ethan Hwang), dying his hair yellow, one of the boys around school. A friend leads him astray, introducing him to drugs, some moody episodes with his mother. She continues working at the factory, bonding with the women there. And, a gentlemanly man, Simon (played genially by Shim himself) is attracted to her, wants to care for David, proposes.
However, there is a deeply felt personal issue for the mother, confiding in Simon, her friends, and in David. She tells a symbolic story from Korean mythology of a dying mother being carried on a pilgrimage by her son to the top of a mountain but her dropping rice along the path so that he will be able to have a secure return.
The third part of the film is the mother’s symbolic re-enacting of this story, taking David to Korea, his curiosity roused because of a class project on writing the family tree and his realising he knows nothing about his father. The audience accompanies them on this visit, wondering at the beautiful scenery, curiosity at meeting the rice farmer family, the welcome, the genial grandfather, the grandmother mentally disturbed still about the fate of her son. We are glad that David and his mother have made this visit.
And, finally, ascending mountain to find her husband’s grave and headstone, rituals performed, David experiencing his heritage, family warmth and long cultural traditions.
Riceboy Sleeps leaves the story at the turn of the millennium – but, with the director and this achievement in his film, we are assured of the positive results of his young and teen experiences – and the profound influence of his mother.
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