Written and directed by Anthony Shim
The immigrant story is often rooted in the hardships faced by newcomers, whether that’s racism, alienation, or economic dire straits, and while that’s all dramatic dynamite, there has always been much more to the immigrant experience. These other elements are subtler, harder to express, and they don’t automatically promise the same visceral punch.
Anthony Shim’s Riceboy Sleeps, the story of a Korean woman building a better life for her son in Vancouver’s suburbs, goes beyond the go-tos. While it can’t quite refrain from using the aforementioned dramatic standbys as a crutch at times, it has its eyes set on what happens between generations when they’re raised in widely different circumstances. The pain is not humiliation at the hands of White people, but the phantom pain of not knowing from whence you came, or giving up everything you know so you may give your children more than what you had growing up. Both lives will never feel whole.
Choi Seung-yoon is So-Young, newly arrived in Canada. Raised in orphanages, she finally left South Korea behind after her marriage ended in tragedy. On her arm is Dong-hyun, who struggles early with his fellow kids, who are mindlessly cruel the way kids can be, bullying him about the food he eats, his appearance, and the glasses he wears (just because). So-Young was raised on hard knocks, and forbids him to betray weakness. You watch this small boy internalize it in real time.
Skip ahead to 1999, and Dong-hyun is now 15 and culturally acclimated, preferring English over Korean and turning inwards to the consternation of his mother. A pain point is her reticence about Dong-hyun’s father and his family’s past in general. Two people, each the other’s world, but a distance is forming.
Shim’s direction is rooted in tenderness. His camera tip-toes around in scenes with long takes that circles and weaves into the action and stays close, but never breaks into close-up. There’s a naturalness to it, this way of sharing the space of the scene with the character without imposing. Homevideo framing and digitally imposed grain grants it a nostalgic tinge, and we sense Shim’s want for it to feel like a malleable memory, like someone reaching back through time to deal with something raw and intensely personal.
You have to be made of steel to not feel the sting of tears during the opening half hour of Riceboy Sleeps where mother and son experience the full force of a society not used to them and not very gracious about it. Shitty kids, shittier adults make for a hostile environment, and the zeal with which Shim piles it on borders on excessive. Still, seeing a cute little boy and his hard-working single mother struggle to carve out an existence? Tell me it doesn’t hit a soft spot and I won’t believe you.
These types of stories are not uncommon, though, and the effusiveness of the opening act shows Shim as a capable, but very rigid writer. It’s tidy, and it’s easy to see how it’s all pieced together, with scenes, characters, and lines and dialogues too on the nose and cut into squares for easier arrangement.
It’s therefore not until it gets out past its opening act that Riceboy Sleeps starts to get at the good stuff as the cultural divide emerges. When it takes the leap, it soars. Confrontations are no longer about what’s being said, and hard stares in the mirror no longer about one’s foreign looks, but how unrecognizable one has become to oneself.
To keep your heart strings engaged, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s score is haunting and beautiful, and as mother and son, Choi Seung-yoon and Ethan Hwang put on a beautiful duet of a performance.
Despite its rough edges and workshopped feel, Riceboy Sleeps is a moving story about finding oneself and discovering the roots from which you grew, whether that’s the old country, or your immediate family. Those roots aren’t always beautiful, they can be gnarly and twisted, but they reach the wellspring of our being. Shim’s movie puts you in touch with that fact, and that’s something to cherish.
Mikkel Frederiksen 