Riceboy Sleeps (2022) dir. Anthony Shim
After her boyfriend gets put in psychiatric hospital due to his schizophrenia, and ultimately commits suicide there. So-Young decides to move from Korea to Canada with her six year old son Dong-Hyun. So-Young gets a job in a factory where she gets sexually harassed by some coworkers, but also gets a community with the fellow immigrant women working there, korean and otherwise. Dong-Hyun speaks no English but still goes to a suburban elementary school, where he gets relentlessly teased by the other kids, who seemingly haven't seen a non-white person before and for whom mayo is an exotic food, for being asian, for the food he eats, for his name. As he gets older he actively tries to surpress his korean heritage.
Riceboy Sleeps doesn't shy away from showing the ugly parts of moving to another country. Dong-Hyun has a terrible time facing racism almost constantly throughout his childhood. But direct and systemic racism. So-Young tries her best be a good mother for him, but often comes up short compared to what his emotional needs are. It doesn't help him that she doesn't want to talk about their past in Korea, which further alienates him from his heritage, leaving him without roots. Anthony Shim lets the camera roll, even when things are uncomfortable, and it works well to put the viewer in the same state of wanting to get away from the situation, that the characters are no doubt feeling.
I worried that the movie would take a turn for the melodramatic when So-Young got her cancer diagnosis, but I am happy that it didn't. It stayed grounded. Even the end felt emotionally genuine, even if it was a bit on the nose.
I really liked the first half of the movie. I feel it's a great piece of social realist cinema from an immigrant point of view. It shows the hardships of the immigrant experience, both from an adult and a child point of view. The second half I didn't feel was quite as strong. I can see why Anthony Shim made it like that. He gave himself a very hard task of showing a young person rediscovering their heritage, living it, taking pride in it, as a way to gaining self confidence and finding out who you are as a person. It's something that's very hard to show on film. But I think he makes it work quite well, even though it's slightly contrieved. But to me it doesn't flow as naturally as the first half. But I also can't see how Shim could have told this story in a better way. I'm interested to see where his career goes from here. I hope his next venture will be just as inspired as this one.
