Convenience stores are one of the best places to kind of just doze off and look at different human beings coming all at different times, total strangers come in and out. One time, I was in a convenience store somewhere deep in Manila. I had gotten lost and the most familiar thing in that area was the 7/11 in the corner street so while ordering a Grab to get home, I decided to chill around and eat something first. Beside me, a lady with one eye that had no pupil was talking to another a lady and told her that if she did not give her money by tonight, she would have her sent away. I got kind of scared and I imagined that the lady with the strange eyes was some kind of drug lord den kingpin. It was exciting but scary and despite just having to hear a snippet of their conversation, I had all these thoughts. Maybe I just heard things out of context but I felt as though I personally knew what was happening. This same feeling that I had in that ominous 7/11 convenience store I could compare to what I felt while watching the Futureless Things (2014) directed by Kim Kyung-Mook.
Futureless Things was set in one convenient stores showing different vignettes of each time in and time outs of every employee. I would think that it was the convenience store customer that would see the most to each’s trip to a convenience store but it is actually the employees who get to see everything. The film did make me think about how maybe the strangest people could come in at the deadest hours? Or perhaps every hour, as the film showed. It is interesting how with each employee, even if you hardly knew any background story about them, their interactions with the customers would bring out so much about their life. One particular scene that really brought this out was the woman from North Korea. A racist creep was trying to disturb her and insulted her about being from North Korea and it came to a point she was so angry and told the man off. I felt the stress in her eyes and how she was shaking as she put on her nail polish. It talked so much about how she was just trying to live a normal life in South Korea like everyone else but she had this horrible discriminative customer making it hard for her to live in peace as someone who got to escape. While it started off as a kind of casual scene, it turned out to be really political.
Aside from bringing out a lot of character in each employee, the film had a really lovely way of bringing out social issues in modern society. Since the structure was episodic, each episode had some kind of message to bring which all kind of always led back to some inconvenience. I feel it was intentional for the film to be set in a convenience store and show the irony of how actually inconvenient it is, especially for the people who manage a store to answer short inconveniences of each person that store served. I remember the actor who wanted to make it to his audition but he could not because of a religious man trying to pray for his lotto ticket to be the winning one. While the employee is tied down to his job, he has bigger dreams of making it big as an actor, following his passion but is held back because of having to attend to delusional customers. To me, it could be they were both delusional. The employee, having dreams but not being very responsible about it and setting his audition schedule during his work hours while a man uses prayer to win a lottery ticket. It is not faith or luck that bring out success in this world, we are told by the film.
As the clock strikes night time, it ends with a kind of sad picture of the owner of the convenience store committing suicide and business men or the government giving him sanctions for what he did. I think the whole movie kind of was a one big picture of the problems of the Korean society and what unjust systems there are.
The place itself felt like a character in itself because of how much had happened there and was only set in that one place. When the convenience store would not open, piles and piles of people just stood outside and it looked like a funeral for store. They were not mourning for the people inside that might have lost their jobs or the possible death of someone but just because they faced a minor inconvenience.
For what seems to be a really comedic play on what is in a convenience store, it came to be a really good satire piece and critique on the injustices in Korean society without pointing a finger directly on its audience for not paying attention to what is happening around us. I think it takes a lot to be able to pull off something political without being extremely up in your face about it and still somehow make it fun to watch. It is incredible how this film tricked us even at the beginning that it was going to be a cute little love story with the typical K-drama type music at the beginning and ended up to be something of a heavy critique on society. I applaud this film. The cinematography was so clean and it looked like a commercial with all of the clear as day lighting but in the end, it left me feeling dark after.
P.S. Not even that cute dance number at the end made me feel better.
Elements of Screen Arts (2019) 