Futureless Things

Futureless Things by Kim Kyung-Mook is a product of the modern Korean cinema. It has an episodic narrative which focuses on one character to another. What astounded me was how it all took place within ne setting, that of which is the convenience store. It works hard to balance the comedy to entertain and the socio-criticism that it holds over the many social evils that plague the Korean culture. It’s a good arthouse film that quite stuns with its artistic direction. At first sight it may look like the usual or typical Korean film, however underneath it actually packs a whole lot more of a personality. The title itself is indicative of how the people are referred to as things, due to the fact that they are used by others for their own end. This is deep and resonates for me as it shows how we are often reduced as a means to an end by other people who would only seek to exploit us. That was something that the film shows through the characters and thus that is why they are stuck in that cycle of their work and life rendering them futureless in a way. This film felt like it was structured from a play wherein there was only one setting where multiple scenes and stories took place in. It was structured in a very smart manner wherein the characters were given this sandbox in order for their stories to be consumed and the narrative to flow in a very loose manner yet still be apprehensively effective and cohesive at the same time. The story affects you in a manner where you build an emotional connection to the characters and their time in that setting. Therefore, the smart form and structure of the film actually lends itself a great amount of heft that pits the characters within the story to have this sense of connection towards the place. The way that Korean films also seem to champion their culture is a detail that was not lost on me as there was a lot of commentary about the many different problems they had to fix with their many cultural problems. There a voice towards the many things that hound them in Korea are shown on and the commentary comes from the stories presented here. I then kind of found a parallel with how this could show more credence towards the contextualized notions of films from foreign countries and how they could easily show the voice of the masses through the telling of the stories of their everyday lives. This in turn could be utilized more in terms of how it can be applied in say films from our own country. That there should be a struggle and questions tackled from the constancy and contextualization of the proliferation of our many problems as they are thrown into the light of cinema and how they could be expressly tackled by the means of films. In this way the legacy of this film stretches far beyond their own origin.

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