Highly
A moving and austere debut, it treads a delicate line in exploring guilt, redemption, and culpability.
When debut director Kwon Man-ki won Best Film at the Macao Film Festival 2018, he beat out the likes of Hiroshi Okuyama’s Jesus and Barnaby Southcombe‘s Scarborough. CLEAN UP (호흡) stands apart from its contemporaries as a tightly controlled drama about people on the fringes, and the lasting impact of trauma and guilt.
Kwon’s script slowly unfolds like a mystery, but is also honest about its portrayals of these characters. Jung-ju (Yoon Ji-hye) is a woman barely making ends meet working as a cleaner and a kitchen hand, drinking herself to sleep most nights while praying for repentance. When ex-con Lee Min-gu (Kim Dae-gun) begins working at the company, we learn why: 12 years earlier, she and ex-husband Tae-gyu (Kim Su-hyun) kidnapped the young Min-gu.
Filled with an overarching sense of loss and mourning, director Kwon doesn’t make it easy for us to make quick moral judgments. There’s no doubt Jung-ju committed a crime years ago, but how responsible is she for taking on the whole of Min-gu’s fate? Min-gu has suffered terribly: his mother is dead, his father committed suicide, and he has served terms in prison. Yet Jung-ju has also lost her son to a heart condition, and subsequently her husband and sense of self.
Kwon draws out these observational moments through a series of flashbacks to the kidnapping. Shot with a quiet and low-key intensity, these moments are tactile, terrifying from Min-gu’s point of view, and matter-of-fact from Jung-ju and Tae-gyu’s. All three of these principal characters look back at these pivotal moments as if they forever dominated their collective destinies.
In the present day, the gaze is turned towards the nature of Jung-ju and Min-gu’s work and their relationship. As the very definition of working poor, Kwon’s own experiences on the borderline inform a sympathetic portrayal of cleaning maggots out of a deceased estate, or Min-gu living rough in a toilet block. Kwon is attempting to project a vulnerability, one that makes the relationship between the leads (both as a romance and a kind of mother/son dynamic) all the more complex.
Although religion forms a large part of Jung-ju’s means of coping with the world, Kwon isn’t so much commenting on faith as he is on the way some people use it to assuage their own guilt. Through reconnecting with Min-gu, Kwon observes that guilt and forgiveness aren’t linear concepts or a one-way street, but an exchange between individuals. CLEAN UP explores them all in a moving and deeply enveloping way.
2018 | South Korea | DIRECTOR: Kwon Man-ki | WRITERS: Kwon Man-ki | CAST: Yoon Ji-hye, Kim Dae-gun, Kim Su-hyun | DISTRIBUTOR: M-Line Distribution| RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 9-11 June 2019 (SFF)
