nwasianweekly.com
Oct. 1, 2005

Nam-woo meets a silent girl in white, the “Mari” of the film’s title.

A moving story, a stunning film

By N.P. Thompson
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

Gorgeous to behold, the Korean animated film “My Beautiful  Girl, Mari” merits every effort you can make to see it on the big screen.

The writer-director Lee Sung-gang studied psychology before becoming a filmmaker, a background that serves him well in telling the story of Nam-woo and Jun-Ho, a pair of schoolboys, aged about 11, who live in a rural rain-drenched seaside village. It’s late spring. When summer comes, Jun-Ho will move away to Seoul, and the movie mostly concerns their final days of swimming in the ocean and playing in the crumbling abandoned lighthouse.

Nam-woo, whose father has died, laments, “Everyone leaves me too soon.” His widowed mother has begun seeing a new man; the boy’s grandmother chides him for keeping a stray feline and for greeting his mother with “I’m hungry,” instead of “Hello.”

When a shimmering marble reveals a human shape inside, Nam-woo begins to have visions of — or visitations to — a world of puffy clouds, gnarled trees and densely clustered long-stemmed flowers. Floating and tumbling through skies or along landscapes of green and purple, Nam-woo encounters a silent girl dressed in white, the “Mari” of the film’s title. Mari lets Nam-woo do all the talking in their scenes together. She’s a spirit guide, and there’s the suggestion that all she can give him may just be the tip of what he needs, yet somehow it’s enough.

“Mari” surpasses Hayao Miyazaki’s recent “Howl’s Moving Castle,” both in the superiority of Lee’s lines and colors and in what “Mari” gives back to the viewer in emotional richness. The movie begins with a dazzling opening credits sequence, an aerial glide that weaves through Seoul in winter. Snowflakes swirl across rooftops and over a six-lane highway wedged between office towers. From that height, the passing cars look no bigger than matchbox toys.

It’s no wonder that the film took the Grand Prix prize at the Annecy International Film Festival a few years back.

The images are ravishing, and the music, by Lee Byeong-Woo, fits them evocatively. The composer uses jazz piano in a couple of spots, at first meditatively, then jauntily for an underwater montage. There’s a silvery trumpet reminiscent of Mark Isham and a semi-wordless ballad for male voice backed by guitar and orchestra. The plaintive “la-la-las” and “lo-lo-los” of the singer, in tandem with the rushing flight through a maze of gray skyscrapers, set the right note for entering the movie’s symbolically charged exploration of childhood hurts and wants.

In the film’s prologue, the grown-up Nam-woo and Jun-Ho reunite, somewhat tentatively, after a long absence. As the men talk, trying to reconnect, the direction focuses not on them, but on the surface of the harbor, as if their shared history amounts to just so much water downstream. Devastating in its own quiet way, “My Beautiful Girl, Mari” shows us that lonely children grow into equally lonely adults, with little comfort except talismanic memories and the therapeutic trickle of tears.  

“My Beautiful Girl, Mari” shows Sept. 30 to Oct. 6 at the Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50^th St., Seattle. For tickets and showtimes, call 206-523-3935.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at scpnwan@nwlink.com.

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