Sketching a Korean orphanage, with a French touch

Basing her film on her own experience in a Korean orphanage in the mid-Seventies, first-time writer-director Ounie Lecomte tells a painful, delicate tale of separation, friendship and loss. Lecomte brings much tact and discretion to her work, recounting an experience that is terribly sad without indulging in a single moment of sentimentality.

We first see 9-year-old Jinhee (the excellent Kim Sae-ron) happily riding her bicycle in a prosperous-looking setting. But shortly her father, who has remarried, leaves her off at a small Catholic orphanage with no intention of returning. Jinhee has been deceived, and is in shock. The scenes that follow show her failure to thrive or adapt. She is befriended by Sook-hee (Park Do-yeon), an 11-year-old who is one of the liveliest girls in the bunch -- at night she likes to cast fortunes with cards -- and the two become inseparable, sharing stolen cake and caring for a hurt bird. Unfortunately an American couple comes looking for a girl to adopt. They like both Jinhee and Sook-hee, but Jinhee won't even answer their translated questions, and soon Sook-hee is adopted and Jinhee left behind. Apart from the orphanage director and the housekeeper, the other notable figure is the unfortunate Yeshin, whose bad leg has kept her from being adopted, is in love with a young messenger, and eventually is taken away, we know not where.

Jinhee still wants her father to take her back. She demands that the orphanage director contact him. She's so angry at the place she cuts of the heads of dolls the girls are given at Christmastime. The housekeeper at the orphanage understands her anger and shows her how to vent it by beating the bedding hung up on the line outside. Eventually Jinhee comes to a kind of reconciliation with her lot through a strange ceremony of changing places with the dead bird. She pushes dirt out of her eyes and seems reborn. Rather surprisingly, since we've seen Americans come in a black ford to get children, Jinhee is sent to France, and doesn't even see her adoptive parents until she arrives there.

Lecomte, 43, is an actress and costume designer who attended the prestigious Femis film school in Paris. Since she has lived most of her live in France, it was necessary for her to collaborate with Lee Changdong on details of the staging. Viewers have noted with surprise that Jinhee's father, who figures only briefly at the beginning and whose face isn't even seen, is played in the film by one of Korea's better known actors, Sol Kyung-gu.

A Brand New Life may be said to have a French as well as a Korean touch. It is notable for its elegance, its economy, and its lack of pathos. The feel of the orphanage, the noise of the children, the curtains, the bedding, are vividly there. There's not a wealth of incident or physical detail. That's not what the film is about. Lecomte's object was to fashion a souvenir of her past, and above all to evoke the emotions of that time, rather than to recreate an entire world. The film is most compelling in conveying what it is like to realize that you are effectively an orphan and to be forced to try to make the best of being put up for adoption.

Introduced at Cannes, May 2009, shown later at Toronto and various other festivals since, including in May at Tribeca as well as the SFIFF, A Brand New Life as Une vie toute neuve opened in Paris January 6, 2010 with a generally positive critical response (Allociné 2.74/52). Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2010.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.