‘Soul’ Searching
Derek Tsang’s female friendship melodrama moves to Korea for a de-fanged, note-for-note copy. Not sure why.
Soulmate
Director: Min Yong-keun • Writers: Kang Hyun-joo, Min Yong-keun
Starring: Kim Da-mi, Jeon So-nee, Byeon Woo-seok, Jang Hye-jin, Park Chung-seon, Heo Ji-na
South Korea • 2hrs 4mins
Opens Hong Kong March 23 • IIA
Grade: B-
Did you see Take Care of My Cat? It’s from way back in 2001, about five girlfriends coming-of-age in Incheon as South Korea was on the verge of its digital transformation. The country was coming-of-age too, and writer-director Jeong Jae-eun’s conscious decision to set much of the film in the aggressively unglamorous, industrial, provincial town signalled her larger interests in class, poverty and systemic sexism. Yes, yes, director Min Yong-keun’s Soul Mate | 소울메이트, which puts a South Korean spin on Derek Tsang’s 2016 Soul Mate | 七月与安生, isn’t that ambitious or astute. It’s also not about five young women in the year or so from high school to the real world. But there is a cat, and the tone of the film and the vibe of two friends, Mi-so (Kim Da-mi) and Ha-eun (Jeon So-nee), growing close, growing up and growing apart, recalls Jeong’s film as strongly as it does the Chinese original. It feels like that other film. End of comparison.
The more appropriate comparison, of course, should be to Tsang’s film, to which Min is fairly faithful, but fails to make “Korean” in a way that would justify the move. If Soul Mate speaks to you as a viewer, it will do so in any language. But apparently it appealed to Min’s narrative sensibilities: his 2011 debut, Re-encounter, was about an unwed pregnant woman whose boyfriend splits for Canada and their reunion five years on. I’m sensing a pattern here. Why come up with a fresh story when one’s already been written?
Where’s that cat?
If you missed the first film, we start with Mi-so meeting with an art gallery curator who’s trying to locate Ha-eun for a show. It seems she created a photo-realistic sketch of Mi-so and the gallery wants her on its roster. Mi-so claims she has no idea where she is and marches out. Flash back to Mi-so transferring into Ha-eun’s Jeju Island elementary school, where they become BFFs, practically sisters after Mi-so’s mother dumps her to return to Seoul for… reasons. Childhood becomes adolescence, and so like so many films about women by men (Almodóvar and Kwan among major exceptions), a dude becomes the fly in the ointment that is the girls’ tight friendship. Perhaps it’s an age thing? Cultural? Personality? But the tension brought on by having the hots for a friend’s beauhunk clangs; it simply doesn’t ring true. Women are not like this. Unless the beauhunk is Pedro Pascal, in which case I or my girlfriend would have permission. Off topic.
In Soulmate this dude is the blandly handsome Jin-woo (Byeon Woo-seok), a budding doctor who Ha-eun kinda sorta pursues, and who of course sparks to Mi-so. The two girls are oil and water: Ha-eun is the reserved, responsible one. Mi-so is the impulsive wild child. You’ve seen these archetypes before, so you know her impulsiveness will send Mi-so globe-trotting to find herself, leaving Ha-eun and Jin-woo behind to follow the path everyone expects them to.
But wait, there’s more: self-sacrifice, secrets, lies, suicides, unwanted pregnancy, turning tables, miscommunication and reconciliation, everything you’d expect from a rambling chronicle of a relationship. But Soulmate stumbles in its transfer from China to Korea, unsurprisingly sanitising parts of the content and taking the bite out of some of the situational humour without bothering to rejigger and recontextualise the story. In more than a few instances it makes Mi-so and Ha-eun’s beefs with each other incomprehensible, and its makes the inherently feverish, overly dramatic story (no hospital anywhere in the world lets a pal sign a sheet of paper and walk out with someone else’s baby) even harder to swallow.
But this is a heightened, semi-weepy soap opera, and for what it is, on that level, it’s mission accomplished. Min is a pedestrian filmmaker, and there’s little in the language that stands out (I swear to god if I hear “Me and Bobby McGee” one more time…), but TV actor Jeon (who, well, acts like she’s on TV) and especially Kim (The Witch) commit to the material and are mostly convincing as joined-at-the-hip gal pals, particularly in high school. Films like Soulmate have an audience and that audience is likely to eat this up, and all power to them. But if you want a slightly ballsier version of this story, find Tsang’s Chinese original. If you want an actual examination of growing up girl in Korea, find that Cat. — DEK