Bandhobi

Min-seo is a high school student who feels frustrated and angry at the state of her life.
Her friends all take after-school classes at study institutes, but her single mother can’t afford to pay for them. With her mother preoccupied with a new boyfriend, Min-seo has nothing to do during the hours after school (when, that is, she goes to school), and she eventually gets an under the table job at a massage parlor in order to pay for English classes.
One day she is riding the bus when a migrant worker from Bangladesh drops his wallet. The man exits the bus, and Min-seo takes the wallet for herself. However the man, named Karim, soon realizes what happens and manages to chase Min-seo down in a side street. “Let’s go to the police station,” he says in excellent Korean, but Min-seo manages to talk herself out of trouble. Instead, she eventually agrees to help him with a problem that has long haunted him: trying to collect his back wages from a former employer who refuses to pay him.
Min-seo and Karim are one of the more interesting pairings in 2009 Korean cinema. Min-seo is particularly well drawn: rebellious and not particularly nice, she is an unpredictable and magnetic screen presence. Although at first her actions are driven by a kind of self-focused anger, as the film goes on and she draws closer to Karim, her anger takes on a different quality. The young actress Baek Jin-hui puts tremendous life into this performance, and her character is without question the best thing in this film.
Karim is played by Mahbub Alam, a longtime resident of Korea who entered the country as a migrant worker and who has since become involved in various activist projects, including the launch of the Seoul Migrant Workers Film Festival.
He shows himself to be a decent actor in this film, as well as an accomplished Korean speaker, although his character lacks the sort of emotional complexity that we see in Min-seo. (Alam also appeared briefly in Where Is Ronny?, another film from 2009 that explores Korean attitudes towards Southeast Asian minorities.)
In a sense, Bandhobi is two films in one: a story about two people from very different backgrounds who come to form a close bond, and a piece of social commentary about discrimination against migrant workers in Korea. If the latter had been executed as effectively as the former, this film would have been a major achievement. Alas, there is a one-dimensional quality to the film’s political content that clashes with its three-dimensional characters. Every time we see Karim interacting in Korean society, someone discriminates against him. This may well be true to the experiences of many migrant workers, but within the film itself it becomes so predictable that the director’s intention crowds out everything else.
This is a rare misstep for Shin Dong-il, who in the past five years has established himself as one of the most interesting among the Korean directors who haven’t yet become famous. His previous works, including Host & Guest (2005) and My Friend & His Wife (2006), have also drawn attention to social issues and class differences through well-developed, complex characters and relationships. Bandhobi’s best scenes capture the viewer’s attention in a powerful, involving way. If Shin let his politics become a little too obvious this time, other aspects of his filmmaking are still in top form. In this case, even a partially realized effort is well worth watching.