Review of Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 / 82년생 김지영, directed by Kim Do-young

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

For movies in a language I’m not fluent in, I have to fully focus on the film for me to walk away with an understanding of it. I think it’s harder for me having a somewhat multilingual brain to watch international movies because, for example, I know enough Korea to get by and converse, but then when watch a movie or drama, I fixate on the language aspect and what I know, so I need to put 110% of my brain into it.

So while sometimes I can put a movie on in the background while I’m doing work, and don’t plan on reviewing it, then I can play a dumb American romantic comedy with no actual substance to it. But for a Korean movie, I have to pay attention and do the legwork mentally.

Being unemployed has helped with this, so I’ve been catching up on movies from abroad specifically during this time when I’m not applying to jobs. While this review is going to come out much later than when I watched the movie due to the sheer amount of backlog I have on this blog, I did watch this one on a particularly hot day when my cat was trying to snuggle too hard with me. It was a slightly miserable experience, but it was worth it!

I first read Kim Ji-young when I was a sophomore in college, and I remember how it was one of the first feminist Korean women writers’ works I had read. Now I’m older, did a master’s thesis in Korean women’s literature, and slightly sold my soul to it when it comes to this blog, but hey, I’m pretty familiar these days with the themes and whatnot of what goes on in these books.

I was pretty pumped to watch this movie because of that! It always fascinates me on how books are translated for the screen.

Let’s get into the review; I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

After giving birth, a stay at home mom develops depression and mental health issues dealing with a patriarchal world around her.

This movie revolves around the world of one mother: Ji-young. She’s a typical housewife who does her daily routine of cooking, cleaning, picking her daughter up from school when she needs to. Her husband has a stable job at a company in Korea, but as we see throughout the film, Ji-young once had a career too.

She was happy in it, as she worked at a marketing firm and was quite successful with what she was doing there. She wanted to be like one of the leaders, Kim, who had given birth to a child and was still rising through the ranks of the company, which is remarkable considering how in Korea, once you give birth, you are expected to be more of a housewife.

However, when Ji-young had her daughter, she quit her job. In the present day, she’s starting to feel stagnant and trapped in the life she is living, and now has depression because of it. Additionally, she’s beginning to have possessions from her mother and deceased grandmother, which manifests through a different mental illness. Dae-hyun, her husband, especially becomes concerned by this as it manifests in high stress situations, such as visiting his mother’s house.

Dae-hyun decides to record these episodes and take them to a shrink, who thinks that Ji-young needs to come in immediately to be checked out. Ji-young is given a card to go to appointments, but then refuses to go because she realizes how expensive they would be if she went regularly. Instead, she debates going to work again and reaches out to Kim from the old office, who has started her own job.

Her husband thinks this might help her, so he encourages her to go back to work. He goes on parental leave so she can have the opportunity to do so, and her episodes decrease and her depression goes down. However, when her mother-in-law learns about this, she goes after Ji-young and berates her for it.

She demands Ji-young quit her job and return to being a stay at home mom, and Dae-hyun reveals the nature of Ji-young’s mental health to his mother. Ji-young’s mother also comes to learn about it and is devastated for her daughter, who still does not realize something is wrong. Ji-young herself confronts Dae-hyun about wanting to have her see a psychiatrist because she doesn’t know, and he shows her the video.

Horrified at what she sees, she quits her new job and then focuses on healing. She starts documenting her feelings by journaling, and opens up about her experiences with discrimination in the workplace. Eventually, she starts speaking to the public about her experiences, and gains a reputation as someone who writes about it in publications.

The movie ends with her in a much better position, ready to start writing a memoir about her experiences.

Overall Thoughts

Well, I think this was a pretty solid movie overall. The movie kind of sanitizes some of the plot from the book, as we see more of her upbringing and the specifics of what led Ji-young to be the person she is today.

However, I can see why the movie’s direction went the way it did. Both of the actors did a fantastic job with the material, and I could see how this is giving the book new life on the big screen. I know a lot of people don’t read these days, despite what the Internet is claiming about reading habits and BookTok, so movies are a way to access literature through a visual medium.

But if you’ve just seen the movie (or haven’t and are cheating through posts like these), go read the book. It’s an important book for understanding the boom of Korean women’s literature, which has really spread abroad in a way that’s so interesting to me. We get so many Korean and Japanese women writers in translation these days, which has been so fulfilling for me as a reader interested in their experiences.

And if you haven’t seen the movie and are indeed cheating, go watch it. Movies are meant to be seen, not read about.

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