Best Reels: Canadian Cuts | "Riceboy Sleeps" is an Impactful Mother-Son Folktale

The sophomore feature from Korean-Canadian director Anthony Shim opens with dramatic vistas, somber voiceover narration, and a swelling score—it feels like entering the thing of myth. Indeed, Riceboy Sleeps is film that feels “big,” even though its scope is modest and small—a story of mother and son. But because So-young and Dong-hyun are immigrants in Canada, their story can also feel like mother and son versus country. Maybe this is why Shim gives his film an epic feeling—it is his David vs. Goliath story (perhaps tellingly, Dong-hyun’s “white name” is David). Or, maybe Shim wants us to see the mythic potential in nostalgia mining. Whatever the case, what he has here is undeniably “big.”

As the film progresses, Shim works to hold you in the gravitas of this powerful opening. Riceboy Sleeps operates by way of its consistently awe-inspiring tone, which enraptures one in the poetic grandeur of life-defining moments, but it doesn’t glaze over finer character details as a result. In this way, the film vacillates between the universality of a folktale, and the intimacy of a family journal, becoming an experience that is part Malick, part Jenkins, but proudly all its own. 

This clearly defined identity contrasts with the film’s characters, for whom identity is not as easily negotiated. Choi Seung-yoon plays So-young, a weary but resolute widow who, alone with her son, Dong-hyun (played by Dohyun Noel Hwang as a toddler, Ethan Hwang as a teenager), decides to leave rural South Korea and forge a new path in Vancouver, Canada in the 90’s. With gorgeously photographed long takes that rove curiously but patiently around the family duo’s most foundation shaking moments, we see how the Korean experience in friendly-presenting Canada is shaped by sexist and xenophobic interactions, which So-young and Dong-hyun inevitably carry home. These internalized interactions, in turn, cast cynicism and contention across family dining tables (and dining habits). And while So-young and Dong-hyun’s story is not a terribly unique one—Shim admits to Exlcaim that “[c]hildhoods and upbringings like that were so common with a lot of people of that generation”—its telling here is elevated by the assured decision making behind the camera.

The cinematography, already mentioned, is a clear highlight. Christopher Lew’s 16mm photography looks great, and the film even makes use of changing aspect ratios to differentiate between scenes set in Canada and Korea (can you guess which country stifles our characters with a more “closed-off” frame?). The thoughtful production design, with its use of complimentary colours, gives frames a storybook quality, while the stirring score by Andrew Yong Hoon Lee strikes an exhilarating chord of burnished nostalgia. These choices work together to make much of Riceboy Sleeps feel as if it were plucked straight from memory. But because Shim often refuses to cut, we as viewers are kept at something of an arm’s length, allowed only to float idly around the family moments without falling into the usual, editing-based rhythms of their dramaturgy. We as viewers become melancholic ghosts in this way, perhaps because we are meant to be channeling So-young’s late husband, who feels very much like the film’s implied spectral presence.

There is a beguiling air to this work, and it can beset one in feelings of detachment, but what ultimately defines one’s experience with Riceboy Sleeps is the pathos. Choi Seung-yoon and Shim have worked together to plumb immense trauma and pain from So-young, and the final on-screen performance is devastating. You have only to look to a scene around in the film’s halfway mark, in which So-young shares a fable-like tale with her boyfriend (Shim), to understand just how resilient and impossibly selfless a mother she is. Even when stricken with health issues and ostracized by society, So-young would move mountains for her son, and that makes her larger than myth.

This is why Shim echoes So-young’s story across mountain ranges—her role as an immigrant mother is Herculean, and Shim only wants to give it the grandiosity and the dignity he feels it deserves. The result is a staggeringly inspired work, one that communicates the utmost respect for its characters, while also celebrating their flaws, and allowing the performances behind them to shine. Riceboy Sleeps also celebrates life’s finer details and more idiosyncratic moments, whether it be So-young preparing kimchi traditionally in her Canadian kitchen, or Dong-hyun and a schoolmate preparing a weed brownie milkshake. In this way, Shim goes big to also get small. This has always been the power of myth, and thanks to Shim, we get to see that power extended into film.