Did we watch the 2018 South Korean film Little Forest because it’s Taurus season, which includes two of our writers and legend Kim Tae-ri? Possibly! The following is a transcript of our post-watch discussion, and it has been edited for length and clarity.

EU: Eugene

EL: Elise

P: Peyton

P: This is a Eugene movie because it’s about friendship, and it focuses on food as love, food as communication, et cetera.

EL: And leaving your shitty job. 

P: I mean, we have to talk about the food. 

EL: She made some delicious looking things, she also made some what the fuck is that, you’re putting some weird—

P: Flowers? 

EU: Yes, it was like an oil pasta with flowers. 

EL: But the other half of it was the work she put into it. 

P: Yes, the process was the point, not so much the end goal. Which I think is the same with the farming in this, like she was planting a lot as well, and it was about the process of that. And then also . . . haha, this is what the movie is about, but healing . . . It is about the end goal, but the process of it. 

EU: I definitely think labor played a really big role in the movie. Because Kim Tae-Ri’s character in the beginning, Hye-won, is working towards her education permit, she’s trying to become a teacher. But it’s something that she personally didn’t want, it was an idea that her boyfriend had had and they were planning on doing it together. So she’s living this life in this city, borrowing someone else’s goals and time and existence, and she’s going along with it, and at some point it becomes too much for her and she realizes she doesn’t have anything to herself. And so she runs away from it. The rest of the labor that she does at that point is dedicated to herself. All the labor she puts in nourishes herself, because it all comes back to her as food or her long-time friends. So, there is a labor element to it, and I think that’s kind of helped by her two friends. Because the male friend [Jae-ha] left his shitty corporate job, like he just burnt all the bridges and went and became a farmer. And then the female friend, Eun-sook, we see in the beginning is very okay with being in this small town as a bank teller, and then at the end she hits her boss’s head with a tambourine and gets fired. So there is this idea of a certain kind of labor not sitting well with people. 

P: But there’s also a moment with Eun-sook, the bank teller, where Hye-won is like, “You should just tell him off or you should just quit,” and she’s like, “We’re not all like you, I do want to stay here,” or “I do want to continue with this, this is solid for me.” 

EU: But she gives in at the end . . . 

P: Does the mom come home at the end? 

EU: I think it’s hinted at, but I think it’s not important whether the mom comes home or not. Because basically Hye-won cleans up her life in Seoul, like she closes her apartment, does all that, and when she comes back, the door to their house is open. But we don’t see who it is and we don’t see if they’re still there. We just see that someone has come in. So she could have come in, read Hye-won’s letter, and left again, but we just don’t know what that interaction was like. 

P: Yeah, I think you’re right in that the most important thing is that she officially closed down everything in the city and decided—because she was being delusional the whole movie, about like “I’m only here for a season”—

EL: “I’m going back.”

P: And then it would be the next season. And she was planting down roots. 

EU: Literally planting. 

P: And I think the movie began somewhat in medias res, like she’s already moved in and you kind of have to piece back . . . like you kinda think, oh it’s about the boyfriend or about the job, but then the movie really goes into like: this is about her relationship with her mother. All the memories, all the flashbacks start to go back to her mom, and how tied to her mother’s memory the house is, cooking is . . . It’s that cooking is love language thing. [Hye-won] was with her boyfriend and her boyfriend said, “She keeps cooking for me, this is lame,” and that’s how her mother took care of her. And I think she realized that I can’t be here. And she returns to where her mother was last that she knows of. Then that’s where the movie starts and you have to piece backwards, this is actually about her and her mother.  

EU: Even with the boyfriend, we only find out about it in passing conversations that she has with her friends. Because they’d be like, “Do you have a boyfriend, what happened with your boyfriend, where is he?” And then we start seeing snippets of flashbacks. We don’t really get her talking about it, it’s just her being like whatever, I’m done with it. 

P: And even the relationship stuff with Jae-ha, it doesn’t ever come to anything, it doesn’t resolve, because it’s not the heart of the movie. 

EU: Which is the mother-daughter relationship . . . I thought it was interesting that the mom is shown not being a bad mother for like 80% of the film, because in all those memories, she was a pretty good mom, and then Hye-won tells her mom, “I’m not going to live this country bumpkin life, fuck you, I’m going to the city, I’m gonna go to college and I’m gonna do my own thing, and I’m gonna have my own journey.” That’s when the mother has a realization, and the very next day, the mom’s gone. And the mom goes on her own journey. 

EL: It’s so weird, [the mom] is like, “Oh, she’s gotta figure it out.” 

EU: So it makes me wonder if the mom felt like she needed her own space, like her own time to figure things out? But, I don’t know. I think they’re paralleling the journey of some kind. 

EL: It’s kind of a shitty Mom thing to do.

EU: But it happens way at the end of their relationship. Why would you—

EL: That’s so wild for you to be like, “She’s going to college, she’ll be fine, I’m leaving.” 

EU: [The mom] must have believed that to a certain extent. 

EL: That [her daughter] will be fine?

EU: Yeah.

P: I do think to a certain extent, college/high school is around the time that you begin to realize your mother is her own person. Not to say that what she did was great. 

EL: But to eliminate a whole support system for your child as they’re becoming an adult, that’s a lot. 

P: I kind of thought the movie was leading up to [Hye-won] having run away, in a sense, from the city life and dropping it and her boyfriend being like, Are you coming back? and the apartment deal not being dealt with. And then you slowly realize over time this thing with the mother, that the mother had left her, and now she’s kinda done the same thing. So I was thinking, Oh, she’s come full circle, not that she’s become her mother, but she’s reached a point of understanding, where she understands what her mother did. Because she has had to do it. 

EU: To just run away. 

P: Yeah, to just run away from those problems. I feel like the letter is really important.

EU: From what I remember, in the letter it was not completely shown to us, but in the little monologue that she gives, it’s like, I’ve come to certain truths about myself and I’m leaving you a recipe of my own that I’ve developed. Because the entire movie Hye-won is making recipes that her mother has taught her, and she kinda learns that some of those recipes that she used to think were genius, were actually copied from other vendors and things like that. Like the okonomiyaki pancake that she’s like, My mom’s a genius, and that’s just a common street food. 

P: A lot of this movie is about realizing . . . you stop idolizing your mother as your mother. And it’s about, we’re both adults. 

EL: We’re both just a person.

P: Yes, we’re both people trying to deal with that. 

EU: And at the beginning of the film, it’s cold as she’s moving back in, remember, and her aunt is like Oh have you heard from your mom, do you know what’s going on? And she’s like Don’t talk to me about my mom. The aunt says a line like, “Who can understand your mother? She’s such a person, an individual.” And Hye-won doesn’t say anything about it, but by the end of this journey, when she comes back and it’s winter again, she kind of has that moment of, Oh, I do understand my mother. So I guess it really is just about moms, labor, and food and healing. I do think there’s an element of part of the messaging is that life is about the connections you make, the food you eat together, those moments you share together. 

P: Obviously the whole food-as-communal thing is not new by any means, literally dating back to Christ. And in the film, Hye-won makes alcohol, doesn’t she? And she mentions, oh, the best time—you have to drink it at this time, sharing it with other people. So even though a lot of the food she makes in this is for herself, it is also about opening up to sharing with others. 

EU: This is very distinctly Korean culture, but traditional Korean food, everything is for the table. You’re never given your own individual plate. The only thing that’s yours is your rice bowl, and then you eat collectively from everything. But even if you’re going out for Western food, like if we were going out to pasta . . . we would all share from each other’s plates. We just order based off our preferences, but the idea of sharing is still baked into the equation already. 

EU: We also never see her mom eating the food she makes except for the tomato. Everything else is the mom making something and then feeding her daughter, and then we watch Hye-won make food for herself and start sharing it with her friends, cooking for her friends. 

P: I think there’s also—I keep coming back to this learning about your parents thing—because I’ve done the same thing, like when you’re a kid and your parents give you advice and you’re just like, sure, whatever, adult things. And then you actually become an adult and you’re like wow, that was actually really fantastic advice, or it’s advice I always come back to. And hers is just a simple, you know, enjoying a tomato in the summer, but even just small moments like that, where you stop and realize: there was wisdom in this. And there’s wisdom in gardening, planting, sustaining—small moments of appreciation. 

EU: I definitely think it’s not completely idyllic, because the storm passes through and destroys all the orchards and the things they were all working on. 

P: Yeah, this was a very slice-of-life film, like the drama of it is so under the surface. But that idea of the storm passing through is like, life is random, shit just happens. And sometimes we just have to deal and sometimes we just have to keep going through it. And sometimes the drama in life is external, even as we’re dealing with internal . . . All the drama in the film is internal, this tension between past/present, memory and not-memory, mother/daughter, kind of divides like that . . . We’re always cutting back and forth between seasons, between years, between memory. So despite how simple the film is, there is a lot of disturbance, disruption—

EU: The seasons are consistent, but the years are not. 

P: So a lot of the drama is internal, we have to piece together from her memory and her own process of going through it, but that doesn’t mean that external factors like your drama with friends or weather patterns won’t affect you just as much. As much as you’re going through your own shit—oh, now I have to deal with the storm damaging my crops. 

EU: That reminds me of when she fights with Eun-sook because Eun-sook has a crush on the guy friend. And Hye-won is like, I have no interest in this because I’m dealing with my own fucking problems. But she’s so self-absorbed in her own problems that when the friend comes to her for advice like on the boss and about the boy, they end up fighting because Eun-sook is like, I can tell you don’t actually listen to be because I’m not you, I’m not going to do what you’re telling me to do because you’re saying what you would do and I’m not that. And you’re not listening. But Hye-won is so absorbed in her own world that she cannot think about other perspectives like that.

P: Yeah, and the movie is kind of making the audience—not necessarily side with Hye-won, but they’re putting us so deeply into her perspective, into her life, into her psyche, that those moments of the friends being like, You’re arrogant, it’s kind of pulling the audience out as well. We’re so deeply tied to this one character, that now we’re getting pulled out of it for a brief moment. We’re in her perspective so hard, but her perspective is not everything. 

EU: I don’t think we’re necessarily supposed to take her side like you said because Eun-sook is shown being socially aware, she has a social grace that Hye-won kind of lacks. So she can talk to everyone, she’s a bank teller, she can navigate these circles a lot better than Hye-won can. And so I think it just goes to show that you have to be somewhat present, that even in the countryside, there’s still people politics at play.

P: No one is completely isolated.

EU: Also the pacing of the movie was so relaxed. It was such a . . . like a jaunt through memories.

P: A jaunt through the forest, yeah. 

EU: There’s no sense of urgency to anything.

P: I think the only real time I noticed any . . . style . . . in the directing is when she was cooking food. That’s when it seemed like the director cared, so it seemed like that’s when we should care. Which again, goes back to this—it is when we should care, because she’s recreating these memories, recreating food stuff, she’s being creative, she’s connecting with her mother, which is the heart of the film. But I feel like most of the direction was pretty normal or, like . . . it didn’t stand out much?

EL: Standard. 

P: Yes, pretty standard. Until we get to these food scenes, and then it was really focused on the process just as much as she was focused on the process. It almost looked like . . . because we were looking directly down at her hands, that was when we seemed to be taking her place the most, we the audience. 

EU: That is actually a really interesting point because . . . I don’t know if you guys watch a lot of food creators, but there’s been kind of like a food vlogger movement where they start removing themselves from it. So instead of filming and being like, oh, this is what I’m doing, or giving a voiceover, they’ll rely on captions and they’ll use soothing music in the back and they’ll just show the act of cooking itself. That’s kinda what we get with Hye-won, her cooking is us also engaging in that. 

P: Which is exactly what we were saying earlier about it being communal, sharing in it.

EU: I wonder if also there’s this like idea of memory being intrinsic with food, like memory and food being tied together. And like every lesson that she learned from her mother that stays with her, there was food involved. When she gets bullied, when her Mom is trying to show her something new and fascinating, there’s always a new thing being introduced through food in her life. 

P: Again, that’s the central relationship—Mom and food—so they develop that quite strongly over the course of the film.

EU: And her deepest sadness with the boyfriend is the rejection of the food she had so lovingly crafted. 

P: Which made me upset . . . Kim Tae-ri, I would eat anything you gave me.