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As a sometime diaspora-studies geek, I expected a lot of insights and reflections on that subject from In Between Days, which centers on a Korean girl living in Toronto who misses her estranged father in South Korea. It delivers very little on that score but so much else that writer/director So Yong Kim and co-writer/producer Bradley Rust Gray can be forgiven many times over.
This is a movie about a boy and a girl. We know this because a good three-quarters of the screen time consists of their faces in extreme closeup, or just the two of them side by side. Forget multiethnic Toronto, celebrated as one of North America's most vibrant cities: We barely see it in this movie. Aimie and Tran (he's also Korean) ride the subway, sit in coffeehouses, hang out at claustrophobic teenage parties and ponder their ambiguous relationship, almost always in darkness. The city appears as a dimly lit skyline as we hear Aimie voicing the letters she's writing home to her father, but this is a film of warm faces in a cold landscape.
To be sure, their situation as immigrants does play a role in the story. Though Aimie claims in a letter to have friends of all colors, she doesn't appear to be close to anyone but Tran. Together they speak Korean almost exclusively, and everyone they spend time with is Asian. This amplifies the sense of isolation and claustrophobia in this very close film.
Jiseon Kim as Aimie and Taegu Andy Kang as Tran, both new to the screen, give perfect understated performances. Decades earlier and a world away, Elizabeth Taylor warned that the slightest expression goes a long way when your face is projected on a screen two stories tall, and these young actors have clearly learned that lesson.
In Between Days takes a while to gather steam, but once we understand its visual world, the movie's dim midwinter lighting and deliberate pacing make it that much more powerful. And despite its unconventional style, the movie has a classical movie arc built around increasing sexual tension. In Between Days is a perfect evocation of two themes in adolescence and life itself: the blurry line between festering and growing, and between being uncomfortably close and comfortably intimate.