Fantasia 2019, Days 7-8, Part 1: Maggie
July 17 for me was a day of rest and running errands; then for my first film at Fantasia on July 18 I went to the De Sève Theatre to watch Maggie (메기). Directed by Yi Ok-seop from a film she wrote with star Koo Kyo-hwan, it’s the story of Yeo Yoon-young (Lee Ju-young), and her boyfriend Sung-won (Koo). Yoon-young’s a nurse at Love of Maria Hospital in Seoul. One day, an X-ray surfaces showing a man and a woman having sex in the X-ray room. The next day almost nobody comes in to work; the X-ray room’s a popular site for assignations, and everyone thinks they’re one of the figures in the X-ray. Yoon-young’s the only one who dares show her face, along with Doctor Lee (Moon So-ri). They end up forming an unlikely partnership as Maggie helps Lee learn to trust other people. Meanwhile, Sung-won finds work filling in sinkholes opening up in Korea, following an earthquake predicted by a catfish named Maggie — who also turns out to play an important role within the film.
This is only roughly a description of the movie, indicating just a few of the plot strands. Maggie unfolds through a series of vignettes, with flashbacks and chapter titles and an unseen narrator. It’s a consciously quirky approach to a film that isn’t afraid of punching up its plot with a certain amount of surrealism. You wonder what happens to the patients at a hospital with no staff, for example, and though we do see a few people left in the empty building, by and large the question’s unanswered.
What is most interesting, and I think in the long run surprisingly effective, is the contrast between the surface tone of light comedy and a deeper sense of abiding bleakness. The conclusion suggests hidden depths to people we think we know, and not always abysses into which we would choose to gaze. While the pacing and general approach seem to aim at a gentle comfort, much of what actually transpires depicts some real pain.
The vignette structure seems to ask the viewer to see the humour of events, and the surrealism is at first distancing, but the subject matter (of trust, of violence) has a weight that in the end can’t be ignored. This could have been a significant disconnect, and at first I felt it was. The more I thought about it — and after having seen at least one movie that tried something similar to Maggie and in my judgement failed — the more I came to appreciate this film, and suspect that I hadn’t been sensitive enough at first viewing to what it was trying to do.
