Aloners

Aloners

The Korean drama “Aloners” is a bittersweet film because it works best as a study of the main character’s behavior rather than how others choose to deal with it. That does not happen until the end, when she wraps up her story and they clean everything under the carpet so we can have a neat kind of catharsis. “Aloners” becomes human before then. And it never says that Jina (Gong Seung-yeon) acts this way because of one thing it’s everything.

If you saw her at work, you might still be surprised at how good she is at talking to people. She keeps her earbud headphones in whenever possible and only smokes alone. At lunch, she sits at the counter of her regular ramen shop, where they usually let her watch cooking shows or whatever online series she’s watching this week while she eats. She doesn’t let clients get to her even though they’re all obnoxious and mostly call in to complain about their credit cards; Jina is always just following prompts on a script. Her boss (Kim Hannah) sees something special in her performance amid the neediness and otherwise impersonal nature of their line of work, but nobody else does anything other than ask for help and hang up.

Which is fine by Jina: what isn’t? The title itself is misleading because it’s almost exclusively about Jina her estranged father who likes to chat (Park Jeong-hak); her next-door neighbor who doesn’t (Kim Mo-beom); Sujin (Jung Da-eun), whose name I had to look up because no one really calls each other by them except on paper at work but then again, most supporting characters don’t have names because they don’t play major parts in anybody’s life but their own. They’re funny for a second mostly because they share cubicles with Jina sometimes (try this breath spray, it’s good!).

There are a few moments where each of these side characters tries to pull Jina out of her shell. But they don’t even try as hard as she does to avoid them. She talks to her neighbor with the same well-oiled aloofness that keeps her from having deeper conversations with her dad or boss. Her relationship with him sometimes feels like the elephant in the room that explains away all of her over-sensitivity. It never does, not even after she learns how to deal with him and his breathless one sided conversations. She can force her way through awkward ones so skillfully that it almost seems like it’s effortless for her. It is every bit as unreasonable as everything else not just the world but Jina herself.

It is frustrating when creators do everything they can to keep their antiheroine, who has spent the whole movie painting herself into corners only just now realizing what she’s done, from staying there. Because until then, we have not seen much of anyone else but Jina at all.

During a phone call with a rude customer, Sujin eventually cracks up and Jina steps in. But as Jina apologizes to the obnoxious caller by rote, Sujin’s voice floats above her reluctant mentor’s call center banter: “Why should I apologize?” Sujin whispers. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

For a while, that question of Sujin’s provides Jina and the story with its clearest and hardest dramatic guideline. It is obviously flawed how non-committal she is about her problems, but not only are her actions still sensible according to the information available to her (and us), they also credibly reflect the sheer forcefulness of everything outside of her head.

No one needs it explained to them that work and socializing, and living today can be alienating. “Aloners,” though, goes deeper than most other similar dramas when it shows how various social entanglements ask us to silently accept socially inane or unfair obligations. What Hong Seong-eun does with Jina is really impressive; I think he worked so hard to keep her elusive not just because it makes “Aloners” more dramatic (and often quite funny) but also because it represents such an uncommon respect for her as a character which is both real and unsentimental about her.

Jina is not a problem to be solved even though the ending of “Aloners” would seem to suggest otherwise. The best scenes in Hong’s movie still show what being alone feels like when you’re living as a loner who has chosen half their lifestyle and had half of it forced on them especially if being apart from others seems like the only coping strategy available that might actually work for you at all times.

There’s nothing wrong with how things turn out for Jina here but what happens afterwords could be considered even better since during this moment author’s let her be alone without telling us what she is really doing there or even why she chooses so. There are reasons for Jina’s problems that are both easy to see and valid enough but neither do those reasons indicate all about who she is as person nor does anything else explain everything about her either.

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