Director: Jai Chul Kim
Writer: Jai Chul Kim
Running time: 4mins
As a rule, I try to view all IFL’s movies blind – I don’t want to be steered in any direction by a director’s statement before I see it. To paraphrase the famous David Lynch quote, the movie should be the talking. If it can’t stand up on its own, in a dark room, before an audience of strangers, filmmakers need to know.
In the case of Our Quiet Together, however, I did feel the need to consult the notes after – so that I could try and contextualise one of the film’s murkier details. A poem to some great lost love – set to a montage of romantic imagery from Portuguese hot-spots – concludes in the final moments with writer/director Jai Chul Kim explicitly aiming it at someone, via a ‘dedication’.
Unfortunately, the director’s statement does nothing to clarify whether this is still part of the film’s artifice – in the same way The Texas Chain Saw Massacre claims to be a true story – or a real, and therefore the kind of uncomfortable, probably unwelcome ode to a real former partner (whether the name featured is an alias, or not), as is found at the beginning of 500 Days of Summer.
While on the surface, Our Quiet Together might seem quite a bit kinder to the director’s ex than 500 Days of Summer’s grotesque branding of Scott Neustadter’s ex as a “bitch”, both films would in essence be doing the same thing. They would both be the fictionalised reframing of a former relationship, by a man using the medium and respect of film to retcon his past. They take intimate and personal moments from a collaborative experience, erase one half of that, to claim control over the associated narratives. And whether they seem overtly nasty, or not, their visibility and public engagement serve to bury any uncomfortable details the other party may still decide to release.
Our Quiet Together sees the camera occasionally break from seemingly disparate shots of Portugal’s disconnected landmarks (the Sao Jorge castle in Lisbon, the Dom Luis bridge in Porto, etc), to focus on a lone woman wandering through the streets, filled with wonder. Meanwhile, the poem alludes to special, quiet moments shared in this land of noise – but pointedly, Jai Chul Kim seems to be absent from this apparent portrait of the relationship. This is about control, about transforming this apparent lover (who may be an actor approximating someone, or who may be the real person – no end-credits are offered) into a passive object, for his – and the audience’s – gaze. As the camera stalks the loan figure through crowds, and lurks around corners, we are invited to watch, not engage, with the camera’s focal point. This is not a someone, who thinks and feels for themselves, with hopes, dreams or agency. This is a something, to be desired. And whatever the intent, then, that’s an unhealthy approach to both memories and human relationships.
At no point is there any allusion to why exactly the pair might have separated, in fiction or reality, while beyond vague references to special nights in Portugal, the poetry gives us precious few details about the connection either. Without telling, this could still be shown, and that might well be a telling omission. It all feels tightly managed, memories cultivated into the most ‘presentable’ form for a conventional audience to accept as a wholesome truth – and subsequently comes across as having all the emotional impact, and authenticity, of the text in a greetings card.
At the same time, the imagery is glossy to a fault; the endless churn of four-second moving postcards pieced together with the pristine and ultimately bland serving of an advert for a package holiday. And as well as feeling utterly sterile, the montage lacks the moments of stillness or peace this kind of visual poetry requires. We shouldn’t just be bombarded with new shots for the sake of it – we need some space and time to think about what is being said, and how we might relate to them.
Those moments only come in the final third of the film, when the camera suddenly draws the lone woman into sharp focus – dwelling with her in intimate close-ups. We are supposed to have saved up all the fine words from the earlier prose, combined with the ‘beauty’ of the constantly changing surroundings – and now see them all reflected within her. But frankly, it has already become hard to remember any of it, because there was so much.
At any rate, the director’s statement (which may be authentic, but various online tools suggest may also have been generated by AI) does not answer my question to the real nature of this story. While I cannot categorically condemn it on this basis, I am left with the uncomfortable feeling we may simply have to take its dedication at face-value – and that certain important details may well be missing from the picture…
Beyond that, I am also left with the feeling the author of the statement didn’t watch the film. Because while it promises a movie where “silence becomes its own language”, and “minimal movement, restrained camera work, and a calm visual tone” reveal the “delicate emotional threads that bind two people together”, the eternally swooping camera, the relentlessly saccharine music, and the reams of B-roll which it constantly cycles through offer none of that – least of all the things that supposedly bound these two (now apparently estranged) people together. Whatever the intent, whatever the politics and power dynamics that are or aren’t involved, this is a frenetic selection of holiday photography, which never lives up to its own billing.