The Anxious Soul That The School Cannot Care
- The Movie, "Memento mori"




1.

Most Koreans might remember, when they were elementary school students, hurriedly writing their daily diaries the day before the semester starts. The reason for their haste was that writing a daily diary is frequently an expected piece of homework during vacation for Korean elementary school students. Those who do write their diaries start out writing, ‘today was a good day’, but as the vacation gets longer so do the entries. Then the diaries location changes from the bookshelf to the bottom of a desk drawer and those ‘good days’ slowly become ‘horrible, desperate days.’ The secret hinted about yesterday becomes a little more visible today and will finally show its true ugly face tomorrow. When we, as adults, look back at these writings, we realize that the anguish in these pages feels so exaggerated and were just a prelude to the problems we now face everyday. People who have graduated from a girls’ high school will probably recognize the female adolescent characteristics that appear in this film. Characteristics like obsession for a friend, lustful thoughts about unmarried teachers and the feeling of betrayal when one of their close friends becomes interested in another friend. The movie Memento Mori draws a picture of high school girls in an isolated girls?? school who have extraordinarily sensitive heartstrings. The movie whispers to us about a time when nothing is more valuable than a diary, those secret memories and confidential screams of anguish.

2.

It is almost folly to expect a sequel to be better than an original movie. Most sequels are poor works, made quickly just to ride the waves of their financially successful predecessors. And though this rule holds true for most sequels, Memento Mori is definitely the exception to the rule. In fact, it doesn’t feel like a follow-up. It has little in common with the previous movie Whispering Corridors (Park Ki-hyung, 1998) (aka A Ghost Story In Girls’ High School) except for girls, a high school and horror. The ending credits hold some very revealing facts. The co-directors, Kim, Tae-Young and Min, Kyu-Dong were sent to study in the field, seeking out popular hang-outs, participating in class with students, interviewing and filming them. This movie is based on this intensive research focusing on a teenage girl’s irrepressible sensibility suppressed and hidden beneath the high-handed system of school institutions. As the small pleasures and pains are unraveled from each page of a shared-diary, the tension that lurks around the experience of a girls?? high school transforms itself into the horrific. In addition, this film tells the tale of what it is to be a student in a high school in Korea, of being a 17 year-old female in a male-oriented society, and of what it’s like to fall in love while experiencing your coming of age.

3.

A match lights up a dark screen. Someone narrates ‘the first day a girl dies’ with her head emptied out. Perhaps she had remembered the truth. The beginning soaks the audience in dark/light, silent/echoic, realistic/illusionary uncertainty which is attractive in horror movies. Min-Ah (Kim, Min-Sun) discovers a scarlet covered diary as she is hurrying to school. She has a brief hallucinatory experience when she opens it, initiating a series of strange occurrences, which eventually draw Min-Ah into the eerie world of the diary. The first page of the diary says to her that the first kiss, like the smell of apples? On your lips, I’ve smelled the blood that touches my tongue. In her desire to read more of the contents of the diary, Min-Ah feigns an illness, getting permission to lie down in the school’s clinic. There she witnesses the reunion of Hyo-Shin and Shi-Eun who wrote the shared-diary together. The day at the girls’ high school is half over, and the students are preoccupied with the trauma of getting their physical checkups. Their hustle and bustle is abruptly interrupted by a sharp scream, which announces Hyo-Shin’s death. While various rumors surrounding this death spread throughout the school, Min-Ah continuous to follow the trails left behind in the diary’s writings. And like the inscribed incantation, ‘Memento Mori’ suggests, she senses Hyo-Shin’s ghostly entity, which seems to linger in every corner of the girls’ high school. 'Memento Mori’ or ‘Remember the death’ in Latin, is the incantation that sadly ordains a dead student’s diary. The death of the girls who was neither child nor adult is recalled through this spiritual dialogue.

4.

If one feels that it is hard for males to share their feelings through the movie, one might consider only the place the story happened, a girls’ high school, without considering or understanding the symbols and metaphors the movie suggests. Homosexuality, which most Koreans have been known to shun, and an affair between a teacher and a student, which is considered taboo, has made this movie notorious in Korean society. What is attractive about Memento Mori is not only the well-made interwoven stories that might really have happened in a girls’ high school, but also the realistic scenes, such as the beginning scene that implies the relationship between Hyo-Shin and Shi-Eun, the scene where the faces of the teacher and some friends of Min-A??s were reflected in Min-A??s pupils and finally the scene where Hyo-Shin and Shi-Eun ran around on the roof of the school. These scenes are visually invigorating. Yet, despite the realistic stories and well-intentioned pokes at Korean prejudice, the film fails to tell the whole story smoothly. The movie is written from the point of view of both Min-A and Hyo-Shin, yet the dialogue is from the point of view of only Hyo-Shin, who is the most mature and sensitive character. Because of this they had to eliminate many details of the story and sometimes had to explain situations fantastically. This did enable the audience to interpret different things their own way. For example, the relationship between the Korean writing teacher Mr. Ko and Hyo-Shin, Hyo-Shin tried to explain her relationship with her teacher with exaggeration to Shi-Eun. But it is hard to understand that Hyo-Shin lied to Shi-Eun. Additionally, in the scene where the teacher Ko is talking with Hyo-Shin??s illusion, her motivation for committing suicide is not clear to us. In terms of horror movies, Memento Mori, is not scary enough. However, it has its own voice. Although the voice is not loud enough to be recognized, it is enough to feel deep in our hearts. This ‘Horror Movie’ is not for feeling frightened but for feeling emotional.