After Watching 'The Florida Project'

The poster itself looks very vivid and bright, but the content of the film is actually not so. There were several times I laughed during the film, but those laughs were really nothing more than momentary laughs — I couldn't say that the content of the film itself was 'fun.'

'The Florida Project' is the old name of Disneyland, and a member of the film's production company once said it is also used to refer to housing assistance programs. So this film's title was something you needed to watch with the awareness that it's a work far removed from the ordinary 'Florida' image we typically think of — but I failed to realize this in time. The kind of thing that happens when you watch a film with no schema for it at all. Since there were a few reviews saying it was sad, I watched while wondering exactly which parts were the sad scenes, but I think I'd have to say most of the scenes were all sad.

The content of the film is the daily life of the impoverished, living in motels in 'Florida' where Disneyland is. The fact that it depicts that impoverished daily life through the eyes of a 'child,' 'Moonee,' can be called this film's distinctive feature. It depicts the housing poor who can't obtain a normal residence because, while the cost of living in a motel is far higher than the cost of maintaining a 'home,' they have no 'lump sum' on hand at the moment. It's a film that paints a picture in your mind of how such housing poor are not just 'one or two' people.

In terms of the film's intertextuality, there were quite a few parts that reminded me of Chae Man-sik's 'Chisuk' (My Idiot Uncle). In Chae Man-sik's 'Chisuk,' the narrator 'I' shows the tragic realities of the Japanese colonial era as seen through a child's eyes. Of course, the 'I' here shows a slight difference in that he is corrupted, but even setting aside that point of 'corruption,' 'The Florida Project' shares the same context in its aspect of grasping reality simply. 'Moonee' cannot properly understand reality, nor is she of an age to do so. She is purely a child. She is a child who rejoices at the very fact that she can eat ice cream, who rejoices at being able to play on an iPad, who rejoices at going out to other places with friends. Moreover, she doesn't know the reason she lives in communal housing with other people in a home called 'Futureland,' and she also feels nothing in particular about receiving the bread that the relief organization comes to hand out. In other words, it can be called a cinematic expression handled comprehensively from a 'child's' perspective. It's just like how the 'I' of 'Chisuk' can't understand why his uncle does socialist movement work, can't earn money, and only comes back having gained illness. The only difference is that the 'I of Chisuk' holds doubts, while 'Moonee' and 'Scooty' don't hold much doubt.

A friend who watched this film with me asked whether there was any reason for 'this kind of subject matter' to be made into a film, and I think that's a valid question too. Since I'd never seen this kind of dramatic film either, throughout the viewing I was often confused about whether I should laugh at the funny scenes or whether those were parts where I shouldn't laugh. Taking the words or sentences themselves, they were quite funny scenes, but the part contained behind them was something at which laughter couldn't be taken — to give a literary technique as an example, there was far too much laughter of the 'humorous-satire' kind. The content of the film, where I keep finding myself making sympathetic laughs unconsciously, could even be called a 21st-century, Disneyland-front impoverished version of Kim Yu-jeong's 'The Mountain Wanderer.'

From the fact that Disneyland is very close, yet the actually existing Disneyland appears only once, and in most scenes expressions like the 'safari' that indirectly evoke Disneyland appear, you can grasp that it allegorically reveals a cross-section of the lives these people live. It was that kind of film, hard to just laugh at after watching.