FAQ the brilliant childhood fantasy adventure is a heady brew of tone and style that is sure to find a cult following. Played at Fantasia Film Festival 2024.
Talk about a Core memory being unlocked by FAQ. Go with me here …
When I was around ten years old my family placed me into a Cultural School for Japanese. This school ran on Saturdays for six hours. While there I was in class learning how to read, write, and speak Japanese.
It was one of the worst school experiences I ever had.
Why? The short answer is that I did not fit in. I was different. Almost all the kids disliked me and made fun of me because I wasn’t fully Japanese and did not look Japanese. I was a Gaijin (Foreigner/Not Japanese). This added to my dislike of the Cultural school that already took up most of my Saturdays. While others got to sleep in and play freely, I was stuck in school, bullied, and made fun of.
The entire year culminated in having a speech presentation. One that I utterly failed. Fumbled so badly, that my stutter, which had been gone for more than two years, came back. After that spectacular failure (in front of an audience no less), I didn’t have to go back to school. My grandmother (who was fully Japanese) who was funding it saw me and this presentation as utter embarrassment and failure on my part – to be fair, it was – and decided to not spend her money on this “gift of education” (her words not mine).
I understand FAQ and its heroine Dong-choon (Na-eun Park) and her inability to fit in. Many will find her flopping at an English Speech presentation as panic-inducing as I did. At seven or eight years old the world is heaping on Dong-choon in a way that only a person of South Korean descent or a culture that pushes from birth the need for educational greatness to stand out in the pack could. Though this is only the beginning of the weird, wonderful, and life-affirming fantasy adventure that we go on in FAQ. Rest assured there are other challenges that Dong-choon will face but they are all for a purpose that she and the audience are unsure of until the very end.
FAQ is the kind of film that builds on its narrative twists and turns to create something wholly original and bravely defiant in the way that films rarely are. Writer/Director da-Min Kim has created a film that champions those quiet insular unique children. Those who can see beyond the code of normalcy and formality. FAQ at in its best moments recalls the way that Steven Spielberg, Hayao Miyazaki, and Guillermo Del Toro approach childhood and fantasy. The respect that da-Min Kim shows for the traumas and delights of childhood is uncommonly artful and delightfully quirky.
One will be tempted to read more plot-driven reviews but this reviewer stands by not divulging much of the plot as FAQ’s strength isn’t in its plot but in its execution and ending. If one is daring enough to go into FAQ relatively blind, they will be treated to a daring piece of childhood cinema. One that doesn’t talk down to you but at the child in all of us. The one that’s lost and without purpose or guidance. One that I wish the ten-year-old version of myself could have seen to feel less alone and less a failure.
At its end, FAQ assures those children that we all serve a purpose and are all unique.