Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Jeon Go-woon's Microhabitat (2017), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on MUBI, is showing from March 22 – April 20, 2019 as a Special Discovery.
In late 2014, taxation measures introduced by the Park presidency nearly doubled the price of cigarettes in South Korea, where they’ve become a demographic signifier of the young and financially insecure. Miso (Esom), the willowy protagonist of Jeon Go-woon’s debut feature, Microhabitat, realizes she can only keep smoking and drinking whiskey—her only two indulgences—if she stops paying rent. She lives alone in a windowless apartment without heat or furniture; the hearth of the home is an orange plastic suitcase upon which dining (a lone tomato on a steel plate; some free rice if she’s lucky) and weekly budgeting take place. A shock of grey streaks her thick black hair, the slow creep of some unknown illness staved off by slurping daily packets of herbal medicine. Her parents are dead, and her boyfriend is a failed cartoonist who lives in a single-sex dorm. Money is immediate, material: she works as an ad-hoc housekeeper, cleaning the slick apartments of various young women for wads of cash. She drifts, homeless, into the orbit of five old college friends, all ex-members of the same band, staying with them one at a time and moving onto the next when things sour.
Jeon’s emphasis on fault is always structural. Everyone is apologetic about rising costs: Miso’s old landlord, the cigarette vendor, the whiskey bar server. Prices have been lifted by invisible hands that pull the strings on theirs. Microhabitat confronts the imperatives of endurance at a time when the cost of living—industry at the expense of the planet, overwork at the expense of the body—seems incommensurate with the conditions of life. The overriding attitude of neoliberal culture has been one of optimism: the subject grows attached to an object of desire and expects its eventual attainment. It is, fundamentally, a relation contingent on a possible future, one that promises fulfillment. The present seems different when it’s occupied as a deferral of hope; we are, ideally, driven in pursuit of a future to arrange our immediate behaviors. What does Miso want? Cigarettes, whiskey, time with her boyfriend. She works and saves with some vague expectation of gathering enough for a new rental deposit, but the goal recedes with time. Fantasies of the good life are situated in an ideal future, but the crisis ordinariness—of surmounting debt, unreliable jobs, uninhabitable cities—supplants it and chains her to the present.
In their seminal book on the affects of late capitalism, Cruel Optimism, academic Lauren Berlant theorizes a form of optimistic attachment in which the desired object emerges as an obstacle to our social and material flourishing. While this object is itself problematic—for the impossibility of its attainment, the harm of its pursuit—its desire confers upon the subject a world-sustaining relation. As a rich friend points out later, there’s something wrong with what Miso wants—it isn’t normal, this sleek housewife remarks, that Miso prioritizes cigarettes over accommodation. No one should uproot themselves for a minor vice. Against these set priorities, what does it mean to reconfigure your conception of a livable life, to shift the normative coordinates of comfort and stability to something that looks much flimsier from the outside? It’s not strictly the attachment to cigarettes and whiskey that sustains Miso, but some abstracted expression of agency: vice is indulgence is choice. The generous reading is that coping mechanisms help reinstate a kind of lateral agency, a sideways meander when the up and out propulsion of financial stability seems out of the question. But the trick of these mechanisms—and the many other Janus-faced tools of self-care—is their implication in the same systems of exchange value that abstract bodies as capital.
Microhabitat insists on the body as body, expendable—and therefore sellable—as both material product and performed service. Early on, Miso meets a friend at her office in some kind of corporate-mandated chill-out space, a tiny wooden den right by her office cubicle. As they chat, her friend sticks a medical bag of glucose to the ceiling and needles it into her arm. It’s a trick she learnt as a nurse, she tells Miso, to help when she’s working overtime. “You can’t imagine what I had to go through to get this job,” she says, slumped against her makeshift IV station, “I’m going to work harder and get a better job.” Miso nods and smiles. Later, she reclines side by side with her boyfriend on a blood donor bed, tubes coursing red as they talk about the future. He’s still saddled with student loans, and neither can see a way to raise enough money for an apartment deposit. But she refuses to take out more loans: “my goal is to live debt free,” she says, assuredly. By the time we find out they’re donating blood in exchange for movie tickets, any apprehension of dystopia has been normalized as routine.
Jeon centers the transactional flows of daily interactions, the camera emphatic on the monetary exchanges that take place when Miso buys a packet of cigarettes, or goes out for whiskey, or gets handed cash post-cleaning. Money also cues us for reading exchanges too obscure to name. What does it mean when Miso cooks up a big breakfast for her jilted friend, or, of her own accord, cleans every inch of the many houses she drifts through? At face value, it’s compensation for staying rent-free, sure, but the act seems strangely bound with her sense of self. The film’s depiction of her labor never feels fetishistic—no telescoped pain and exhaustion nor saintly stoicism—but it’s telling that cleaningis really the only thing she can offer in transactions both emotional and financial. In the absence of her own domesticity, she finds ways to perform the arrangement of a home in the spaces of others. Maybe this is lateral agency that works; from a relative distance, the mess of other lives seems easy to advise. Third party clarity is brief, but comforts with the possibility that our own messes, too, can be reworked with thoughtful intervention.
Each friend seems miserable in a different way: the first, career-driven at her own bodily expense; the second, married but living with her in-laws; the third, spurned by his wife and bound to an extortionate mortgage; the fourth, still living at home with his suffocating parents; and the last, married into money but exhumed of any real personality. As Jeon explains in an interview, they’re locked to a model of compromise, a kind of monthly budgeting magnified to the scale of a whole life—to have their own place in Seoul, everyone had to give something up. It exposes the exhortations to budget better as a series of false choices, because foregoing daily cigarettes will never a property owner make.; a brutal either/or binary is no just foundation on which a whole generation must build a life.
Even affection is at stake. In one of the opening scenes, when Miso and her boyfriend entertain themselves in her freezing apartment, things take a turn for the sensual. They begin peeling off socks and sweaters in a long overdue rush until, suddenly, the cold gets too much and they stop. They’ll do it in the spring, she half jokes, but by then he’s long gone, sent off to work overseas for two years in the sincere hopes of returning with enough money to buy a place somewhere, just for the two of them. Towards the end, the film abandons its defined narrative time altogether—maybe it’s been weeks since he left, or months, or years. There are few markers beyond seasons or love to index the time Miso has left.