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The opening scene of Im Kwon-taek's Adada, where a single white hand signs against a black background as a voice-over narrates, generates praise from many. The audience learns about a woman whom others failed to understand. This woman is Adada (Shin Hye-soo of Life and Death of the Hollywood Kid) a Deaf woman who was communicating all along, but those receiving her messages were unable to translate them, ignoring her words, and by extension, ignoring her personhood.

Based on a short story by Kye Yong-muk, "Idiot Adada", the original title shows Korea was no different from other countries in mislabeling the Deaf as "dumb." In Im's Adada, she is married off to a noble but poor family for her desirable dowry of rice fields. Initially, the family is warm to Adada, attempting to learn Korean Sign Language - with unrealistic speed - in order to help her transition into their family. However, as the fields and Adada's labor bring greater riches, Adada's husband (played by Han Ji-il of Aje Aje Para Aje) becomes greedier, eventually stumbling into the Manchurian drug trade. This all leads to a painful dismantling of Adada's placement in the family. Although Adada's in-laws appear sympathetic to her plight, they begin to relish their son's new found status, however illegitimate, and place the responsibility of reconciliation on Adada. Adada's family also refuses to offer support, deferring to Confucian tenets of a woman's proper place in Korean society. Even when she reunites with a childhood friend (played by Lee Kyeong-young of Out To the World), this too turns into something unsupportive.

Again, we have Im using a woman's suffering as metaphor for the suffering of Korea. As Eunsun Cho states in her chapter in Im Kwon-taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema, "The severity of patriarchy enforces her silence, locking her up in an inaudible han." And Cho goes on to further note that this han, or suffering, comes to replace, or further suppress, the realized suffering of women, leading Cho to indict ". . . the cruelty of Korean national cinema that fabricates beauty out of that cruelty."

Cho's point can be extended as not just concealing the realities of women, but also of the Disabled. In her groundbreaking Illness as Metaphor and AIDS as Metaphor, Susan Sontag notes the harm often caused by metaphors surrounding disease for those diagnosed. Such similarly affects the Disabled. Looking at their bodies as metaphors of loss or contamination rather than the complicated humans they are, they risk further disenfranchisement. (I must confess that I'm just as guilty of this, metaphoring the word "cripple" in the last paragraph of my review of When I Turned Nine.) Keeping in mind that the Disabled are only disabled because the rest of the world is not structured around their frames, the metaphoring of Disability as a loss, or in this case a "silence", fails to hold. Even the scene at the beginning, however aesthetically pleasing, begs to be complicated by the fact that the Deaf do not communicate solely with two hands, let alone just one. The head, shoulders, torso, and facial expressions are just as important to communicating properly through Sign. Without such parts of the body visible to the reader, itwouldbesomethingliketypingtherestofthissentencewithnospacestodifferentiatethewords. For example, check out the Deaf storytelling in Apitchatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon. Hands are not the sole active part of Deaf languages.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Im's default metaphor. As Cho notes, by muting and deafening Adada, her body communicates like few of Im's female protagonists. (The only one comparable, as Cho argues, is Ok-nyo in Surrogate Mother the year before.) Adada is anything but "voiceless." She is presented as a competent Signer for whom quite a few individuals make efforts to learn her language rather than force her to speak. And her inability to learn spoken Japanese from her husband can be seen as her body's resistance to colonial oppression, of the Japanese and the Hearing. This is probably unintentional, but Im's results challenge stereotypes of the Deaf as unable to experience music. Borrowing a sound clip from his film The Genealogy where a woman beats her laundry dry by pounding it with wooden rods, Adada is shown doing the same, thus, quite capable of performing a complicated musical rhythm.

I'm not aware of how the Deaf Korean community received this portrayal. The immense suffering Adada bears may be received negatively as perpetuating infantilizing images of the Deaf. However, this portrayal may have had a reception similar to that of Johnny Belinda, for which Jane Wyman won an Oscar for her Deaf portrayal. As noted by John S. Schuchman in Hollywood Speakrs, although the film is seen as paternalistic by today's Deaf community, the Deaf press at the time was delighted to see an image of a Deaf person on screen. Later, as more and more portrayals of Deaf characters appeared in Hollywood films, Deaf activists began to demand that actual Deaf people play such roles, hence the boycott around the 1979 film, Voices. I'm not an ardent essentialist, but I can understand how underrepresented groups would want to fight for greater representation. And the limited access for Disabled actors/actresses to play Disabled roles is compounded by the fact that such roles are coveted by able-bodied actors/actresses since they almost guarantee an awards nomination if not the outright awards, such as those won by Wyman and Daniel Day Lewis at the Oscars, Moon So-ri at Venice, and Shin herself at Montreal. Still, I'm not aware if the Korean Deaf community was equally upset by a Hearing person playing a Deaf person in Adada. Further adding to the complex nature of Deaf portrayals is how Schuchman, a Hearing CODA (Child of Deaf Adults), received Voices differently from the Deaf activists, since it was the first time he had heard a Deaf voice authentically represented on screen, something Shin also convincingly accomplishes.

Keeping all this in mind, I see Adada as a complicated portrayal of a Deaf woman's experience considering the time in Korea's cinematic history it was produced. Although many of Im's problematic tropes are still present, (add to the list his discomforting images of women losing their virginity), there is an opening for a more liberated portrayal than in most of Im's films through underscoring the language of our bodies. Metaphors can free or freeze us and Adada fluctuates between the two poles enough to allow for hope amongst oppression.      (Adam Hartzell)

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