Planet of Snail

Dohye Kim reviews Planet of Snail, directed by Seungjun Yi (2012, 87 minutes)

Hearing that this documentary is about a South Korean couple - a deaf-blind husband and his wife who has a spinal deformity - it would be easy to presume that this film is dark in tone. This would be very plausible given that the concept of disability has been portrayed very negatively, particularly in the South Korean context, where disabled people have mainly been conceptualized as recipients of benevolent assistance. The Planet of Snail disrupts this presupposition; it is a strikingly bright and peacefully beautiful love story. In several occasions in the film, Young-chan, the husband, narrates his poems. “The darkness and silence [which] were with God… came to me.” But Young-chan’s darkness and silence can be shattered by his bridge to the world – Soon-ho, his wife.

This film shows the language that the couple uses to communicate with one another and the world, and how this language builds the kind of marriage that ordinary people, and in particular those who do not have physical disabilities, long to achieve. Young-chan and Soon-ho communicate with each other by touching hands. Soon-ho’s fingers touch the back of Young-chan’s hands, as if typing braille. If Soon-ho does not speak while she touches his hands, the viewer cannot understand what she says. Fingers and hands, or rather the sense of touch constructs a language all of its own. Young-chan feels the spring by quietly hugging and touching the tree. Obviously, this world moves slowly. Young-chan says, “Feeling heavy in my heart, I am dying to run.” But he cannot, he can do so “only in my [his] imagination.” This is why he lives in the planet of snail.

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