I can’t sleep sometimes. That’s just how things are. (Almost) 23 years on earth, this is what I learned so far. When you can’t sleep there’s really nothing you can do about it. You can try getting back to that dreamy, cozy, warm state of semi-consciousness that is very very sweet, but the effort is in vain. But when I say there is nothing you can do about it, perhaps I’m seeing things from one single point. There are some options: listening to mental chatter or finding some distractions. I go with the latter most often. Watching the cold blue sky is cool. Feeling the wind out of the window. Maybe reading a book. Making tea and forgetting to drink. Observing the clock. But the best, I figured out, are films.
Now and then I find a movie that really hits the right points in my soul (I sound more dramatic than I want). Miso is one of those characters that have a magical aura to them. Not exactly surreal but not quite real either. She points to a possibility of life that’s like a toy we loved when we were children but forget its existence among the bits and pieces of what we dare to call “growing up”. This is what the ‘microhabitat’ makes you feel, without being assertive or didactic or whatever that is makes one cringe at such ‘naive’ and ‘cliche’ views on life.
Why Microhabitat? Because we see Miso in a particular time, at a particular place in a tiny portion of her life and being. So the story is what’s filtered from this close focus of the pen and the camera. And also because she experiences her life in a microhabitat of her own construction whisky-cigarettes- boyfriend. As she touches upon other microhabitats (those of her friends) she leaves her mark, subtly and uniquely- perhaps it's the eggs, the smile, perhaps the talk.
One is tempted to see Miso almost as an idea, an ephemeral concept. But there is something very real that makes her become flesh and bones (the rent that she can’t pay and the price rises, yes, but more and further). Significantly, her character does not create a duality with the unpleasant reality, it makes her life exist as an aggregate, to be made use of by the protagonist of it without being hampered by its restrictions. When hampered, as this is the thing with life, it just goes on, she makes it bearable. Is existence the same thing as living? Why does she quit smoking and drinking?
But why should she? The irony is profound, they do -literally- kill her, but simultaneously make her feel alive.
Is Miso too naive, a daydreamer, a fantasist as one of her friends implies her to be given her situation? I’d argue, quite the opposite. Miso’s heroism stems from the relationship she forms with reality and not from her disconnection from it. And on a literary level, her characterization does not allow any such extreme readings of her being- she’s not black or white. Her habitat is in the grey area.
How would it feel to live a satisfactory life without expectations, with personal stuff fitted into a single bag? How to leave any place at any moment you like? I want to live without debt, she says at some point. Cherishing what is given in a particular moment, deploying it, and being grateful for it, simply. But never yearning for anything beyond. She’s neither a romantic character nor a romanticized one. She’s 30, broke and everything is getting more expensive. There is nothing glorified about the way she lives her life, but also and equally there is nothing judged or despised about it either. That’s just how things are. The story does not play for the sympathy of the viewer, and it definitely does not try to make one pity her. ‘Aiming’ is too ambitious a word for this movie but it at least hints at a character who could’ve easily gone unnoticed as she, very humbly, exists outside the established norms and criteria of modern society. her most visible resistance to this ‘order’ is her nomadic life and the image of an orange tent amidst the city lights.
The movie is a snapshot of a minuscule moment of this ‘ordinary’ woman’s life. And yet she is very unique, not despite, but on the basis of her ordinariness. There is nothing extraordinary or splashy about her, and yet she is impressive and comes off as wise (and yes this would be so even if she didn’t have grey hair).
