I Wish I Were Pretty

A successful young woman finds her relationship with her best friend deteriorating because of the way she feels about her own self-image, and instead of confronting her friend and her insecurities about it, decides to take it all out on her (newest) therapist.

Areum (Chang) is a horrible, disgusting, ugly human being. Much like Mrs Twit, she has been turned ugly by the thoughts that she has running around her head like a freight train, which have absolutely no checks and balances, and which are free to destroy any semblance of the beautiful person she could have been. Having lived with these violent, aggressive, and blameful thoughts for most of her life, Areum has been seeing a long line of therapists in order to get them out in the open. Her latest therapist, Helen (Walsh), just doesn’t cut the mustard though, being a white woman who, in Areum’s eyes, has no idea about the pressures of beauty standards on Korean women.

Being monolidded, which is Areum’s own description and expression of herself, her eyelids don’t have the crease in them that other women around the world do that allows their eyes to open fully and be seen as ‘big’. Areum has been thinking about surgery; a common practice in Korea, although she lives in the US; because she still hates herself when she looks in the mirror and talks bad to herself at every opportunity about how she compares with others, who may be Korean, White, or anything else. At all points Areum can’t see how her embedded stance is only harming herself, while she blames everyone and everything else, including the old-world order, and American GI’s who took their new wives home to the US with them after the Korean War, rather than taking a good, long, hard look at who she is on the inside.

The fact that Areum is only too eager to take the lazy route of blaming, “racism – that’s always the answer,” for her own feelings of self-inadequacy, tells you everything you need to know about her as a character. She is arrogant, unmoving, and so insistent on being right in how she feels, that she fails to see the person that she’s become. When she is given the direction and help that she needs from her therapist, it is met with aggression, steadfast defiance, and dismissal, because of course, how could a white woman know anything about being held to beauty standards?

Once Aleum is faced with a difficult situation in the bar that she owns, where a drunk Korean man wants her friend, Jieun/Jane’s (Lee) number and not hers, she finally realises that she may have to confront her own fears, and the insecurities she has surrounding her friend, before she ruins things completely and irrevocably. While this does lead to some catharsis, and relieving of tension, and eventually a kinder relationship between each other and with herself, no retraction or recompense is ever made about the statements Aleum has made about who she blames for her situation. While she does become set on a more positive track (after doing the things her therapist had been suggesting all along), we never see or hear Aleum being regretful or taking ownership for the odious things she has spouted during the film, casting doubt on whether she has actually changed at all from the horrible, ugly person we are introduced to.

All throughout writer/director Hanah Chang’s short film, I Wish I Were Pretty, the scripting shifts from deliberate, nasty, point scoring, to complete mundanity at turns. Even the point about the American GI’s is undermined in her own script, when Aleum in one of her tirades admits that American guys would actually see her as more attractive than Korean men would, totally contradicting the idea that racism is to blame. It is this shifting of the goalposts, and the lack of consistency and integrity to Aleum’s statements that makes I Wish I Were Pretty a very difficult watch, and really hard to like.

Chang has decided to make a film that is important to her and close to her life experiences, seemingly so that she can air a long list of grievances that she has held for goodness knows how long. She uses Aleum as a mouthpiece for her views on Korean beauty standards and about how that has made her feel about herself. There is startlingly little self-reflection going on in Aleum’s story, and even the therapy of making this film to air these grievances, seems to have done little for Chang’s own point of view. In an ironic turn, I Wish I Were Pretty is nowhere near as eye-opening as its filmmakers and producers would like it to be.