On a city street at night, a barefoot teenage girl with the legs of her sweatpants rolled up lights a cigarette and sticks it between her lips before connecting to the probation office’s voice monitoring system. “Four, five, six, seven, four, five, six, seven…” She repeats the meaningless numbers requested by the system aloud. Her face is never shown, yet we can almost see her expression. The opening scene of Can I Talk to You? immediately grabs our attention. The film follows three teenage girls staying at the House of Rothem, a youth shelter, after receiving protective measure no. 1 from the Juvenile Division of the Changwon District Court for acts of delinquency, including running away from home, theft, self-harm, and smoking. The girls confess that they are most afraid of being abandoned, that they hurt themselves because they hate being people for whom, “everything is a weakness” and that they simply want to “breathe.” Yi Seungjun, director of Planet of Snail and In the Absence, does not interview the girls or add voice-over narration. In fact, he does not even film them in a way their faces can be identified. The film’s mystery lies elsewhere. How did these girls, each standing alone at the edge of the world, let the camera approach them so closely? This documentary about the brutal days of youth invites us into a world we have all passed through, yet one that no one truly knows.
