Jupiter’s Moon
Written by Lee Suk Pei
Jupiter has 67 known moons orbiting around it, and one of them happens to have a saltwater ocean under its icy surface that is a potential cradle of life. That moon is named Europa. The introduction of this moon, which the movie draws its name from, is considered by many critics to be irrelevant to the rest of the movie; however, I think this introduction sounds like the perspective of a refugee who is looking to run away from a war-stricken country to a new home that, although it is as foreign and distant a place as one of Jupiter’s moons, still offers hope for supporting new life.
The movie begins with a wagon filled with anxious Syrian refugees going to cross the border into Hungary through a water route, which results in them being discovered and stopped. The boat overturns and the refugees begin running into the forests, dodging bullets from the border police. Aryan, the protagonist of the movie from Homs, is shot three times while running for his life. Instead of dying from the shots, he wakes to find his supernatural powers lifting him off the ground to make several turns up in the air.
Stern, a doctor whose life was ruined when a patient he operated on while drunk died, regularly collects money from refugees to help them escape from hospitals. Stern happens to meet Aryan at the refugee camp. He smuggles Aryan out of the camp after witnessing Aryan’s newly developed ability and plans to exploit it to help him earn some repatriation money for his dead patient’s family to stop them from suing him. Laszlo, the border policeman who shot Aryan, wants to cover up that fact and starts an endless search for the pair. Things get worse when Aryan and his father’s lost documents are misused by other refugees and later found at the scene of a bombing of a subway train. [Spoiler Alert!] The movie ends with Aryan jumping out of a window to escape and Stern dying from gunshots when he helps Aryan escape.
Produced in 2017, when the Syrian refugee crisis was a hot topic that dominated almost every news discussion, promising Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó’s latest film, Jupiter’s Moon, aims to highlight a multitude of issues, ranging from the European refugee crisis, to governments’ responses to the issues, to religious faiths. Despite the overall less-than-satisfactory reviews given by movie critics, I personally think that the Cannes Palme d’Or-nominated film succeeds in portraying the film’s central issue – the refugee crisis in Europe – using a different perspective and angle.
Though the ending leaves much unexplained about the movie’s intention or the director’s standpoint with regards to the refugee issue, the story has proven powerful in bringing out a message: The lives of even doctors and police, who are perpetually seen as “good” citizens, can be as affected as the lives of refugees. A refugee with a supernatural power, who goes on to be seen as an angel by religious locals, transforms the negativity that refugees are normally associated with – including being troublemakers, threats to the local job market, and overall unwanted people – into a positive outlook. In this movie, Stern wants to know why Aryan is alive. Aryan replies, “You have your purpose, I have my purpose.”
The screening of this movie at Gwangju Theater is timely, and I hope it can strike a chord among our anti-refugee counterparts.
The Author
Suk Pei is currently studying for her master’s degree at Chonnam National University. Having been in Gwangju for almost one year, she is starting to extend her tentacles to meet different people and participate in various activities here in Gwangju. Gwangju is definitely more than what meets the eye.