Why Hasn’t Everything Disappeared Yet?

Today it is too late to be really “lost in translation”, but it is still possible to be lost in cultural clashes, like for the Korean culture of the main character or the Bulgarian culture of the filmmaker Stefan Koutzev clashing with the German one. In fact, neither Cologne nor the German culture are directly represented, rather, they are efficaciously conveyed through the environment. Koutzev’s camera remains quite close to the characters, and Why Hasn’t Everything Disappeared Yet? is mainly a journey into their interiorities. 

The meditative film does not only focus on cultures but on the situation of suspension that is proper to migration and to this fragile moment of youth when the umbrella of student life leaves room for the confrontation with reality, the job market, the possibility of more mature relationships. This is the situation of Moon Sori (Lee Juho), who also carries a traumatic experience involving his military service, his first harsh confrontation with the reality of adulthood, in all its stupidity and violence.

Is migration also a form of escapism, or is it the occasion for a flight toward freedom? Koutzev hints at this flight, at its seductive dream of avoiding any definition of the self. We sense how Moon’s being lost has not only the negative side of loneliness but also the positive side of solitude, being with himself without having to define himself.

While the dialogues of Why Hasn’t Everything Disappeared Yet? accumulate languages, their negotiations, and more in general negotiations with the others, the film develops through a final part where words will disappear. Non-verbalisation of the expression can here be felt as inhibition, withdraw, but also as liberation. Moon walks and seems to start a no-return journey into the unknown. In this, we feel the exposure of a reality that is now perceived beyond the net of social and linguistic connotations. Nature and travel infrastructures will prevail in their mute presence. And this presence appears as a sort of answer to the pessimist claim by Jean Baudrillard’s last book (2007), which gives title of the film, about the disappearance of reality.
The final scene between sheep and airplanes, on liminal territories, on wasteland, is a moment of pure lyricism. This effect is reinforced by an astonishingly refreshing interpretation of Schubert’s lied Gute Nacht, from his Winterreise. “Fremd bin ich eingezogen, / Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus – I arrived a stranger, / a stranger I depart”... “Ich kann zu meiner Reisen / Nicht wählen mit der Zeit: / Muss selbst den Weg mir weisen / In dieser Dunkelheit – I cannot choose the time / for my journey; / I must find my own way / in this darkness.” If we are lost, we are graciously so.