The Apartment with Two Women, the mother longs to be loved by a man, while the daughter seeks validation of her existence through relationships with women. However, the respective heterosexual and homosexual codes they desire are continuously rejected and deflected. These rejections are caused by the conventional system portrayed as male-centered and patriarchal. Within this system, men are depicted as relatively mild figures. In contrast, the women—unable to integrate stably into this societal system—are portrayed as aggressive and fragmented. Each time the mother and daughter are rejected by the system, they return home to confront each other. By focusing on their frustrated desires and strained relationship, the film highlights issues surrounding motherhood, the maternal world, and the relationships between women.* This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5B5A17047713)
Rather than proposing a substitution of patriarchal power with female power, the film reveals that the ambivalent emotions between Sookyung and Leejung are fundamentally rooted in the mother-daughter relationship. By positioning the place to which the protagonists return as that relationship, the film clearly shifts its focus from male-female dynamics to those between women. In doing so, it re-centers the maternal world—long marginalized in dominant narrative discourse—at the heart of the story. Rather than centering on the phallic order and its oppressive mechanisms to explore female sexuality and gender, the narrative of women is further expanded by illuminating the conflicts and ambivalence inherent in the maternal realm, symbolized by the breast.
This study draws upon Melanie Klein, who focused her psychoanalytic research on children, and Julia Kristeva, who engaged deeply with Klein’s theories. These theoretical foundations become more concrete in the work of Kaja Silverman, who writes on the cinematic representation of women and motherhood. Klein, Kristeva, and Silverman all critique the dominant phallic and paternal order, and develop analyses centered on women and the maternal world. Silverman, in particular, critically adopts Kristeva’s ideas, arguing that the symbolic order is not solely the domain of the father. Instead, she suggests that the maternal world coexists ambivalently within the symbolic, and introduces the concepts of the 'negative Oedipus complex' and the 'homosexual-maternal fantasmatic' to deepen our understanding of female subjectivity.