Category: Korea

Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team (이장호의 외인구단, Lee Jang-ho, 1986)

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After finding huge success with his debut film, Lee Jang-ho soon became disillusioned with the film industry and was in fact temporarily banned after being found in possession of marijuana. After the assassination of Park Chung-hee in 1979, Lee returned with a new focus on socially conscious filmmaking only to be blindsided by the advent of an entirely new age of oppression following the coup of general Chun Doo-hwan in 1980. In contrast to Park’s regime, Chun’s embarked on a deliberate bread and circuses policy pushing sports, sex, and screen in which social commentary was out and softcore very much in. 

Lee had opened his nonsense film Declaration of an Idiot with a scene of himself committing suicide because no one cares about movies anymore, they only like sports which lends a note of irony to his incredibly strange and very of its time baseball film, Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team (이장호의 외인구단, Lee Chang-houi wingudan). Adapted from a popular sports manhwa, the film is ostensibly a much more commercial affair yet in its way is attempting to subtly attack the growing inequalities of the Chun era as its poor mountain boy hero, Hye-seong (Choi Jae-sung), squares off against posh boy rival Dong-tak (Maeng Sang-hoon) not only for sporting glory but the hand of his innocent first love Um-ji (Lee Bo-hee). 

As Dong-tak joins a top-rated team and is interviewed on television, Hye-seong returns to the mountains to train and is trying to dodge the train fare while travelling with his father to discuss joining a team. He eventually strikes a blow against Dong-tak by striking him out during a perfect game, but ruins his shoulder in the process with his baseball dreams then behind him, which is a problem because he’s devoted his entire life to fulfilling the promise he made to Um-ji when they were children to become a great baseball player. Hye-song repeatedly promises to do anything he can to make Um-ji happy even if it means accepting her relationship with Dong-tak, but Dong-tak openly laughs at him for being a nobody though there is something worryingly intense in his suddenly throwing all his letters from Um-ji, which he had in his bag, on the table describing them as written by a “goddess” and his “sacred place.”

As for Um-ji herself, she seemingly has little control over her life as the daughter of an upperclass family. She began dating Dong-tak before reconnecting with Hye-seong in Seoul and originally sticks to her class-appropriate match before being tempted by her innocent childhood connection and realising Dong-tak is an arrogant arsehole who didn’t show up to her birthday dinner because he forgot and went on a date with another girl. Even so, her family continue to pressure her into marrying Dong-tak despite his manly decision to ignore her until he’s accomplished his mission of achieving 100 consecutive hits at which point he’ll propose. Hye-song ironically makes a similar decision, taking off for a training session on a remote island which ends up lasting a whole year during which his completely insane mentor Coach Byeon-ho (Ahn Sung-ki) denies him permission to write to her. When he returns, Um-ji has ended up married to Dong-tak and is in a depressive state wandering through life in a daze of guilt and disappointment that she betrayed both herself and Hye-seong because of social pressure to conform and is now stuck in this emotionally unsatisfying relationship. Hye-seong rejects her on the grounds that the spark has gone from her eyes and she’s no longer the Um-ji of his youth though also accepting some responsibility for that. At the end of the film, Hye-song loses his sight which allows him to reunite with a changed Um-ji who has separated from the now loser Dong-tak, no longer able to see the change in her remembering only the Um-ji he fell in love with. 

The men who were with him on the island where they underwent bizarre martial-arts style training regimes, were whipped and shackled, and almost killed their one-armed teammate have similar problems returning to situations that are less satisfying than they hoped. A wimpy pitcher despised by his son returns to find him unimpressed, while another discovers his wife had temporarily left him, and an incredibly short man, Kyeong-do, who’d been bothering a bank employee so much she switched branches to avoid him discovers she’s engaged to another man. Kyeong-do refuses to give up, arrogantly telling her that he’ll be replacing her groom on the big day while continuing to behave like a massive creep but actually successful in the end because of his sporting and financial success though it looks more like a case of her giving in than actually falling for him and sends some very mixed messages about a woman’s agency in this still conservative age. 

The players brand themselves losers and outsiders, each of them in some way compromised and locked out of pro-baseball from Kyeong-do’s short stature to Hye-seong’s poverty though the decision to include a mixed race man which may have been intended as a progressive gesture seriously backfires by having a Korean actor perform in blackface while insensitively mimicking racial stereotypes. The coach, Byeong-ho is also an outsider by virtue of walking with a cane and purposefully creates a team of others like himself he can train with his cruel and bizarre methods to take on the Dong-taks of the world. Even so, others brand them “inhuman”, “beasts trained with whips”, and continue to resent their attempt to subvert the contemporary class order. 

On the surface, however, Lee has simply made a baseball film about a group of outsiders who triumph over adversity. He fills it with the spirit of the times, throwing in several sequences accompanied by contemporary pop songs along with an atmosphere of ridiculous excess not to mention inconsequentiality as if he were actively mocking the current direction of Korean cinema despite the occasional moment of artistry such as the gothic scene in which Um-ji realises Hye-seong has returned but the pair are separated by a billowing white curtain. An oddity, but perhaps one that speaks of the oddity of its times. 

Heavy Snow (폭설, Yun Su-ik, 2023)

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“It’s obvious it was a romance, why did you pretend it wasn’t?” one wounded woman asks another while their connection seems to be frustrated by internalised shame and conflicting desires. Yun Su-ik’s frosty drama Heavy Snow (폭설, pokseol) does indeed seem to suggest that their love for each other can only exist in a kind of otherworld, eventually segueing into a metaphysical realm which simultaneously implies that this isn’t actually a romance but self-reflection and interrogation as a tomboyish actress searches for herself inside her various roles.

Indeed, Su-an (Han Hae-in) views Seol (Han So-hee) with a kind of awe which might be understandable given that Seol is a TV drama superstar improbably transferring to her rural arts school for a break from the world of showbiz. Or as Seol would later imply, because she’s become too difficult to manage and is rebelling against the emptiness of her ostensibly glamorous life through increasing acts of reckless self-harm. Su-an might wonder if that’s all her flirtation is, an attempt to flaunt a taboo while otherwise puzzled and jealous as to why someone like Seol would actually be interested in her. 

Yet Su-an’s interest is also in part idolisation, attracted to Seol because she fears she is everything she wants to be but isn’t, beautiful and talented. But Seol seems to doubt she’s either of those things while otherwise superficially confident in her sexuality and drawn to Su-an because of her ordinariness. Experiencing a moment of identity crisis, she’s looking for herself outside the frame yet also perhaps like Su-an caught in moment of self-idolisation. Noticing one of the giant billboards of her face that the litter the city she briefly touches it before walking away as if attracted to an image of herself she recognises and doesn’t. 

Yet it seems it’s less the awkwardness of too much intimacy that causes Su-an to pull away when Seol kisses her than shame. She tells Seol that she thinks it isn’t right, and perhaps goes on to regret that decision while continually pining for an idealised teenage love. The two women in a sense trade places. Years later Su-an is a famous TV actress, having in a way taken over the image of Seol, while Seol is evidently no longer acting but a depressed and defeated figure still resentful of Su-an’s rejection. The effects of their shifting fame deepen the gap between them with the teenage Su-an further nervous in her relationship with Seol knowing the danger that her celebrity presents. There is a suggestion that their creative desires conflict with the romantic, that they feel they cannot embrace their sexuality freely and remain in the entertainment industry because of the intense pressures a conservative society places on prominent people to be shining examples of moral purity. Each of them appear to become worn out by the demands of their fame, Su-an turning to drugs in attempt to mask her depression while the teenage Seol ponders quitting acting to become more her authentic self.

In the dreamlike third act which commences at the sea, a touchstone for each of the women connected to the innocence of their teenage romance, may suggest that in looking for Seol Su-an is really looking for herself or perhaps simply to recapture the person she was at the beginning of everything. At odds with each other, the two women become marooned in a snowbound land with no one else around. Finally repairing their relationship, it seems that they can only embrace their love in this barren place where no one else exists to judge them. The implication maybe that as Seol says the things Su-an wants to say to Seol she really wants to say to herself in a desire for self-acceptance, but equally that we can’t be sure that any of this “real” rather than dream or wishfulment.  In any case all that remains is a painful longing either for an unrealised love or the elusive self. 

Hinting at the pressures of the contemporary society, the unrealistic expectations placed on those in entertainment industry and outward social conservatism the film never less presents its central romance with an evenhanded poignancy even in its continuing impossibility as the two women continue to look for the self in each other but seemingly struggling to see past the hollow images of their own self-projections.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Heavy Snow screened as part of this year’s BFI Flare.

A Bloodthirsty Killer (殺人魔 / 살인마, Lee Yong-min, 1965)

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Clearly influenced by the classic Japanese ghost cat movie and the work of Nobuo Nakagawa, Lee Yong-min’s nightmarish slice of gothic horror The Bloodthirsty Killer (殺人魔 / 살인마, Salinma) winds a tale of female revenge though somewhat incongrusouly positioning the vengeful spirit’s oblivious husband as the hero who must attempt to save his family by exposing the corruption at its centre. That corruption is intensely and exclusively female but informed mainly by entrenched patriarchy along with growing anxieties amid increasing wealth disparity. 

As in Nakagawa’s The Lady Vampire, a woman makes a surprise reappearance 10 years after being declared dead looking exactly as she had the last time her husband saw her while also featuring in a painting though this time not in the nude but melting as soon as the confused hero, Simok (Lee Ye-chun), picks it up for a closer look. Lee opens with an incredibly gothic, dreamlike sequence in which a creepy man watches Simok walking in the rain before taking him to a gallery that turns out to be entirely empty. A security guard informs him that the exhibition is over, the painting of Aeja (Do Kum-bong) the only one remaining. It also transpires that Simok has made his trip on the one day a year ghosts roam the earth, as the creepy taxi driver points out gesturing towards a field which appears to be full of white-clothed figures. Eventually he arrives at an eerie house in the woods where he meets the main who painted the portrait only to see him murdered by Aeja while the painter survives long enough to hand him the painting and explain that it contains “a secret”.

This secret will relate closely to Simok’s family which on his return home we can see is affluent and apparently happy. Simok lives in a large, Western-style house that is perfectly primed for gothic horror. When he tries to explain to his wife, Hyesuk (Lee Bin-hwa), what he thinks has happened, a cabinet door mysteriously opens on its own before the couple begin hearing the screams of Simok’s mother who claims a ghost tried to strangle her in her room. All things considered, it does not actually take them very long to agree that ghosts are real and they’re being targeted by one though the reason remains obscure to all, or perhaps to all but Hyesuk whose demeanour immediately changes. Despite having gone into a frenzy when her eldest daughter Mihwa was snatched by the ghost, she quickly makes her way to her hidden stash exclaiming that she’s still “young and rich” and plans to enjoy the rest of her life. The ghost can take her kids, but it won’t get her. 

This is of course entirely contrary to contemporary codes of motherhood especially as we realise that one of the causes of Aeja’s downfall was her childlessness. Three years into her marriage with Simok, she had born no children and earned the animosity of her mother-in-law (Jeong Ae-ran) who it seems did not really like her and felt that she did not live up to her traditional ideas of idealised femininity. Perhaps partly for aesthetic reasons seeing as she is a ghost, Aeja dresses exlcuvely in hanbok in contrast to Hyesuk who in flashbacks is seen in only Western clothing and declares herself jealous and resentful not only of the couple’s material comfort but of how happy they seem to be. A kind of poor relation, Hyesuk plots revenge on societal unfairness in wilfully disrupting Simok’s household by manipulating patriarchal social codes in causing Simok to believe Aeja has been having an affair during his lengthy business trips to Japan.

By the same token, she also takes advantage of the grandmother’s affair with a married doctor (Namkoong Won) which is taboo on several levels the first simply being the existence of sexual desire in a middle-aged woman. Later, once she has been possessed by the ghost cat, Simok’s mother will similarly manipulate him in claiming that she has spent all her life in his service clinging to the memory of her dead husband who left her widowed at 30 as an advocation of idealised womanhood. Though Simok has realised that she was no longer his mother but a ghost cat on catching sight of her reflection, he was unable to kill her because of all her reminders about her maternal suffering. It’s the desire to maintain this facade that encourages her to reject Aeja after Hyesuk engineers her walking in on her mother-in-law and the doctor, insisting that Hyesuk, who is pandering to her, would make a much better daughter-in-law than the righteous and wronged Aeja. 

Aeja’s revenge is also against all of these oppressive social codes that have contributed to her demise though it was other women who eventually brought it about in their enforcement and manipulation of the codes of femininity. Recalling a moment from Hajime Sato’s Ghost of the Hunchback in a which a shamaness drops in having spotted all the evil emanating from the house, another woman later turns up and seems to want to help giving Simok a magic talisman he eventually uses to save his kids who have been imprisoned, perhaps for their own safety, inside some Buddhist statues. In contrast to Aeja’s rage, Hyesuk’s greed, and the mother-in-law’s shame, the mysterious woman is gentle and self-assured if a little eerie. Just as a cross can stop a vampire, so a Buddhist rosary can fend off a ghost cat while it’s an appeal to Buddha that eventually helps to break the curse transforming the portrait into a lotus instead. 

In any case, Lee adds a playful irony to the genre as the grandmother in particular begins to take on feline mannerisms, hissing and pawing at the Buddhist statues while licking her granddaughter’s face in a way even her grandson Woong realises is “disgusting” and not something his grandmother was usually accustomed to doing. In a nod to Yotsuya Kaidan, Aeja’s metamorphosis into a vengeful ghost is accompanied by a loss of her hair, symbolising her loss of femininity, along with a large disfigurement over her eye that has become closely associated with that of Oiwa. Then again, he also has fun with a transformation scene as the grandmother is defeated and turns back into a cat complete with a tiny dress that shrinks with her. What he otherwise conjures is however an eerie sense of dread hanging over a superficially happy home with a terrifying secret at its centre, though what it does in the end suggest with its ambiguous messaging is that the father will eventually have to take responsibility for his family and play an active role in the domestic space if he is to escape this very particular curse of familial corruption.

The 8th Night (제8일의 밤, Kim Tae-hyoung, 2021)

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“But even the most trivial moments of our predetermined fate are meaningful as pieces of the whole” according to embittered former monk Jin-su having reached a moment of philosophical epiphany after bringing his karmic retribution full circle. Another in the recent series of Buddhist supernatural thrillers from Korea, Kim Tae-hyoung’s The 8th Night (제8일의 밤, Je8ileui Bam) once again turns apocalyptic as an ancient evil is set for accidental revival thanks, largely, to the wounded pride of a bitter old man. 

As the opening voice over explains, thousands of years ago the world was threatened by a powerful demon. Luckily, Buddha managed to vanquish him, tearing out his two eyes, one black one red, and burying them on opposite sides of the Earth in order to prevent them ever being reunited. Some people, however, just can’t resist chaos which is presumably why Professor Kim (Park Hae-joon) insists on retrieving the canister containing the Red Eye from its desert resting place, thereafter releasing its power when his discovery is rejected by both Buddhist and scholarly authorities. Sensing a disturbance in the equilibrium of the world along with the upcoming Blood Moon, priest Hajeong (Lee Eol) realises the prophecy of which he has been a guardian is about to come true. His big, somewhat unethical plan, is to kill off one of the seven pre-ordained victims of the Red Eye which he plans to possess in order to reunite with its partner in and stop it body hopping towards the apocalypse. 

You can make a case for greater good, but murdering an innocent person to put an end to a curse seems at best unfair, not to mention not very Buddhist. Hajeong sends young monk Cheong-Seok (Nam Da-reum) to track down his former pupil, Jin-su (Lee Sung-min) then known as Seonhwa to give him the instruction to assassinate the “Virgin Shaman” with a holy axe to stop Red Eye in its tracks. Jin-su is seemingly unconflicted about the murder but is carrying his own baggage, now living as a resentful construction worker. As it turns out, he and Cheong-seok are also linked by a karmic circle of guilt and trauma that the boy doesn’t remember and Jin-su has been running away from since leaving the temple. Meanwhile, he is also plagued by voices of departed spirits he for some reason refuses to help cross over to the other side. 

Meanwhile, over on the side of the rational, two policemen mirror the monks’ movements as they investigate the strange paper chain of mummified corpses turning up all over the city. Veteran cop Ho-tae (Park Hae-joon) feels responsible for his feckless associate Dong-jin, blaming himself for an accident which has left him physically impaired while resisting instructions from his boss to fire him. Yet the pair are entirely ill equipped to investigate this case of spiritual malevolence, confused by its religious connotations but perhaps filled with suspicion on realising that all of the victims belong to the same “meditation group” for people with suicidal thoughts which has been offering “free” blood tests and apparently paying for attendance. Described by one as more like a cult, the shady meditation group might be one kind of evil but what they’re currently facing is on an entirely different level. 

The irony is that it’s Jin-su who must learn to save the world by finding closure with his own traumatic past, generating a paternal bond with young monk Cheong-seok who is so excited by the world beyond the temple that he accidentally breaks his vow of silence and then can’t stop talking. Cheong-seok’s sense of wonder and confusion, unsure what to do about the meat he keeps finding in his food but also slightly bemused by Jin-su’s willingness to eat it for him, stands in direct contrast to Jin-su’s embittered cynicism as he attempts to resist his destiny only to receive a ghostly reminder that you can’t escape your fate and, in any case, his duty would simply fall on the successor, Cheong-seok. In order to save the world, he has to free not only himself but also Cheong-seok too from the cycle of karmic retribution which binds each of them in the “agony and anxiety” of the monster’s separated eyes, determining to set them to rest once again to restore a sense of balance in a destabilising world. A buddhist procedural, Kim’s supernatural horror may rediscover that hell is a place on Earth but eventually allows its heroes the possibility of escape if only in the willingness to free themselves from the shackles of the traumatic past. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Mimang (미망, Kim Tae-yang, 2023)

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Part way through Kim Tae-yang’s Mimang (미망, Mimang), a woman giving a talk about a classic Korean film the ending of which is lost to time remarks that the audience will walk out onto the same Seoul streets the protagonists of the film once trod in 1955. They are literally the same streets, but of course they aren’t. On her way there, she’d talked to an old friend she’d bumped into along the way about the imminent redevelopment of the area which will lead to the cinema she’s on her way to being torn down. A statue of Admiral Yi they frequently refer to as a meeting point and landmark will be moved to accommodate the new road structure leaving them even less certain of direction than they were before.

In fact, the statue itself is compromised in that it depicts Yi holding his scabbard in his right hand which implies he was left handed in contrast to all the other statues of him that suggest otherwise. The woman claims her friend, the man, told her this before a long time ago and insisted that this sculptor did his homework and got it right though another woman he later meets, his current girlfriend, claims the reverse is true. A man the woman later meets, the organiser of the event she was appearing at, offers another interpretation which insists the only answer is uncertainty. There’s no historical record as to whether Yi was right or left handed, and in any case given the stigma towards left-handed people he may have been forced to behave as if he were right-handed even if he were not.

The conversations themselves are meandering and circular, offering no real conclusions and like the classic film missing an ending. The word “Mimang” can have many connotations some of which are outlined by title cards appearing throughout the film though all echoing a sense of being lost, wandering in a literal but also intellectual sense unable to reconcile oneself to an ever changing world that in other ways never changes. The man complains that everything repeats itself and that life is just a cycle that revolves from noon to midnight which is indeed what happens in the parallel conversations of the man and woman as they travel through the city in the company of their respective partners each revolving around the shortly to be (re)moved statue of Admiral Yi. 

In any case, we can feel a sense of loss between them that perhaps they were once together and then parted or almost but never were. In the third arc of the film which occurs some years later they re-encounter each other at the funeral of a university friend, someone their age who has passed away though as another friend points out they’re all still too young to see each other only at funerals. They make an arrangement to visit a bar they used to go to, near the statue of Admiral Yi, though something comes up, someone leaves, and they part again without really having said anything much at all. Moments pass without noticing, and as the song the man sings in memory of his friend suggests, were really “nothing special” after all. 

The organiser of the event the woman takes part in has a habit of saying “that happens” as if nothing really surprises him amid the mundanity of an ordinary life. As the film opened, the man had got off the bus at the wrong stop which is how he meets the woman to whom he explains that often finds his way by getting lost, a sentiment echoed in what he tells her learned in drawing class that things which seem like mistakes can actually be interesting diversions which take you somewhere new. A less comfortable motif sees both men confidently give the woman directions, assuming they know where she wants to go and somewhat unwilling to let her walk her own way though she in turn seems lost for direction and unsure which way to turn. We too can see the passage of time in the differing quality of the photography, the ADR’d dialogue and gentle ageing even the various ways the man and women dress though obviously more formally in the final sequence. Like the classic film this one has no ending either, just a gentle fade in which we can’t be sure if the man the woman will ever meet again or what might pass between them if they do only that they will continue to wander these ever-changing yet familiar streets in search of something they know not what.

Mimang screens in New York 17th March as part of this year’s First Look.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Green Rain (草雨 / 초우, Chung Jin-woo, 1966)

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The false promises of the post-war era are brought home to two romantic youths dreaming of an illusionary future in Chung Jin-woo’s Green Rain (草雨 / 초우, Chou). At that time the youngest director to debut at just 25 years old with 1963’s The Only Son, Chung was a proponent of the “Cine Poem” movement which, in direct contrast to the literature film, sought to communicate through image alone minimising dialogue as much as possible. Heavily influenced by the French New Wave, particularly Godard’s Breathless and Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, Green Rain is essentially an anti-romantic melodrama in which each of the lovers deceives and is deceived only to be awakened to the final truth that romantic salvation is nothing more than a childish fantasy. 

Chung opens with an excitable sequence in which the heroine, Yeong-hui (Moon Hee), introduces us to her “home”, which is in actuality that of a diplomat who has just been appointed Ambassador to France and so is currently living in Paris. Yeong-hui had hoped that the family would take her with them, but Mrs Kim and her daughter who is suffering from an otherwise unexplained illness and uses a wheelchair, have been left behind alone and she with them. Yet Yeong-hui loves everything about the idea of Parisian sophistication, overexcited when a package arrives from abroad that turns out to contain the latest French fashions for the two Kim ladies. Yeong-hui looks on wide-eyed, but the daughter is petulant and resentful. She doesn’t want her father’s presents and views them as insensitive because it’s not like she has anywhere to show off nice clothes when she’s stuck at home ill. The two women debate giving the clothes away but can’t decide who best to give them to before Mrs. Kim casually offers Yeong-hui the stylish raincoat which is in its own way about to change her life. 

As she later puts it, putting on the raincoat turns her into someone else. She waits eagerly for a rainy day and steps into a hip jazz club, somewhere she wouldn’t usually go, where she attracts instant attention precisely because of the coat. The women look on with scorn, noting the mismatch between the coat and the rest of her appearance, while the men swarm on her unpleasantly. Luckily, Cheol-su (Shin Seong-il) comes to her rescue and offers to drive her home believing that Yeong-hui is the ambassador’s daughter while she fails to disabuse him. He meanwhile tells her he’s a chaebol son, but really he’s a mechanic and sometime university student currently in a compensated relationship with a stylish older woman who we later learn to be some kind of gang leader. 

They fool themselves into thinking they’re falling in love, deceiving themselves as well as each other in playing at innocent romance. They meet every time it rains and go on charmingly innocent dates to parks and boating lakes shot with a dreamy romanticism, but also, in contrast to Barefooted Youth, indulge in stereotypically “low” forms of entertainment such as boxing and horse races without ever managing to blow their covers as they simultaneously both pretend to like Tchaikovsky because they’re trying to live up to an image of upperclass sophistication. 

Yet, there are cracks in their connection. They talk idly of the kind of future they’ll have with Cheol-su wanting an “enormous concrete home” while Yeong-hui claims she’s fine with somewhere small so long as there’s sunlight because she wants her life to be “real, not for show”. It’s an ironic statement under the circumstances, one which is perhaps brought home to her by the otherwise kindly old washerwoman across the way who is forever complaining about her “fake” coal that won’t light and moans about “fakes passing themselves off as the real thing”. Yet she continues to believe in her fairytale romance with Cheol-su, even while declaring it to seem “like a dream”, terrified that he’ll find out she’s just a maid and leave her. He, meanwhile, is less invested in the idea of romantic love, describing her first as a “business opportunity”. On their first meeting he finishes with the older woman, drops out of the “third class uni” he thinks is more trouble than it’s worth, and continues to push his luck with his boss by repeatedly “borrowing” customers’ cars because he thinks he’s on to a sure thing with the ambassador’s daughter and no longer needs to worry about keeping the job. He presses his friends for money, pawns everything he can get his hands on, buys a fancy suit and tries to convince Yeong-hui he’s upperclass only to be pushed into a corner when she declares she wants fancy crockery in her simple home. To get his dream life, Cheol-su commits a robbery only to be surrounded by an angry mob a la Bicycle Theives and receives the first of many beatings. 

This sense of frustrated humiliation might explain the unexpectedly traumatic closing scenes which contrast so strongly with gentle romanticism with which the film opened. Cheol-su risked everything for a mistaken ideal and he’s failed. He realises Yeong-hui has been deceiving him too, but rather than a cute romantic resolution that returns them both to the grounding of their original social class, he reacts with hypocritical rage and anger. Yeong-hui reemphasises that she loves him anyway, clinging fast to her dream of love, but he ruins her, consumed by toxic masculinity in his sense of hopelessness and inferiority as a working class man with no prospect of improvement now that his dream of marrying up has dissolved. In another film he might be the hero, reinforcing duplicitous ideals of societal misogyny, but in this one he is the fool and the villain. “Without an ounce of sorrow I understood what it was to be a woman” Yeong-hui adds bitterly, finally understanding her romantic fallacy for what it was, learning a painful lesson in naivety and self-deception and striding boldly back to her old life, wiser if perhaps less hopeful whereas Cheol-su runs away still chasing an easy fix to a more prosperous future. At once a criticism of the increasingly consumerist society, its deeply entrenched social inequalities, and its patriarchal social codes, Green Rain is most of all an anti-romantic melodrama in which love is nothing more than childish fantasy incapable of offering salvation in a world of constant impossibility. 

The Moon (더 문, Kim Yong-hwa, 2023)

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Feeling slighted by the international community, Korea attempts to dominate in space by becoming the second nation to send a man to the moon but does so apparently with egalitarian principles in Kim Yong-hwa’s futuristic science drama, The Moon (더 문). The conceit is that that pretty much everyone, having learnt nothing, is intent on colonising the moon because it is a rich source of a particular mineral that could become a valuable means of sustainable energy for Earth. Of course, Korea wants in but crucially wants to share what it finds with the world unlike the Americans who just want to keep everything for themselves.

A running current of Anti-Americanism is deeply felt early on as NASA and the US initially refuse to help when a Korean spaceship gets into trouble in a solar flare, while the International Space Committee from which Korea is expelled because of “conflicts between nations” also seems to be led by Americans. Moon-Young (Kim Hee-ae), the ex-wife of former flight director Jae-gook (Sol Kyung-gu), also works at NASA and has taken an American name after marrying an American, yet is treated with chauvinistic contempt by her bosses who question her loyalty and qualifications. The implication is that America wants to conquer the moon to secure its bounty for themselves in an ironic act of futuristic colonialism, but that the Koreans are going to the moon in the interests of science hoping to discover something that will benefit all mankind. 

Having been expelled by the committee seems to fuel an exceptionalist drive among the Korean scientists who feel that they aren’t being afforded the respect they deserve internationally. This sense of internalised shame stems from the failure of their first rocket, the Norae-ho, which exploded shortly after taking off killing the three astronauts on board. Introduced to the three members of the Woori-ho, we can immediately sense that their chances of survival can’t be good seeing as the two older members mostly talk about their children, one of them planning to decide on a name for his as yet unborn daughter on the way. The third, Sun-woo (Doh Kyung-soo), has some complicated baggage with the mission and former flight director Jae-gook who was on duty at the time the Norae-ho exploded.

Sun-woo isn’t the only one with baggage as the scientists strive to overcome the traumatic failure of their first attempt. The Science and Technology Minster (Jo Han-chul) has his eyes mostly on his own reputation not wanting to oversee another catastrophic failure in Korea’s space programme. One of the two men in charge of the Norae-ho mission took his own life in atonement, while Jae-gook split up with his wife and retreated to the mountains working in a rural observatory. Perhaps precisely because of this, the quest to save Sun-woo, a former Navy Seal hired for his agility and athleticism who lacks experience and is unable to pilot the spacecraft alone, quickly goes viral pushing the Americans, who had been reluctant to help, to finally pitch in on a joint operation.

It’s this kind of panglobalism that the film eventually advocates as Moon-young sheds her American name of Jennifer and is fired from NASA for trying to help Sun-woo leading her to make a direct appeal to the international crew of the space station who hail from Canada, Australia, and the UK to save him out of astronaut solidarity. A voiceover reminds us that the Moon belongs to everyone, not any one entity, while praising those who were able to transcend nationality and ideology to work for a better world for all. It’s obviously an anti-colonialist sentiment though one that is eagerly pointed at American imperialism and its continuing effects in Korea even if it’s also true that the nation is smarting from being kicked out of the International Space Committee and desperately wants to be readmitted to secure its status on the world stage. Kim throws just about everything he can at Sun-woo and his little lander from solar storms to meteor showers and increasing despair shifting from one set piece to another as Sun-woo tries to overcome yet another disaster and fulfil his mission of returning home with ice samples in an act of redemption not only for the space programme but for himself as its orphaned son. 

The Moon is released in the US on DVD, blu-ray, and Digital on 27th February courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Lee Jang-ho, 1985)

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“The commoners get to have all the fun” a lady in waiting laments to her mistress in Lee Jang-ho’s historical drama set in the reign of good king Sejeong, Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Eo Udong). It is however the titular heroine Eoudong’s (Lee Bo-hee) determination to enjoy herself that becomes a threat to the social order, not only in her ability to subvert the Confucianist philosophies of the era by making men her playthings but doing so with those not of noble birth. 

Legends seem to surround Euodong, a little more of her history revealed with each step in the investigation into the murder of a man she had slept with at a festival. The man had attempted to rape her, but Eoudong was soon able to gain the upper hand in the situation, realising that he is a servant boy who often visited her home. She sleeps with him willingly, dominating him by getting on top and making it about her pleasure and agency rather than his. Soon after she leaves, however, the boy is killed by an assassin apparently hired by her cruel and perverse husband, who is technically the king’s uncle, to tidy up after her. 

Set in 1479, the film is clear in its criticism of the feudal order while insisting that it is the nobles who are the most constrained because they must act by these arcane codes to which the commoners are not subject. The commoners revel at their festival, something more or less forbidden in the revered word of the court and most particularly for a woman like Euodong who craves freedom and excitement, longing to fly like a bird. People of often say of her that should have been born a commoner where her behaviour would not be regarded as so deeply problematic to the social order in its direct attack on notions of class and gender. Though she herself is niece to the prime minister, an assassin (Ahn Sung-ki) is later hired to neuter the threat she poses though there is a kind of care in the unusual request, instructing that death should come suddenly and without pain. Afterwards, the assassin should be sure to bury her in her beautiful place. 

The assassin, however also has a painful past in which in which he was quite literally castrated for a similar kind of transgression of class boundaries having become friends with a young noblewoman. While he lost his penis, his friend lost his tongue so that he would never speak of what happened rendering them both outcasts left with no option but to serve the system that had harmed them by becoming spies and assassins. Eoudong’s rebellion is towards this same system, a system in which women are regarded as worthless if they do not serve their proper function. Married at an early age, some recount that Eoudong was once cheerful but less so after her marriage. Her husband rarely visited her and in fact took a concubine but she was still blamed for the “failure” to conceive a child and threatened with the shame of being sent back to her birth family. In this era, a woman was forbidden from remarrying even in widowhood while it was relatively easy for a man to divorce his wife. Simply “talking back” was enough grounds to send a woman packing. 

The opening and closing text reminds us that the feudal era was “the hardest time for Korean women” if also perhaps inviting us to consider what our times are like too, insisting that Eoudong lives on in the hearts of oppressed women as one who fiercely resisted the constraints of her era. Lee roots the corruption firmly in the king, who is indeed the patriarch of a nation and presider over an oppressive social order founded on shame and misogyny as a means of maintaining male power. Coloured with the softcore excesses of ‘80s Korean cinema, Lee nevertheless signals the crushing austerity of noble life which slowly erodes the soul in robbing it of emotional fulfilment or individuality saving the artiest of his sex scenes for that between the liberated woman and an emasculated man each betrayed by the society in which they live and seeking the only escape that it presents itself to them. 

Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Park Hoon-jung, 2020)

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Sometimes being too good at your job can be a definite liability. So it is for the hero of Park Hoon-jung’s melancholy gangster noir, Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Nagwonui bam). Park’s worldview is often nihilistic and sometimes downright unpleasant, though it’s a sense of fatalistic sadness that dominates this otherwise over familiar tale of a noble gangster cruelly misused by those who choose not to obey their shared code and thereafter finding himself on a dark path towards if not exactly redemption then at least an inevitable ending. 

Rising foot soldier Tae-gu (Uhm Tae-goo) has found himself in the middle of an old-fashioned gang war, serving an ambitious boss, Yang (Park Ho-san), who has unwisely decided to press into territory operated by the well established Bukseong gang. Getting some of his guys back after being kidnapped by Bukseong and held in an apartment block where the community is currently protesting the take over and demolition by gangster redevelopers, Tae-gu is told by his opposing number that Yang is a crazy upstart who would be a nobody without him and that he made a mistake turning down a job offer from Bukseong boss Doh. Tae-gu is however an old school mobster loyal to his gang which is why he doesn’t stop to think things through when someone close to him is killed in a car accident in which he assumes he was the intended target, believing Doh is striking a low blow. Encouraged by Yang, he meets with Doh in person and daringly knocks him off at a swimming pool sauna escaping through a window in the nude. Yang arranges to send him to Jeju Island to lay low before moving on possibly to Russia, but Yang has also been engaging in a failed pincer movement which left them all in hot water after failing to take out Doh’s no. 2, Ma. 

As the title might hint, even the island “paradise” of Jeju is not free of death and crime as Tae-gu discovers after bonding with their contact, Kuto (Lee Ki-young), a fixer smuggling guns from Russian mobsters hidden inside consignments of fish. Like Tae-gu’s sister, Kuto’s niece Jae-yeon (Jeon Yeo-been) is suffering from an undisclosed terminal illness that seems to have few obvious symptoms but has left her with suicidal tendencies. Kuto’s decision to take Tae-gu in is motivated by his desire for money to take Jae-yeon to America for treatment though she and Tae-gu are also much the same both having lost people close to them because of their proximity to the gangster world while he and Kuto search for ways to make up for the harm their lives of violence has caused. 

Jae-yeon is quick to remind Tae-gu that she will soon be dead and that therefore nothing really matters and her life has no meaning while he perhaps as a gangster feels something similar that his life ended the day he first picked up a gun yet there are also ways in which he must act in satisfaction of his code. His tragedy is that he’s operating under a misapprehension, blindly trusting in the wrong people when the truth is painfully obvious to all but him.

Park inserts a series of ironic pillow shots of the idyllic Jeju night scene with comforting lights swinging from tropical trees and gentle waves rolling on the horizon, before closing with a series of eerie daytime shots of familiar locations now devoid of people as if this were a hell our heroes had recently been haunting, ghosts of a violent landscape. His fight scenes are visceral yet also occasionally cartoonish, several taking place in the confined space of a car expertly framed by Park as the heroes fight desperately for life while constrained by their environment. A high octane chase through an airport with its ubiquitous escalators soon gives way to an impressive motorway-bound set piece with an unexpected resolution, the gangsters later scattering on hearing far off police sirens though as we also realise police collusion is an inescapable factor in the fragile equilibrium of the underworld even if it might not stretch all the way to idyllic Jeju. “Don’t waste your tears” Tae-gu unironically offers in weary resignation to his fate, a noble gangster to the last too good to survive in a world of nihilistic futility. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Call (콜, Lee Chung-hyun, 2020)

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The call is coming from inside the house. It’s a final revelation intended to chill, the idea that the source of threat is located in the very place where you ought to feel safe, protected, invulnerable. Of course, there are many reasons someone might not feel completely safe at home, those who perhaps live with hidden threat every day, a hidden darkness that lies at the centre of twisty Korean thriller The Call (콜). Another in a small series of time travelling communication, The Call makes connection through outdated technology, an almost literal ghosting in a voice from the past that, like an inverted Strangers on a Train, offers the tantalising promise of mutual salvation only to prove extremely unreliable. 

28-year-old Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) has just returned to her rundown country home because her mother, whom she intensely resents blaming her for the death of her father in a fire, is suffering with a brain tumour. Though her strawberry farmer uncle Sung-ho (Oh Jung-se) describes the place as the most desirable property in town, the home in which Seo-yeon finds herself is cold and austere, a creepy old mansion decorated in an outdated style and filled with gothic furniture. To make matters worse, Seo-yeon has left her phone on the train but unexpectedly assures Sung-ho that she’ll be fine with the landline, later calling herself and getting through to a woman who claims to have found it but asks for a reward and then hangs up presumably to assess her options. Then, the landline starts ringing with calls from a young woman trying to reach a friend and claiming that her mother is planning to set fire to her. Though obviously disturbing, Seo-yeon assumes the calls are a simple wrong number until she discovers a hidden room with what looks to be some sort of tiled experimentation area along with a box of memorabilia which lead her to think the phone is somehow connecting her to the girl who lived in her room at the turn of the millennium. 

Also 28 only born 20 years earlier, Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo) claims to be at the mercy of a wicked shamaness step-mother convinced that she has a dark destiny. The two women engage in a strange act of intergenerational bonding between two people who are the same age, Seo-yeon mystified by the meaning of the word “Walkman” while Seo-yeon struggles with the concept of the multifunctional smartphone. The force which unites them is parental dissatisfaction as Seo-yeon claims a hatred for her mother she does not perhaps really feel and cannot in any case compare with that of Young-sook for the religiously abusive stepmother who fully believes she is possessed by the devil. In in this the time difference proves useful, Seo-yeon realising that Young-sook has the power to prevent her father’s death, but only latterly that she also even from the future has the ability to change her new friend’s fate. 

Essentilally a Strangers on a Train scenario, the two women agree to save each other, Young-sook dutifully restoring Seo-yeon’s imagined fairytale future, the creepy mansion transformed into an elegant modern dwelling, her mother and father now both healthy and happy. Seo-yeon, however, begins to neglect her promise, too busy enjoying her repaired family life to remember that Young-sook is imprisoned in the house suffering horrifying abuse. Young-sook is, in a sense, the embodiment of Seo-yeon’s familial trauma, the violent resurfacing of a long buried memory that threatens to tear to her life apart but also has the ability to repair it in revealing the truth that allows her to reconnect with her mother who, we learn, has repeatedly sacrificed herself for her daughter’s sake. Nevertheless, you begin to wonder if the shamaness had a point and the lid was best left on Young-sook as her hurt and resentment in being neglected by her new friend eventually take a turn for the dark. 

In essence, Seo-yeon’s decision to interfere with the past engineers a chain of disastrous events robbing her of her illusionary happiness while eventually landing her right back where she started if perhaps with a little more insight and having healed her relationship with her mother. Part tale of millennial anxiety, part gothic nightmare, The Call may not always be internally consistent but charts a dark tale of trauma and response as a haunted young woman finds herself stalked by the psychopathic embodiment of her buried guilt only to discover that a call from the past is always hard to ignore. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)