Category: Korea

The Devil’s Stairway (마의 계단 / 魔의 階段, Lee Man-hee, 1964)

June 14, 2018August 2, 2023by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

By 1964, Korea’s economic situation was beginning to improve and for many there seemed to be a bright light shining in the distance, a fixed point to which they could aspire and felt was in their grasp if they could only catch a lucky break. Throughout Lee Man-hee’s relatively short career (the director sadly passed away at the young age of only 45 – apparently a casualty of his fondness for drink and intensive work habit which accounts for his high output), his protagonists struggle with a conflict between the desire for the new kind of “success” their society promises them, and a feeling that they can never truly obtain it. Ambitious surgeon Dr. Hyeon (Kim Jin-kyu) attempts to climb The Devil’s Stairway (마의 계단 / 魔의 階段, Maui Gyedan, AKA The Evil Stairs) by abandoning the compassion that ought to define his profession for coldhearted pragmatism but discovers that the path has its price while his victims are not quite so passive as he’d assumed them to be.

When we first meet Dr. Hyeon he’s lounging around in bed while his female companion, Nurse Nam (Moon Jeong-suk), dresses and prepares to leave. Somewhat coldly, Hyeon tells her to exit via the back stairs and avoid being seen by the security guard on her way. Irritated, Nam leaves and the pair go back to work at the hospital the next morning pretending there’s nothing more between them than the relationship between a nurse and a chief surgeon. This situation might have continued indefinitely were it not for the fact that Jeong-ja (Bang Sung-ja), the daughter of the hospital’s head doctor, has taken a liking to Hyeon and seeing as her father has no sons to take over when he retires, an arranged marriage is in the offing. Dr. Hyeon, who is ambitious and emotionally cold, considers accepting the offer but Nurse Nam is unwilling to let him go, especially as she is pregnant with his child. When she threatens to spill the beans about their illicit relationship, he decides to kill her by dosing her up with sedatives and throwing her body in the pool behind the hospital to make it look like she drowned herself in heartbreak and shame, but Nurse Nam refuses to go quietly.

The titular “Devil’s Stairway” is a literal staircase from the hospital floor to the head doctor’s office. There has recently been accident in which the bannister was broken and a woman was killed. The banister is repeatedly mended throughout the film but represents a point of fracture in the spiritual path to success. Nurse Nam is another early casualty when she and Hyeon argue in the middle of the stairs and the recently mended bannister breaks as he struggles with her. Despite the minimal drop to the floor, Nam is left with serious injuries requiring surgery, loses her baby, and gains a conviction that Hyeon bears her ill will. Her position is extremely difficult – the accident has exposed the fact that she had conceived a child outside of wedlock and though she has not yet disclosed the name of the father, Hyeon fears that she will destroy his bright future either by speaking out or through forcing him to marry her to avoid social disgrace.

Hyeon gives in to darker instincts. He tells Nam that his heart is hers, perhaps intending to carry on an arrangement even after he’s decided to accept the marriage proposal, but excuses himself for stringing her along by reminding her of his lack of financial stability and comparatively low social status. We are reminded later that he is old be unmarried and, even stranger, is assumed to be a “virgin” – a solitary, perhaps dull, bachelor not known for mixing with women. This again signals his coldhearted ambition – he waits and he calculates. He wants a hospital of his own and knows his only way to get one is to marry into it, and so he does even if it means sacrificing “love” and emotional happiness for the cold comforts of conventional success and the false acclamation of social status.

Hyeon thinks he’s got away with it, but his crime haunts him. Going slowly out of his mind, Hyeon sees Nam everywhere, placing a strain on his relationship with his new wife who grows wary of his increasing violence and bad temper. His madness culminates in a tense surgery scene in which everyone around him has Nam’s face and he finds himself surrounded by his crime, forced to confess himself as a murderer in order to free himself of her ghost. Yet, things are not quite as they seem and it is not he alone who finds his grand plan floundering.

Hyeon posits his poverty as a reason for his crime, but it’s his greed which guides him towards the Devil’s Stairway. He could have married Nam, had his child, and led an ordinary middle-class life of relative comfort perhaps even opening his own clinic in good time, but he chose the quick fix in marrying for money and (literally) throwing over the woman he claimed to love to ease his feelings of insecurity and resentment at his position in the social order. His murder is cowardly but, as Nam points out, the law may protect him while there are precious few looking out for her, a betrayed woman, pregnant outside of marriage, and without a family to press her case.

As he did in the same year’s Black Hair, Lee co-opts the murkiness of the film noir, sending its sense of betrayed morality into the realms of the gothic with an ever increasing atmosphere of supernatural dread. The pond seems to emanate evil while the stairs beckon ominously, the wind rattles the doors open without warning and the rain pours down outside adding to the claustrophobic gloom of the creepy old hospital as if attempting to embody the evil that lies at its centre. Drawing heavily from Les Diaboliques, Lee declares no winners in his tale of fractured morality and emotional betrayal, painting it as a symptom of a confused era in which all emerge tarnished from a struggle to gain some kind of personal agency in an otherwise oppressive environment. Taut to the last, The Devil’s Stairway is a forgotten masterpiece of psychological horror and a mild condemnation of a society’s slide into national paranoia and greedy consumerism at the cost of true human feeling.

Available to stream online via the Korean Film Archive’s YouTube Channel.

The Chase (반드시 잡는다, Kim Hong-sun, 2017)

May 25, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Korea may not quite be facing such an ageing population crisis as neighbouring nations, but old age has become a persistent cinematic preoccupation. We’ve seen old women still engaging in acts of prostitution to support themselves in the absence of family (and indeed the state), serial killers becoming dangerously confused, and ageing grandmother’s attempt to see the beauty in a world that seems to be descending into chaos. What The Chase (반드시 잡는다 Bandeusi Jabneunda) shows us is that the elderly do at least have time on their hands that could well be used for fighting crime and protecting the vulnerable.

If you were appointing elderly street guardians, you probably wouldn’t pick Deok-soo (Baek Yoon-sik). A curmudgeonly landlord with a conviction that everyone is out to diddle him on their rent, Deok-soo complains loudly when a body is found in a nearby area because it’s going to damage property prices. People who are supposed to die should just die, he exclaims, that’s patriotism! You can bet your bottom dollar Deok-soo voted for Park Geun-hye, but despite his grumpy exterior he has a soft heart as one of his young charges reveals when she reminds him that he’s never thrown anyone out just because they didn’t pay up. Deok-soo has taken quite a (paternal) liking to Ji-eun (Kim Hye-in), a young woman living alone away from family in one of his horrible little apartments. Aside from her rent arrears and tendency to let her mixed up friend stay over so often that she virtually lives there, Ji-eun is one of Deok-soo’s favourite tenants.

Which is perhaps why he gets himself so involved when she suddenly goes missing after a shock discovery is made in her flat. Other than the first body which got Deok-soo so worked up, a few other elderly people have been passing away in lonely deaths which, sadly, isn’t particularly suspicious save that the pattern matches that from an unsolved serial murder case from 30 years ago which began with the killing of old people and then progressed to sexually aggravated murder of young women with long dark hair – just like Ji-eun.

Aside from the ongoing serial killer plot, director Kim Hong-sun makes space for depicting the various problems faced by the elderly in contemporary Korea. The first problems are loneliness and dislocation caused by separation from family members – many of the older people Deok-soo is familiar with have children overseas whom they have all but lost touch with. The second problem is economic – Deok-soo’s flats are dirt cheap for a reason and mostly inhabited by the very young and the very old, i.e. people without a lot of “disposable” income. Being elderly, they often can’t find jobs and don’t have access to a proper pension leading many to take to the streets protesting for rights for the aged including that to work or to be given state support. Deok-soo is lucky with income from renting the apartments, but he also works as a locksmith which brings in a few extra pennies. Being Deok-soo he isn’t particularly worried about other people less lucky than himself, so he rolls his eyes at the protests but is worried enough by the lonely deaths to ask one of his tenants to look in on him every now and then to avoid becoming one.

Meanwhile, Deok-soo has become “friends” with a retired police detective who’s convinced the serial killer he failed to catch 30 years ago is back. Worried that Ji-eun may end up among his victims, Deok-soo begins investigating, unwittingly getting himself mixed up in a dark and confusing world of old school hardboiled only Pyeong-dal (Sung Dong-il) is not quite as worthy a guide as he seemed. Walking around like a maverick cop from a violent ‘70s action movie, Pyeong-dal is convinced he knows who the killer is but he is old and unsteady and his mind is not perhaps reliable.

Then again a persistent subplot seems to argue that the young have no respect for age, are selfish and corrupt, thinking only of short term pleasures and forgetting that they too will one day be old with no one around to look after them. No one takes Deok-soo and Pyeong-dal seriously, they are after all just grumpy old men that everyone wants to get rid of as quickly as possible. They do, however, (paradoxically) have time to indulge in “silly” ideas that the young do not have and are, therefore, perfectly positioned to take down a serial killer who preys on the weak and vulnerable including old men like them and pretty young girls like Ji-eun. Old guys have still got it, at least according to The Chase, though they might have got there faster if only they’d cut the young whippersnappers some slack.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Also available to stream on Netflix.

International trailer (English subtitles)

A Special Lady (미옥, Lee An-gyu, 2017)

May 20, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun – so goes the age old wisdom. Korean cinema, it has to be said, has been in a fairly progressive mood of late with several high profile female-led action movies to complement the macho melodrama that has become synonymous with the nation’s cinematic output. There has, however, been a slight imbalance in the way these films have been presented – yes, women carry guns and issue roundhouse kicks to the face but they do so out of maternal fire. This obsession with corrupted motherhood finds a natural home in Lee An-gyu’s A Special Lady (미옥, Miok) which puts puts Kim Hye-soo in a blonde wig and then asks her to do pretty much what she did in Coin Locker Girl only more sympathetically.

Na Hyun-jung (Kim Hye-soo) has risen from lowly bar girl and exploited sex worker to be the right-hand woman of mob boss Kim (Choi Moo-sung). Marshalling a collection of (well cared for) high class call girls, her main stock in trade is blackmail – she sends her girls out as honey traps to capture “important” people, bring them back to the “hotel” for illicit “fun”, and film them in the act to compel them to work in the best interests of the gang. The plan usually works, but snotty prosecutor Choi (Lee Hee-joon), who has just returned from his honeymoon after marrying the boss’ daughter, liked to think of himself as having integrity and is hell bent on revenge against the villainous Na. Exploiting weaknesses already exposed within the gang including the stormy romance between Na and ambitious foot soldier Lim (Lee Sun-Kyun), and the return of Na’s illegitimate son with boss Kim whose wife and (legitimate) child were murdered by a rival organisation, Choi sets about taking it down in an unorthodox way as a means of getting his sex tape back but also fulfilling his commitment to “justice”.

The English title, A Special Lady, has an awkward spin to it with its mobster-esque patter hinting at a classy bar girl or much loved peripheral figure. The Korean title which is simply a woman’s name gives a better indication of the tale at hand in its emphasis on loss of innocence, fall, and rebirth as something or someone else. Na is certainly well versed in the gangster world, perfectly equipped to operate within it both in her physical prowess and also in her emotional control, politicking, and ability to strategise, yet she also operates outside of gang structures with many, including Lim who has long been in love with her, resenting that a mere woman holds such a high position with such proximity to Kim.

This marginal status extends to Na’s feminised perspective which reduces her to a figure of ruined motherhood. Na takes care of her girls, as a mother would, entrusting them to another woman who acts as their madam but is fiercely loyal to her, more nanny than henchman. Her major preoccupation is with the son she was forced to give up as an infant after spending time on the inside on behalf of the gang. Joo-hwan (Kim Min-suk) is Kim’s son and heir and the mob boss has been careful to keep him overseas to keep him safe, but either because of persistent parental absence or his gangster genes, the boy keeps getting himself expelled for violent conduct and Kim thinks it’s probably time to bring him home and verse him in his heritage. Na has long wanted to be reunited with her almost grown up son, but he has no idea she is his mother and believes he is the son of Kim’s deceased wife. When Joo-hwan is threatened and then turned against her by vicious rumours, Na will stop at nothing to ensure his safety even if he never knows who she really is.

Na’s descent into ferocious fighting machine, attacking a field full of mobsters with a bone saw, is the rage of a mother whose child is threatened. She doesn’t fight them off because she wants to survive, or for revenge, or simply because they are from a rival gang but because they threaten her children both in the case of one of her girls who happens to be with Na, and of course their targeting of Joo-hwan solely to get to his mother. The world of the film is a persistently misogynistic one – not just in the way women are routinely used as a means to an end by the gangsters, and by Na herself, but in the way that Na struggles to be accepted as a valid member of the gangster hierarchy rather than an adjunct to it as an honorary manager of the female contingent. Lim, who feels displaced by her in his status within the gang, is also desperately in love with Na who seems to return his feelings on some level but ultimately turns him down – something he can not accept, stooping so low as to threaten Na’s child to blackmail her into accepting him despite his intense resentment on finding out about her previous relationship with Kim.

Unexpected action hero status aside, Na becomes nothing more than a figure of corrupted motherhood who must be “repaired” through saving her son and then by retiring to become a more “normal” maternal figure. The debut from Lee An-gyu, A Special Lady features a number of well choreographed action scenes, strikingly composed images, and impressive production design but all too often falls back on tired ideas as its heroine battles valiantly to save her son with the intention of “rescuing” herself in the process.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Little Forest (리틀 포레스트, Yim Soon-rye, 2018)

May 14, 2018October 15, 2018by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

When you don’t know what to do, you go home. The logic seems sound and indeed the idea is common in many cultures, but the heroine of Little Forest (리틀 포레스트) has gone home to an empty, snow covered house with the intention of burying herself away rather than basking the unconditional support of the people who raised her. Yim Soon-rye, leading light of the Korean New Wave, takes the original manga by Daisuke Igurashi which was previously adapted as a two-part, four hour exploration of Japanese rural life by Junichi Mori, and relocates it to Korea finding that urban malaise and youthful indecision are from isolated phenomena.

Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri) has come home “for a few days”. What she wants is to be alone for a while, to take a time out from her life before trying to figure out what to do next. Accordingly, as she’s in hiding, she didn’t want anyone to know she’s here but perspicacious aunt Bok-soon has spotted smoke on the horizon and come running. Bok-soon thought that Hye-won’s long absent mother who abandoned her in the last year of high school might have been making a rare visit and is surprised to find her daughter instead, though perhaps not quite so much as you’d think. Nothing stays secret for long in a village, and Hye-won’s return is soon discovered first by the slightly unwelcome attention of the older village ladies and then by her treasured childhood friends, Eun-sook (Jin Ki-joo) and Jae-ha (Ryu Jun-yeol) who gives her a pet dog to look after in the hope that she will be eventually decide to stay for good.

Hye-Won faces many of the same problems as the heroine of Mori’s Japanese adaptation, but whereas Ichiko had come back in defeat and heartbreak, Hye-won’s flight is mostly pride mixed with fear and awkwardness. She admires Jae-ha who once lived in the city but eventually came home to be himself, rejecting the conformist salaryman life to be his own his boss, but knows deep down that her decision to retreat to the country is a cowardly attempt to delay dealing with the problems of adult life. After her mother left, Hye-won went to Seoul for university where she, along with her boyfriend, was studying for a teaching exam which only he passed. Wounded, Hye-Won has run away. Refusing her boyfriend’s calls and cocooning herself inside her childhood home she delays the inevitable breakup conversion along with the galling need to congratulate him on his exam success while silently nursing her own humiliating failure to match him.

Rather than the strained relationship Ichiko had with her long absent mother, Hye-won’s feelings run more towards a healthy competition – she wants to exceed her mother in all things but most especially as a cook. Unsatisfied with the tasteless pre-packaged nature of big city food, Hye-won came home because she was hungry, spiritually but also physically. Rejoicing in nature’s bounty, she finds new and exciting ways to cook the various fruits and vegetables grown by her own hand, living closely with the land and running with the rhythms of the seasons. In Seoul she ate cold food all alone, at home she shares her table with her two friends eager to see what she’s come up with to combat the latest glut while filling their souls with the warmth of friendship.

Despite her mild resentment and lingering anger towards her mother for disappearing so abruptly, Hye-won eventually comes to a kind of acceptance, realising that her mother’s “little forest” was raising her but seeing as she declared to her intention to repot herself somewhere else, her mother’s work was done and now it’s time for Hye-won to find her own little forest and set about tending to that. Still unsure if she’s in the country because that’s where she needs to be or is merely afraid to leave and risk failure, Hye-won eventually finds the strength move forward, breaking out of her extended period of hibernation to look for her answers wherever they may lie. Filled with the joy of home cooking and soulful down-home wisdom, Little Forest adapts itself well enough to the Korean climate, finding that life in the country, hard as is it may be, offers its own rewards in the simple pleasures of unconditional friendship and the natural freedom to enjoy all nature has to offer.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Running Actress (여배우는 오늘도, Moon So-ri, 2017)

May 10, 2018by Hayley Scanlon4 Comments

In international eyes at least, Moon So-ri is one of Korea’s most prominent actresses. She has worked with such highly esteemed directors as Lee Chang-dong, Hong Sang-soo, and Park Chan-wook, yet she continues to face the same kinds of issues as many women in the film industry despite her immense critical success and popularity at the box office. The Running Actress (여배우는 오늘도, Yeobaewooneun Oneuldo) is her first feature as a director and brings together three of her short films which neatly form a tryptic depicting the trials and tribulations of the contemporary actress.

Moon also stars in the films, playing a character called Moon So-ri, apparently inspired by her “real” life. Kicking off with the first segment titled The Actress, Moon introduces the fears and anxieties which recur throughout most notably in her preoccupation with gaining good roles and worrying that she is losing out on them though not being “pretty” enough. Her friends, attempting to be supportive, only add to her discomfort by assuring her that she is pretty “in her own way” and reminding her that in any case she is a wonderful actress. Confidence at rock bottom, Moon laments that her industry prefers airheaded beauty to technical skill and is unwilling to accept that women continue to exist past the age of 25 without suddenly morphing into spiky aunties and salty grandmas. Unexpectedly running into a producer whilst hiking, she gets a temporary boost when it seems he has her in mind for a dream project with a director she’s long wanted to work with but is dismayed when she realises the character has a college age child meaning she’ll be making a possibly irreversible step into playing suffering mothers rather than interesting women with nuanced character arcs.

Meanwhile, she runs into the producer and his friends at an inn on the way down and is forced to endure a drinking session with two starstruck fans whose increasingly drunken conversation turns to the rude and loutish in which they too begin picking apart Moon’s looks while mocking her acting skills, one of them even offering a slightly offensive caricature of her award winning performance as a disabled woman in Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis (the title of which he seems to have forgotten).

Moon’s fears and insecurities follow her into her family life in the second chapter, The Running Actress, which finds her attempting to juggle the demands of being a wife and mother with her acting career. In a running joke, everyone seems to assume that mega famous actress Moon So-ri must be filthy rich but like everyone else she has trouble making ends meet, especially as she is constantly worrying over where the next job is coming from. As if that wasn’t enough she also has to put up with her mother continuing to treat her like a petulant teenager (which to be fair her behaviour sometimes mimics) and trading photo opportunities for free dental work, while her adorable little daughter is sharp as a tack.

The social and the professional come together in the final segment which sees Moon attend the funeral for a director she once worked with years ago and to tell the truth did not particularly like. Planning to show her face but not stay very long, Moon is dismayed to realise she is one of an extremely small number of mourners which include a drunken actor she doesn’t really get on with either, and an aspiring young actress who may have been involved in an improper relationship with the late director in the hope of furthering her career. In a lovely human touch, Moon breaks away from the rapidly declining situation at the wake to spend some time with the director’s young son who has been left all alone watching a few home videos his father shot by means of a handheld projector.

The film takes its title from a humorous moment in the second chapter in which Moon suddenly orders her driver to stop the car and jumps out to run away screaming, making a bid for frustrated freedom from her often exasperating life and career. Moon is obviously not afraid to poke fun at herself or her industry, taking her (presumably very real) fears and insecurities and exposing them for all to see. Taking a cue from Hong Sang-soo, Moon’s deadpan style only adds to the comic effect of her razor sharp dialogue which is filled with small moments of everyday humour somehow assuming wider dimensions thanks to the well crafted nature of the script. Addressing real problems faced by women today in all walks of life, The Running Actress is a warm and funny effort from the veteran performer turned first time director and will hopefully pave the way for an interesting second career.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Last Child (살아남은 아이, Shin Dong-seok, 2017)

April 29, 2018October 15, 2018by Hayley Scanlon3 Comments

People grieve in different ways. Some stop altogether, lost in a fog of confusion and regret, while others try to keep themselves busy or at least feel as if they are doing “something” to try and find whatever positivity they can in the midst of such terrible tragedy. The parents at the centre of Shin Dong-seok’s extraordinarily accomplished debut feature Last Child (살아남은 아이, Salanameun Ayi) find themselves on opposite sides of a grief divide after their son is killed trying to save another boy from drowning. While the mother is angry and resentful, the father finds strength in pride for his son’s act of heroism, nominating him for a local heroes award and donating the compensation money they have been awarded to their son’s school to fund a new scholarship place in his name.

Eunchan, the teenage son of Misook (Kim Yeo-jin) and Sungcheol (Choi Moo-seong), passed away some months ago leaving his parents numb and grief stricken. As far as they’re aware, Eunchan lost his life while valiantly trying to save that of another boy – Kihyun (Seong Yu-bin). Asking after the boy whom his son sacrificed his life to save, Sungcheol is dismayed to learn that he’s dropped out of school, possibly as a consequence of bullying and social stigma because of the well publicised incident he has been involved in.

Spotting Kihyun around town riding his delivery scooter, Sungcheol later decides to intervene when he catches sight of some other boys harassing him. Sungcheol buys the boy dinner and tells him to call if he ever needs anything. Kihyun, despite his obvious discomfort calls when the manager of the fast food restaurant he had been delivering for accuses him of lying about his bike being stolen. As Kihyun is a minor, he needs a responsible adult to talk to the police but his mother abandoned him years ago and though his father used to send money for his upkeep, he has now remarried and severed all connection with his son. Feeling sorry for the boy and not wanting Eunchan’s sacrifice to go to “waste”, Sungcheol offers Kihyun a job in his interior construction company as a trainee apprentice.

Though originally shy and afraid, Kihyun begins to blossom under the gentle, positive parental input of Sungcheol as he picks up the paternal reins, not only teaching him a trade but investing in him the confidence to succeed. Misook, horrified at first by her husband’s decision, begins to come around to this wounded young man who perhaps reminds her a little of her own son. Despite his lingering feelings of shame and guilt in accepting such kindness from the people he feels may continue to suffer solely because of his continued existence, Kihyun slowly starts to look on Misook and Sungcheol as surrogate parents as they provide the love and care he has never really known from Sungcheol’s down to earth fatherly pep talks to Misook’s home cooked dinners.

Kihyun does, however, have a secret he has been withholding from Misook and Sungcheol which becomes increasingly difficult for him to keep the nicer they are to him and the more he comes to respect them. Though he might have been able to push it to the back of his mind, an unexpected meeting with another friend of Eunchan’s who was also there that fateful day convinces him he has to speak the truth no matter how much more pain it may to cause to all concerned (including himself).

Sungcheol had invested heavily in the heroic nature of his son’s death and finding out it might not have been quite so straightforwardly noble as originally described is a crushing blow for him. The reopening of a wound which had begun to scar pushes Misook and Sungcheol back into their respective corners as they each attempt to process the situation in their own particular way, beginning to mildly resent each other in the process. Meanwhile, having considered the matter closed, there is little appetite to reopen the investigation into Eunchan’s death. The other parents club together to keep their kids out of it while the school sends a polite message asking Misook and Sungcheol to leave it alone to avoid damaging the school’s reputation. Sungcheol, filled with a righteous anger and a need to find out what really happened to his son, is advised to drop the matter, that it’s better to be remembered as a “hero” rather than a “victim”, implying that Sungcheol ’s quest for “truth” is in someway sullying his son’s memory.

Kihyun, meanwhile, is a mess of conflicted emotions. Grieving himself for the family he’d begun to form with Misook and Sungcheol , he tries to move on with his life whilst hoping to somehow repair what has been broken. Kihyun is not a bad kid at heart, whether changed by his experiences or simply freed from a destructive environment, but he has done bad things which fill him with guilt and remorse compounded by the faith and kindness Misook and Sungcheol have tried to show him.

Yet good as they are, the intensity of their rage and pain threatens to consume the bereaved parents who begin to turn their thoughts towards poetic justice and exacting their own revenge even if they also know it will only bring them more suffering. Isolated by their grief, ostracised for the need for truth, and torn apart by their ambivalent emotions towards each other, the trio walk headlong into a spiralling abyss of nihilistic violence and despair, rejecting the idea of a future in which the concept of family continues to exist. Shin’s drama is bleak in the extreme but strangely hopeful in its clear hearted determination to believe in human goodness which just might be the only way back from the brink.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Interview with director Shin Dong-seok from the 2017 Busan International Film Festival. (scenes from the film not subtitled, interview subtitled in English)

Be with You (지금 만나러 갑니다, Lee Jang-hoon, 2018)

April 28, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

When Nobuhiro Doi’s Be With You was released in 2004, it followed the even more popular Crying Out Love in the Centre of the World as the second in a wave of “jun-ai” or “pure love” romantic dramas in which the heroes and heroines struggle to move past romantic tragedy. Where Be With You differed from the genre norm was on its focus on a love that was already successful – the couple were older, had married, and even had a son before their happiness was taken from them by a cruel illness. Lee Jang-hoon, adapting the source novel by Takuji Ichikawa, shifts the setting to Korea but more or less follows Doi’s blueprint with a number of notable exceptions.

Rather than the framing sequence which kicks off the original, Lee opens with the beautifully illustrated picture book Soo-a (Son Ye-jin) made for her son shortly before she passed away. In the book a cute mummy penguin lives up above in Cloudland watching her baby through a crack in the clouds. When the rainy season arrives, the mummy penguin will be able to catch the Raindrop Train to come back to Earth, but before the summer ends she’ll have to return else she’ll lose her place among the clouds and won’t be able to watch over her son even from afar.

Little Ji-ho (Kim Ji-hwan) has taken the book to heart and really believes his mother will come back when the first rains fall. His father, Woo-jin (So Ji-sub), knows better but hasn’t the heart to tell his son that the book is just a story and that he will never see his mother again. Against the odds, Ji-ho and Woo-jin do indeed find a woman who looks exactly like Soo-a collapsed in an abandoned railway tunnel in the forest but she has no memory of her life as a wife and mother or of the family who’ve been patiently waiting for her return.

In contrast to her counterpart in Doi’s original, Son Ye-jin’s Soo-a is a much less passive presence, less inclined to simply go along with her new circumstances and keen to remind us that the decision to “work or lurk” is entirely her own. Likewise, Lee scales back on Woo-jin’s disability, rendering it far less visible than it had been in Doi’s adaptation. Bar some barbed comments from insensitive relatives at Soo-a’s funeral who question Woo-jin’s ability to raise his son alone, Woo-jin suffers little by the way of stigma regarding his medical condition though he does worry he might have embarrassed his son by pushing himself too hard at a school sports day and making himself ill in the process. Rather than the typical “jun-ai” selfish selflessness which caused the hero to breakup with his one true love out of a noble desire not to be a burden, Woo-jin’s decision is perhaps more out of pride and insecurity than it is out of misplaced consideration.

Nevertheless the timeless innocence of the couple’s early courtship (such as it was) retains its essential sweetness. As Soo-a can’t remember her romantic past, Woo-jin recounts his recollection of it to her in all its painful honesty, and in return later gets to hear her side of events thanks to the diary she left behind for him to read. Having met in high school, the pair entertained crushes on each other they assumed were unrequited, never quite working up the courage to declare themselves and squandering opportunities through nerves and awkwardness. Reliving their original romance the couple fall in love all over again only to be parted by a season’s end.

Yet it is familial love rather than the romantic which eventually takes centre stage as the love of Soo-a and Woo-jin envelops their son in something deeper and richer than your average tragic love story and becomes all the more poignant for it. Realising her time is short, Soo-a sets about teaching her husband and son how to live without her – showing Ji-ho how cook eggs, how to do the washing, how to keep the place tidy etc while giving them a few more happy memories to see them through and reminding them to take care of each other in her absence. Dreamlike and ethereal as Lee effortlessly blends one time period into another in a vast web of memory, Be With You is a heartbreaking drama in which a family must attempt to come to terms with irreparable loss through learning to treasure past happiness and living on in its memory.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

Also screened as the first in a series of teaser screenings for the upcoming London Korean Film Festival. The next screening in the series will be Memoir of a Murderer on 21st May, Regent Street Cinema.

International trailer (English subtitles)

1987: When the Day Comes (1987, Jang Joon-hwan, 2017)

April 24, 2018October 28, 2019by Hayley Scanlon2 Comments

The political history of Korea is long and complex and oftentimes sad. The events depicted in 1987: When the Day Comes (1987), pivotal as they were, occurred just 30 years ago. Yet the recent past has also been one marked by protest, public anger, and political scandal though this time around with far less fear or danger. The protests of 1987 were a different story. The rule of Chun Doo-hwan, a military dictator who had seized power following the assassination of the previous dictator, Park Chung-hee, was one of extreme oppression which had already seen a widespread massacre of peaceful protestors by the state in Gwangju in 1980. Chun’s term, under the constitution, was set at seven years after which many hoped for a path to modern democracy but those hopes were dashed when he announced an intention to appoint his successor rather than call a free and fair election.

In depicting the climactic events of that summer, Jang Joon-hwan begins with chaos as a doctor is summoned to a mysterious room where a young man lies unconscious in a pool of water. The police have gone too far, and boy has died during interrogation. Aware of the potential danger of the public finding out that the state has in effect murdered a suspect in an act of torture, the head of the ACIB, Park (Kim Yun-seok), orders the body to be quickly cremated. This, however, needs a certificate signed by a prosecutor and Prosecutor Choi (Ha Jung-woo) is fed up with the ACIB and unwilling to cooperate especially as he smells a rat with the cause of death for a healthy 22-year-old listed as a “heart attack”. Not wanting to be on the wrong side of it if it does get out, Choi refuses the cremation and orders an autopsy which in itself triggers a series of other events eventually bringing the government to its knees.

The state remains cruel and duplicitous. The death of Park Jong-chul (Yeo Jin-goo) would become a catalyst and a rallying call, not just for the injustice of it but for the injustice of covering it up. Park’s family are denied their basic rights, his mother and sister literally dragged away from the morgue screaming while his traumatised father looks on in silent agony. They say that Park was a communist, that he died of fear because he weak while claiming all along to have done no wrong. Only when the “truth” begins to emerge does the ACIB decide to hang a few of its guys out to dry, urging them to “patriotically” take one for the team and head to prison for a while with a hefty compensation package to help sweeten the deal.

The death in custody becomes just one event in a situation spiralling out of control. Paranoid in the extreme, the Chun regime is also working on bringing down a “North Korean Spy Network” controlled by a democracy activist on the run who, unbeknownst to them, is also working with the Catholic Church who will eventually prove pivotal in delivering the truth to the people. Meanwhile, the press has also decided to jump ship, ignoring the government’s carefully crafted guidelines in favour of running actual news. Chun’s iron grip is slipping.

Jang’s biggest takeaway is that corrupt regimes crumble when enough people find the strength to go on saying no. It begins with Choi refusing to stamp a certificate then travels to the reporter who won’t back down, passes on to the secret revolutionaries bravely carrying messages at great personal costs, the not so secret clergy who perhaps have more protection to speak their minds (up to a point) than most, and of course the students in the streets who risked their lives to build a better future. One of the few completely fictional characters, the niece (Kim Tae-ri) of a prison guard (Yu Hae-jin) charged with conveying messages to an activist in hiding, proves the most illuminating in her inward struggle towards the democratisation movement. Afraid of the consequences and preferring to remain politically apathetic, she is eventually radicalised through witnessing the brutality of the regime first hand and suffering personal loss because of it.

Playing out as a taut thriller, 1987: When the Day Comes has a lived in authenticity from the motif of being constantly deprived of one shoe by a cruel and absurd regime to the deadly serious ridiculousness of men like Park who hate “the enemy” enough to destroy the thing they claim to love in pursuit of it. Timely and filled with melancholy nostalgia, Jang’s depiction of the pivotal events of 30 years ago is also a rallying cry in itself and an important reminder that the fight for justice is never truly won.

Screened at the 20th Udine Far East Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Descendants of Cain (카인의 후예 / 카인의 後裔, Yu Hyun-mok, 1968)

April 13, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Yu Hyun-mok, often regarded as among the more “intellectual” of film directors in Korea’s Golden Age, is also among those to have been arrested for violation of the Anti-Communist laws. Yu was later exonerated and went back to filmmaking as before but it remains true that Yu betrays a little more ambivalence to the anti-communist message so often required than many of his colleagues. That is to say, Yu often leans economically left in his frequent criticism of social inequality and his anti-consumerist stance, but remains socially conservative if with a strong desire for social justice. The Descendants of Cain (카인의 후예 / 카인의 後裔, Kainui Huyea), adapted from a novel by Hwang Sun-won, is as anti-communist as they come, but also offers its share of ironies in painting “communism” as a kind of disease born of greed and self-interest which thrives on fear and eventually consumes those who are seduced by its false promises.

Irony is indeed our starting point as our cheerful villagers enjoy a raucous celebration in honour of Independence Day only for the communists to suddenly turn up and spoil the party. Worst of all, one of the communists is a long lost son of the village – Choe is the absentee husband of Ojaknyeo (Moon Hee), a maid, who has developed an affection for her boss, the nephew of the local landlord, Park Hun (Kim Jin-kyu). The communists’ first action is to close down the school that Park Hun opened to provide education for the peasants and co-opt it as their base. Park knows he’s in a dangerous position and has little power to resist, opting to wait it out and see how far the communists really intend to go. The peasants, however, are becoming excited hearing about the land redistribution programme and are starting to forget everything that Park and his family have done for them over the generations, swayed by the false promises of the communists who preach equality while insisting on deference.

The central conflict is, in many ways, between the feudal past and the “democratic” future. Set in what would shortly the “the north” in 1946, Descendants of Cain positions itself on more than one kind of dividing line with the lingering spectre of tragedy always on the horizon. High on a ridge there’s a large stone slab erected as a memorial to the late Park, Park Hun’s grandfather, whose solicitous care for the villagers had earned their eternal respect and perhaps their love. The Parks are “good” landlords. They take their “feudal” responsibilities seriously as evidenced by Park Hun’s school and his father’s desire to finish construction on the local reservoir which is both his legacy and an important failsafe precaution against draught which is in the interests of all. By all appearances this is a well functioning village where no one is hungry or alone. The peasants have not felt “oppressed” or been unhappy, which is not to say they don’t want to better their lot but they have no burning desire for revolution and have nothing in particular to rebel against.

This leaves the communists with a problem – they have little leverage over happy peasantry which has never acknowledged its own oppression let alone longed for freedom from it. Their approach is therefore one of divide and conquer. Cynical in the extreme, the communists set about exploiting petty village disputes to foster discord between people – something which eventually contributes to a murder which they also manipulate for political gain. The “landowners” are of course a prime target, but their judgement must be at the hands of “the people” by means of a farmers’ trial. Having recruited something close to a former village leader, the communists assume they will have the villagers on side but they all (bar two) refuse to indict the Parks. The communist leader, fond of irony, gestures towards towards his armed men and reminds the villagers that no one here is “impinging on their freedom”. That is, their freedom to express the views they are required to express or suffer the consequences.

Threatened with violence and intimidation, feudal deference bends or perhaps shifts to a different master. The villagers, losing their attachment to the Parks, salivate over the possibility of “redistribution” and of being handed “free land”. Their desires are material and not political. Thus when the Parks’ estate is “returned” to the people, they simply walk in and start taking things. Not the most sensible way to redistribute wealth concentrated in the hands of the elite – the fast get horses, the indecisive dented pans which sounds like a recipe for rancour and discontent. When the old village chief becomes disillusioned with his choices and smashes the memorial to old Park, a small fight breaks out among villagers keen to snag the large pieces of stone for various other projects. Happy peasants who once shared everything and wanted for nothing, are now fighting with each other over rubble and trinkets.

The communists, far from fostering collective spirit, have become the evil feudal lords they rail against, oppressing the peasants with their rules and regulations while wilfully creating an atmosphere of fear in order to better oppress them. Their hypocrisy is rammed home early on by the slimy Cheol who complains about his wife’s supposed faithlessness while molesting a barmaid and smugly repeating the story of a large scar he has on his forearm. His superior, believing he got the scar during a labour dispute at a mine, promoted him for his communist spirit, but Cheol really got the scar in a scuffle over a girl (not his wife, incidentally).

Cheol is “a” force which comes between the two lovers, Ojaknyeo and Park Hun, as both are too morally upright to pursue a full romance when Ojaknyeo is still married to another man, even if the other man’s first action on seeing her is to throw her to the ground and begin kicking the living daylights out of her. Later Ojaknyeo gets another, more serious, beating from her father but this time because she’s chosen the wrong side in refusing to step away from the feudal world in her responsibility to Park Hun and his household, even if that responsibility is partly romantic desire. Yet Park Hun and Ojaknyeo are also separated by the feudal world’s rules in their obvious class difference. Communism is supposed to break down these barriers, not to mention removing the “patriarchal tyranny” of marriage, yet the communists would rather award Ojaknyeo to her former husband, little caring that he is abusive and neglectful. Ojaknyeo, at least, will not be freed from her oppression any time soon.

If Yu is making a mild defence of paternalistic feudalism as a metaphor for compassionate government, it is probably a little ambitious given the times in which he lived. Following a regular pattern, Yu paints the world as a terrible place where fear and self interest trump all, only to find small rays of light in the closing moments when an act of violence provokes a series of unexpected epiphanies and reconciliations. He ends on a note of hope in which an older man sacrifices himself for a younger one but is then rewarded with the possibility of salvation and a happier future with the woman he loves (and is now unafraid to pursue) south of the border. Communism seduces and betrays, whereas liberal democracy at least affords the “freedom” to be miserable with personal integrity.

Screened as part of the Korean Novels on Screen season at the Korean Cultural Centre London.

Steel Rain (강철비, Yang Woo-suk, 2017)

April 12, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

A little way in to Steel Rain (강철비, Gangchulbi), one of its heroes – a Blue House official, gives a pointed lecture on Korea’s past to some students of Geopolitical History. Fiercely critical of Korea’s previous subjugation by Japan, he laments that his nation was not able to free itself from the Japanese yoke and was awarded its freedom with the end of a wider political conflict which saw the Japanese “empire” collapse. According to Kwak Cheol-u, Korea has never quite lost its cultural admiration for its former colonisers which is why its most prominent corporations – Samsung, Haeundae etc, are all direct competitors with similar Japanese firms (and are only now pushing past them in terms of global market penetration and technological innovation).

Switching tack, he wonders why it is that Japan lost a war and Korea got cut in two by two new “colonising” forces. In his oft observed mantra, Kwak (Kwak Do-won) insists that the citizens of a divided nation suffer more from those who seek to manipulate the division for their own ends than they do from the division itself, which is where we find ourselves in the contemporary era of my button’s bigger than his button in which “capitalist pig dogs” face off against “dirty commies”. Adapting his own webcomic, Yang’s action thriller is among the most recent in a long line of North/South buddy movies and even if its cold-war paranoia feels distinctly old hat, it just goes to prove that everything old is new again.

Eom Cheol-u (Jung Woo-sung), a former North Korean special forces agent, is called back into the fold by his old commander for a very special mission. Tensions are about to boil over in the perpetually precarious state and the Dear Leader’s life is under threat from a suspected coup. Eom is to silence one of the conspirators in return for which he will be given elite status and his family will be well looked after. Unfortunately, the mission does not go to plan and Eom ends up witnessing a missile strike on a welcome meeting at a Chinese managed factory in which the (mostly young and female) employees are murdered in cold blood. Managing to escape with the Dear Leader himself who is seriously wounded, Eom travels over the border along with two young girls. From this point on he’s in conspiracy thriller territory trying to work out just what’s going on and who he can really trust.

The symbolism is rammed home by the fact that our two heroes, Kwak and Eom, have the same first name – Cheol-u, only one uses the characters for “strong friendship” and the other “bright world”. Taken together they paint a pretty picture, brothers in arms despite the political difficulties which place them on differing sides of an arbitrary line drawn up by a foreign power without much consideration for those divided by it. As in many North/South buddy movies of recent times, the North Korean agent displays the best qualities of his nation in his essential “goodness” – a caring husband and father, he executes his mission with maximum efficiency but bears no ill will towards those outside of it and is keen to protect the people of North Korea from almost certain doom should a nuclear war break out between the two peoples. Kwak, by contrast, is more of a schemer whose moral universe is much less black and white. A fluent Mandarin speaker he’s in tight with a North Korean official who keeps trying to talk him into taking a research post at a Chinese university while his family life is somewhat complicated thanks to a divorce from his plastic surgeon wife.

Meanwhile, the film is at pains to point out that Korea became the focus point of the first East/West proxy war and, in Kwak’s view at least, remains insufficiently important in the eyes of its “allies” to merit much direct consideration. Thus our boardroom squabbles are often reduced to the looming face of the American President “advising” the Korean officials on the best course of action while others worry about what Japan is going to think and wonder if the US secretly values the opinion of the Japanese more than the Koreans on the ground. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the government is in a transitionary phase in which a new president has been elected but not sworn in. The crisis may well play out entirely within the old president’s final hours which means that diplomatically he has little to lose and as he is a conservative, might as well milk the situation for all it’s worth. In short, he’s as keen to ruffle diplomatic feathers and bring the situation to a head as everyone else is and war looks more likely than not. The central message is that, as Kwak is fond of implying, governments care little for their people or that millions may die when idea of division is so easily manipulated, especially if it’s not “their” people who will be doing the dying.

Not for nothing is the new president seen reading copy of Willy Brandt’s book on successful reunification, even if he begs his outgoing predecessor to consider the economic impact of any possible change in relations with a Northern neighbour. The North Korean official also warns that China is not keen on the idea of a war seeing as that will necessarily mean an influx of North Korean refugees no one wants to take responsibility for. The cold war may be about to turn hot, but the heroics that cool it down turn out to be of a much less gung-ho nature than might be expected, relying on personal sacrifice and a perhaps outdated code of honour. Nevertheless, the crisis is averted not through macho posturing but through “diplomatic channels” and a careful balancing of powers. Perhaps not so farfetched after all.

Streaming worldwide via Netflix.

Steel Rain will also receive its international festival premiere as the opening night gala of the Udine Far East Film Festival on 20th April.

Far East Film Festival trailer (no subtitles)