Category: Korea

Handsome Guys (핸섬가이즈, Nam Dong-hyub, 2024)

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The malicious inequalities of the contemporary society are manifested in an angry goat demon who wants to burn the world in Nam Dong-Hyub’s zany horror comedy, Handsome Guys (핸섬가이즈). Adapted from the American film Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, the film plays with prejudice and superficiality along with the pernicious snobbishness of a society founded on status in which, as a would-be-exorcist later says, some have lost the ability to distinguish good from evil.

Step-brothers Sanggu (Lee Hee-joon) and Jaepil (Lee Sung-min) often suffer precisely because of this inability. They are actually nice, sweet guys who are always trying to do the right thing but somehow their behaviour always comes off as creepy giving rise to a series of misunderstandings. That might be why they’ve decided to buy a cottage in the woods in order to live a rustic life, only the house they’ve purchased is a little more rundown than the estate agent implied and was previously home to a Catholic priest which doesn’t altogether explain the goat-themed pentagram in the basement. 

Like the brothers, Mina (Gong Seung-yeon) is also a nice person as we can tell because she’s the only one of her friends who wanted to give the goat they hit with their car a proper burial while the others decide to just leave it in the road and drive off. She too thought the brothers were creepy, but is also awakening to the fact that Sungbin (Jang Dong-joo), a rising star of the golf world, is a bit of a twit who wields his privilege like a weapon and has essentially invited her on this country weekend as entertainment. He also bullies his friend/minion Byung-jo (Kang Ki-doong) whom they regard as a loser and is evidently willing to bear humiliation merely to be in the same orbit as a man like Sungbin who with his good looks, refined manners and modern manliness projects an idealised image of contemporary masculinity that is the exact opposite of the brothers. 

In many ways, he is the demonic presence of privileged youth damaging the hopes and prospects of ordinary youngsters like Mina. Believing that she has been kidnapped by the brothers, the three guys set out to “rescue” her but Sungbin doesn’t care about Mina at all and in fact only wants to retrieve his phone which contains evidence of his sordid lifestyle which would destroy his prospects of becoming a celebrity through achieving success in his golfing career. Nevertheless, they decide to attack the brothers with mostly disastrous results believing them to be nothing other than idiotic hillbillies if also depraved backwoods serial killers living an animalistic, uncivilised existence that is far too close to the land for city slickers like Sungbin. 

Once again, the brothers are plagued by a series of bizarre misunderstandings based on the perception of their “ugliness” which aligns them with “evil” and demands they be exiled from a society that equates physical “beauty” with moral goodness. To that extent, having been rescued from falling in a pond, Mina becomes a kind of Snow White ensconced in the home of the brothers and coming to understand that they are actually nice, if a bit strange, and merely have difficulty expressing themselves while their down-to-earth homeliness only seems suspicious to those who are a little less honest with emotions.

Their niceness, however, seems to be perfectly primed to face off against the Goat Demon as they become determined to protect their homestead from the likes of Sungbin who has only contempt for them and thinks they’re merely fodder for his heroic fantasy of retrieving his phone and proving his manliness at the same time. In essence, it’s Sungbin who embodies the ugliness of the contemporary society with its hypocrisy and superficiality, its casual misogyny and petty prejudice, while the brothers later vindicated as angelic presences of altruistic goodness. Slapstick humour mingles with a sense of malevolence and an inescapable cosmic irony that plagues the brother’s with misunderstandings and has kept them isolated, “handsome guys” too beautiful for a profane world and attempting to find refuge in their remote homestead and homoerotic relationship but eventually discovering unexpected solidarity with the equally exiled Mina as she delivers a silver bullet to privilege and patriarchy, sending ancient evil back to whence it came.

Handsome Guys screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Remember (리멤버, Lee Il-hyung, 2022)

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An elderly man suffering with a brain tumour and advanced dementia is determined to expose the abuses of the colonial past all too easily forgotten by the contemporary society in Lee Il-hyung’s remake of the 2015 Atom Egoyan film of the same name, Remember (리멤버). The film’s title works on multiple levels, firstly in the mind of the hero who both wants to remember and doesn’t as he feels his mind slipping away, and then in the minds of the men he seeks asking them both to remember the man who’s come calling with vengeance on his mind and who it is they really are. 

As in many other similarly themed films of recent times, Pli-ju’s (Lee Sung-min) main problem is that those who chose to collaborate with the Japanese during the colonial era and directly contributed to the deaths of all his family members have largely gone on to extremely successful careers at the heart of the establishment. Ironically enough, right-wing Korean nationalist ideology is largely pro-Japan and the legacy of Japanese militarism was a key component in the post-war military dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-Hwan. To that extent, Pil-ju is the inspector that calls visiting each of the men who caused the deaths of his father, brother, and sister in turn while exposing a series of colonial abuses. One of the men he visits is a working professor who teaches that Japanese colonial rule was actually beneficial in that it helped “modernise” the society though building infrastructure such as roads and railways without really considering that they were largely built with forced labour. 

This casual disregard for human life has continued into the present day with the general Pil-ju targets, Chi-deok (Park Geun-hyung), also the head of the company, in which the Japanese effectively have a controlling share, responsible for a workplace accident that injured the father of Pil-ju’s getaway driver In-gyu (Nam Joo-hyuk) and refused to compensate him. Chi-deok, a hero of the Korean War, even makes a rousing speech instructing the audience that they must remember those who fell in defence of democracy which is a little rich seeing as his values are anything but democratic. Chi-deok also tries to justify himself to the police officer investigating the murder of the first man Pil-ju knocked off that those days were just about survival and that “Korea” no longer existed so all he could do to save it was to become Japanese. But like many of the other men, such as the professor who tricked Pil-ju’s brother into forced labour in a mine where he eventually died, he did so for personal advancement wilfully selling out his fellow countrymen throwing those who refused to change their names or continued to speak Korean in jail while sending off their sisters to become comfort women for the Japanese army. 

The first man that Pil-ju killed tortured his father to death on a trumped up charge so he could steal his land. It’s not even ideology, it’s just greed and oppression. Everyone keeps telling him that no one cares about this kind of thing anymore, but conservative politicians nevertheless continue to weaponise it suggesting that anything is permissible in the battle against communism while imperialism is therefore a lesser evil. Pil-ju’s dementia is a metaphor for the literal erasure of history and the simple act of forgetting, the process by which many of these men have been able to rewrite their pasts to justify their actions. Yet it’s also true that there are things Pil-ju too does not want to remember and actively denies until finally forced to reckon with himself, with his complicity, guilt, and regret that he was as Chi-deok puts it not all that different as a man who survived those times when so many did not. Shot through with a gentle humour, Lee’s admittedly unsubtle drama (a Japanese soldier named Tojo literally says he’s going end the pacifist constitution so Japan can start wars whenever it feels like it) is also a gentle tale of intergenerational bonding as Pil-ju comes to develop a paternal affection for his workplace buddy In-gyu that suggests the past is only exorcised when spoken and passed down to new generations free of justifications or omissions and most importantly remembered as it was by those who really lived it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

The Hut (피막, Lee Doo-yong, 1981)

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We’re told that the titular hut in Lee Doo-yong’s 1981 shamanism drama (피막, Pimak) is a like a stopping place between this world and the other. Babies are born there, but more usually it’s a place where the dying are sent to expire. Located in a more literal liminal space on the outskirts of the village, it presents a borderline that keeps the villagers safe from the taboo of death. They say the souls of those who die there cannot return to haunt the village, which is to say the village is a place free of death and also of the grudges of the past.

That is, however, not quite true. During the colonial era, the heir to noble house, Seongmin, has fallen ill and is likely to die but is being cared for at home by his desperate family who have invited shamans from all over the county in an attempt to cure him. This has obviously annoyed the village’s resident shamaness who is forever telling them they’ve made things much worse for themselves by sidelining her and shunning the local goddess, but the cause of the boy’s illness is quickly rooted out by Okhwa (Yu Ji-in), a powerful shamaness who leads the family to a buried vase in the woods which has been broken allowing the trapped should of Samdol (Nam Koong-won), the former keeper of the hut, to escape.

The Old Madam (Hwang Jung-seun) immediately admits that she was the one who put him in there, though she did not know where the vase was buried. The Gang family has a curse on it which results in many of their sons dying young before they could father sons of their own and leaving behind young widows which are perennial problem in the rigidly Confucianist, patriarchal society that some may argue continues into the present day but is certainly in the ascendent in the 1920s and 30s. As in many films of this kind, managing the sexual desires of young women, which are acknowledged as normal and natural, under such an oppressive system presents a key challenge to the social order. Given the taboo against second marriages, the family’s large collection of widowed daughters are seen resort to acts of self-harm in order to quell their desires in the absence of men. When the second daughter-in-law falls ill after stabbing herself in the thigh with a silver dagger, the Old Madam is sympathetic but believing she cannot be saved sends her to the hut to die. But before she does, the Old Madam also orders Samdol to sleep with her on pain of death so that she won’t pass into the afterlife with her needs unmet. The Old Madam is after all a widow herself, if an older one, and understands the frustration and desperation the younger woman feels. 

But the decision she makes breaks another taboo for as he points out himself, Samdol is the lowest of the low, a commoner who deals with the dead. Not only is the sex itself non-consensual, but threatens the social order in its transgressive qualities, crossing a class divide while also occurring outside of a marriage. Of course, it takes place in the liminal space of the hut where such borders meet. Described as quiet, honest, and reliable, Samdol is a kind man who also patiently nurtures the daughter-in-law back to health with medical herbs from his garden and eventually reveals to her what he was forced to do by the Old Madam but the two later fall in love and conceive a child which of course means they must both die in order to preserve the social order. 

Okhwa arrives as a kind of inspector exposing the poisonous past of Gang family which after all probably did do something untoward in order to become prosperous which is why there’s a curse on it. We get the impression that she may have ulterior motives and almost certainly knows more than she’s letting on while otherwise looking for information. She is not in fact a shaman, though her mother was and a fairly legendary figure at that, but later becomes one and with it a kind of avenger mainly for women who suffer under this system but also for men like Samdol abused by the feudal class order and forever at its mercy. The shamaness is also of course a liminal figure who lives outside of conventional society which views her with suspicion as a woman with both power and independence.

But even Okwha is subject to the unwanted attentions of men who despite their insistence on a woman’s chastity believe themselves entitled to her body, not only the head of the Gang family (who is actually elderly and presumably survived the curse), but men in Western dress who snatch and rape her. Thus the hut also exists at the nexus of tradition and a seemingly destructive modernity ushered in by Japanese imperialism. After recovering from his illness following Okhwa’s guk exorcism, Seongmin insists he just got better on his own and there’s no such thing as ghosts. We’re told he studied abroad in Tokyo and in fact dresses in a Japanese-style student’s uniform complete with cape. He tells his mother that they’re making scientific advances in Japan and that it’s ridiculous to think a ghost could have killed the Old Madam and the head of the family who died in odd circumstances during the guk along with his uncle in Western dress who had raped Okhwa. He proves to her scientifically that someone could have merely set traps for each of them and points the finger at Okhwa as a likely murderess rather than a gifted spirit medium.

Perhaps we more “rational”, modern people might agree with him but the film seems certain that there are indeed vengeful spirits haunting the landscape, those who fell victim to the hut mentality and were deliberately cast out and left to die by their society who effectively exiled them in their death. Okhwa can’t exorcise the evil ghosts of patriarchy, classism, feudalism, or sexual repression but she can perhaps in part symbolically end their tyranny by dissolving the border and burning the whole thing down. 

Escape (탈주, Lee Jong-pil, 2024)

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Lee Jong-pil’s existential action drama Escape (탈주, Talju) opens with scenes of a man running. He runs his way through the rest of the film, continually on the move and chasing a dream of freedom outside of the oppressive society in which he is otherwise trapped. The man who chases him, meanwhile, is himself running away. His movements are slow, calculated, and cold but also somehow tender and almost it seems an act of self harm. 

The fact that the oppressive regime is North Korea is almost irrelevant and the film is less about Communism than it is lack of autonomy that may be found in any other democratic or developed nation in which people are driven to erase a part of themselves in order to fit in or to prosper amid rigidly defined social codes. Nevertheless, there is a direct criticism of the Democratic People’s Republic in the ironic signage, a car ploughing straight through a sign that reads “for freedom and happiness of people”. But then, even if deserter Kyu-nam (Lee Je-hoon) finds happiness in the South we can’t be sure it’s really any better. The welcome message blasted through loudspeakers over the wall that marks the border doesn’t sound all that different from the propaganda messages on Kyu-nam’s radio, while the deserter’s phone positioned to appeal to men like him appears to be out of order. 

But to Kyu-nam, “the South” is only really an idea and it’s clear he intends to transcend those borders too, venturing on to the wider world and wherever it pleases him to go. What he rails against is fate, that his life is dictated by forces outside of his control or more accurately by Field Officer Hyun-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan) from State Security who takes him under his wing and tries to make something of him as a loyal soldier of the North. What becomes clear is that Hyun-sang is a man who fears freedom and that the presence of a man like Kyu-nam is a threat to him because he awakens his own deeply buried desire for liberation. 

From the longing looks he directs at a man with whom he studied abroad in Russia we infer that Hyun-sang is gay and the suppression of his authentic self in order to keep himself safe in a repressive culture has made him cruel and vindictive. Unfortunately, this presumably unintentionally plays into a homophobic trope which aligns queerness with sadistic villainy, but does nevertheless lend a kind of poignancy to Hyun-sang’s otherwise vindictive quest to prevent Kyu-nam’s escape precisely because he himself desires to be free but is too afraid to free himself. From a wealthy and prominent family and with an important position within the regime, this system otherwise works out well for Hyun-sang but he is also imprisoned by it and will forever be prevented from becoming his authentic self or gaining what he truly wants so long as he remains within North Korea. 

A homoerotic charge exists between the two men though what Hyun-sang may really be chasing is himself and half-hoping he’ll be caught. Kyu-nam meanwhile has a single-minded desire for autonomy and individuality, to live and die on his own terms rather than live with no right or power to decide his future. There are those who’ve found other ways to reject the system, a group of mostly female nomads seeking a new place to belong after being kicked out of their village but seemingly with no intention of leaving the country, but for Kyu-nam there is no freedom inside the walls and his determination to find it is what makes him so dangerous to Hyun-sang for whom the very idea of freedom is so painful he’s sublimated himself entirely into an oppressive regime.

With pulsing synth scores, Lee keeps the tension high as Kyu-nam runs and runs through minefields and bullets while pursued by the full force of the North Korean army and the steely Hyun-sang who always seems to be one step ahead. His passage takes on an existential quality, risking death rather than continue to live a “meaningless life” in which he has no power to decide his own fate. His escape is finally self-liberation, taking the decision to free himself because no one else is going to, while Hyun-sang remains a prisoner too afraid of freedom to actively pursue it though perhaps tempted by his encounter with Kyun-nam, a man free in his mind if nowhere else.

Escape screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

US trailer (English subtitles)

A Water Mill (물레방아, Lee Man-hee, 1966)

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It’s not every day you wander into your own funeral. Or to be more precise, the death rite that Bong-won (Shin Young-kyun) unwittingly intrudes on in Lee Man-Hee’s feudal era fable A Water Mill (물레방아, Mullebanga) is for someone who died in a time no can remember. The old lady who explains it to him says that it happened long before she was born, implying at least the villagers have been enacting this ritual since time immemorial yet it’s almost as if Bong-won were walking towards a point of origin, drawn inexorably by forces beyond his control to play his part in this immortal ritual dance.

To that extent, Bong-won becomes a kind of “everyman” in this cautionary tale by virtue of the fact that he is nameless. Asked for his surname, he says he isn’t sure. It might be Kim or Park, later someone else says Lee which fills out the triumvirate of Korea’s most common family names. He says at one point that he doesn’t remember his mother, but thinks that she may have been a sex worker and his father a man who didn’t pay. But the fact he has no last name places him firmly at the bottom of the feudal hierarchy and most at the mercy of its hypocrisies and contradictions. He was on his way somewhere else when he fatefully found a sock floating the river that seems to flow towards him from his own future but that he will later gift perhaps to its original owner, the mysterious Geum-boon (Ko Eun-ah) with whom he falls in a deep, obsessive love that takes over the whole of his life.

Others in the village tell him that there is no such woman. An old man assures him she must have been some kind of ghost or supernatural creature come to trick him and Geum-boon does indeed take on a kind of eeriness. After deciding to stay in the village and look for her, Bong-won catches sight of Geum-boon in a forest glade bathing naked in a pool as the bright summer sun beats down on her but when he eventually makes his way down the mountain she has already disappeared. In chasing Geum-boon, he chases death but most evidently in the ways his obsession with her causes him to contravene the feudal order. He rebels against the landlord he was working for in refusing to collect her debt, then contracts himself to another in order to pay it so that he might marry her.

But ghost or not, Geum-boon is herself constrained by feudalism’s aggressive patriarchy. Force married to an invalid, she cared for him for three years until his death and then is pressed for his debts by the local landlord who wields them against her in order to claim her body. Married to Bong-won who has become an indentured servant, she is once again pursued by a landlord insistent on his droit du seigneur who exiles Bong-won to the pottery fields to get him out of the way. Geum-boon’s ambivalence does seem to give her a sometimes demonic quality as she laughs in the face of the landlord like something possessed and though she at first seems to like Bong-won and fear the attentions of the landlord she is also intrigued by the frankness of his current mistress who sees in her relationship with him the possibilities of transgressing class boundaries not to mention escaping a dull husband who will never be anything other than a servant. 

The film seems to suggest that Bong-won is powerless, while Geum-boon does at least have some power to wield. Even the landlord tells her that he has nothing to offer other than his money and power and even if becoming lady of the manor is a little far-fetched it seems unreasonable to criticise her if she did decide to become the landlord’s mistress as the path towards overcoming her circumstances lies in trading her body for influence. One could argue Bong-won does the same in leveraging his strength and his labour, but all it buys him is further exploitation and the eventual humiliation of knowing the landlord has been sleeping with his wife. 

Feudalism therefore destroys natural human emotions such as love when all life is transactional in a constant, and largely futile, struggle for survival. Bong-won turns to the spiritual realm for help, asking a shaman how he can win back his wife but she gives him the rather bizarre instructions to steal three sets of underwear and throw them in the river on 3rd August while bowing to the west. Needless to say, that doesn’t work out very well for him. The fates truly do seem to be against Bong-won. Lee adds a touch of supernatural dread as Bong-won finds himself surrounded by howling winds as he fatefully makes his way towards the water mill and his destiny. The ritual dance is perfectly recreated as Bong-won and Geum-boon retake their roles in the play, their actions matching those of the masked players as Bong-won collapses on the bridge just as the demon had though there is no positive resolution in what is now both reality and fable. What we’re left with is the tragedy of feudalism, but also the maddening futility of obsessive desire for that which is and has always been ever so slightly out of reach.

General’s Son 3 (將軍의 아들 3 / 장군의 아들 3, Im Kwon-taek, 1992)

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The third and final instalment in the General’s Son trilogy picks up some time after the events of the previous film, not with Doo-han (Park Sang-min) being released from prison but emerging from hiding. After his showdown with Kunimoto, he’d been lying low in a temple but is now on the run, heroically jumping off a train to avoid the police and thereafter making his way to Wonsan and seeking asylum with an affiliated gang. By this time, Doo-han’s role as the son of a legendary general who was murdered by communist traitors while fighting bravely for independence seems to have been forgotten as he wanders around trying to evade the colonial net. 

In Wonsan, he immediately starts causing trouble by objecting to gang leader Shirai’s treatment of an aspiring singer, Eun-sil (Oh Yeon-soo), whom he has more or less imprisoned until she agrees to sleep with him. Doo-han helps her to escape and encourages her to continue pursuing her dreams of stardom, but motions toward romance create an ongoing instability which indirectly echoes throughout the rest of the film as he tries to balance his desire for Eun-sil with the ongoing battle for Jongno and resistance against the Japanese. 

For her part, Eun-sil falls for Doo-han as the man who saved her from Shirai and restored her freedom but still finds herself at the mercy of the Japanese as otherwise sympathetic lieutenant Gondo (Dokgo Young-jae) takes a liking to her after being struck by her singing talent which he apparently did not expect seeing as she is a mere Korean. Later Gondo and Doo-han become accidental rivals when Eun-sil is arrested because of her associations with Doo-han and they have to work together to get her out. Gondo is fiercely critical of their relationship, not only out of romantic jealously but because he finds the Korean approach to romance vulgar. Despite her later agency which sees her primed to reject both men in order to pursue her career, Eun-sil is also a mere device to emphasise Doo-han’s virility as the entire neighbourhood is kept awake by her moans of ecstasy even after Doo-han has been badly injured in a fight, is covered in bandages, and has been told he will need to stay in bed for the next month to recover. 

Gondo meanwhile, in a slightly symbolic gesture, tries to force Eun-sil to marry him by laying his sword on the table and making it plain that if she refuses he will kill her and then himself. Perhaps in a more romantic tale, he might have threatened Doo-han and asked her to make a sacrifice, but in any case Doo-han tries something much the same on hearing the news, having a kitchen knife brought to him and thrusting it into the table. Eun-sil merely seems amused, or perhaps worryingly pleased at open show of romantic jealousy as proof of love, knowing that it is quite unlikely Doo-han is actually going to hurt her (the same cannot be said for Gondo). He still however tries to command her to stay and marry him, refusing to let her leave because she is “his”, but in the end of course it’s bluster and if she chooses to leave he cannot stop her because he is not a man like Shirai or Gondo who would willingly restrict another’s freedom. He is still “fighting for our liberty” after all. 

Meanwhile, he undergoes a parallel “romance” with Dong-hae (Lee Il-jae) who left alone for Manchuria after renouncing the gangster life but has apparently left the Independence Movement because it was too socialist when what he seems to want is individual capitalist prosperity which is why he’s got mixed up in the opium trade. Still on the run, Doo-han seeks out Double Blade, the street thug mentor who brought him into the gang all those years ago. Unfortunately he makes a lot of trouble for Double Blade in annoying one of his underlings who runs a local Chinese gang and then starting a turf war after getting himself into trouble with the bandits who run the drugs trade. He and Dong-hae are eventually separated in the escape from the bandits but reunite when Hayashi (Shin Hyun-joon), who is still nominally running the yakuza but has delegated Jongno to his sadistic brother-in-law Uda, tries to use him in a plot to take out Doo-han once and for all. 

Throughout the series, Doo-han has been a mythic, comic book-style hero who is respected for the integrity of his fists, refusing to use weapons and leaving his opponents beaten but breathing so that they can verbally concede the victory. The previous film had seen him enact a more serious kind of violence, but even so his rival apparently survived only permanently changed. His final confrontation with Hayashi, by contrast, sees him kill for the first time by picking up a blade and then a gun. Nevertheless, he is perhaps the General’s Son after all. According to his gang members, scattered after he left, he is the only force with can keep Jongno free, without him they fell apart and let the Japanese take their streets from them. The final instalment in Doo-han’s story ends on a moment of tempered victory which avenges his gangster honour but places him firmly in the arms of his brother Dong-hae as they temporarily retreat from the battlefield towards an increasingly unstable future. 

General’s Son 2 (將軍의 아들 2 / 장군의 아들 2, Im Kwon-taek, 1991)

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A year after General’s Son struck box office gold, Im Kwon-taek returns to colonial Korea picking up pretty much where he left off with Doo-han (Park Sang-min) once again getting released from prison only this time to a hero’s welcome. Pushing deeper into the colonial era, The General’s Son 2 (將軍의 아들 2 / 장군의 아들 2, Janggunui adeul 2) takes place in increasingly straitened times in which the Japanese are both in control and on the offensive, using the colonial base to strike further into Manchuria while Doo-han discovers a little more about his legendary father and the fate of the Independence Movement in exile. 

Like the first film, the sequel largely consists of a series of episodes in which Doo-han fights and defeats his various rivals. The major change this time is that he begins in defeat as the early celebrations of his return give way to a dawn raid by Hayashi’s yakuza after which Doo-han is dragged into the town square and forced into submission. When Doo-han’s mentor Ki-hwan (Min Eung-shik) is also released from prison, the gang opts for a truce, but Ki-hwan then absents himself after realising Hayashi has tricked him leaving Doo-han in charge. 

During the first film Doo-han’s Korean gangsters had been presented as unambiguously good, standing between the ordinary people and Japanese oppression. While Doo-han was away, however, things have changed. The Japanese have infiltrated Jongno and the Jongno gang has lost the support of the merchants through pressing them too hard for collection money. Doo-han’s first task is then to get the smaller Korean gangs back on side, fighting the local Mokpo kingpin to ensure he resumes sending taxation payments back to Jongno. His main source conflict, however, is still with Dong-hae (Lee Il-jae), the Korean fighter working for the yakuza whom he defeated at the end of the previous film but who got his own back by getting the jump on him at the beginning of this one. 

As a defender of Korean liberty, Doo-han’s side mission is to win back Dong-hae to the side of right, reminded of their childhood meeting by a repeat of the flashback in which he helps a starving Dong-hae cadge a meal by teaching him how to dine and dash. The Dong-hae dilemma is compounded by Doo-han’s increasingly complicated love life which begins with a brief flirtation with Setsuko, a half-Korean Japanese woman working at a gangster-friendly bar who seems to have taken a liking to him, but then later transfers to Chae-hwan (Song Chae-Hwan), a new gisaeng at his regular hangout who is sweet on Dong-hae and is also carrying baggage because her late husband was stoned to death as a traitor when the Japanese discarded him. 

Through Chae-hwan, Doo-han gets to know a dissident author, Park Gye-ju, whose novel Pure Love he pays two high school students to read aloud to him because he is still illiterate. According to Gye-ju, Doo-han’s general father is dead, assassinated by communist traitors among his men including such esteemed names as Kim Il-sung, placing Doo-han at a peculiar intersection of anti-communist and anti-Japanese ideology. Despite that however, Doo-han is warned off associating with Gye-ju because of his “suspicious ideology” by his arch nemesis, Kunimoto, formerly “Lee” the Korean detective working for the Japanese who arrested him all the way back at the beginning of his journey in the first movie.

Traitorous Koreans rather than the Japanese are the main antagonists with Kunimoto first among them, but then as Chae-hwan puts it it’s not the fault of the world only the Japanese whose continuing oppression has placed them all into these perilous positions. Dong-hae weighs up his options, persuaded to end his problematic associations with Hayashi despite his previous assertion that he didn’t care where the money came from he only wanted to survive. The world abandoned us first, he explains, what else was there to do? Chae-hwan criticises Doo-han, suggesting that he’s using his fists not for the people of Korea but for himself, convincing Dong-hae that he can be “saved” if he leaves the gangster world behind. Like his nation, he decides he wants “independence”, eating his own food bought with his own money, rather than remaining at the mercy of a higher authority be that Hayashi or Doo-han. 

The Japanese army, however, believe themselves above the law and answer only to the emperor. Dong-hae’s decision brings him further into conflict with Doo-han, rejecting not just the law of the street but provoking romantic jealousy. As Chae-hwan points out love isn’t a fight you win or lose, but it’s still at the mercy of the various political forces in play and in not in any way helped by Doo-han’s childish provocation of Japanese soldiers at Setsuko’s bar. In any case, Doo-han remains a folk hero, concluding his final showdown with his first show of real violence with active consequences, but in the end protected by the people of Jongno as they offer themselves as human shields holding back the forces of oppression while Doo-han remains trapped in a world of pointless gangster violence. 

General’s Son (將軍의 아들 / 장군의 아들, Im Kwon-taek, 1990)

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Im Kwon-taek may have been among the first Korean film directors to secure a spot on the international festival circuit, but his long and meandering career began with action cinema which is where his early ‘90s blockbuster trilogy General’s Son (將軍의 아들 / 장군의 아들, Jangguneui Adeul) returns him. Quite clearly influenced by recent Hong Kong martial arts movies, ninkyo eiga yakuza dramas from Japan, and episodic fighting comics, General’s Son creates legend from recent history in further mythologising a real life street king who eventually shifted into politics in the 1950s which might be one shift too far in terms of the film’s complicated politics. 

This first instalment in the trilogy opens with Doo-han (Park Sang-min) being released from prison after apparently having been picked up for sneaking into a Japanese cinema and getting into some kind of fight. An orphan, Doo-han has spent his life on the streets as a beggar but also has a deep love of the movies and is determined to get a job at the cinema, eventually landing one as a sandwich board/announcements guy parading through the streets shouting about what’s currently on for which he gets two tickets on top of his pay. The tickets become a bone of contention when some lowlife punks try to cheat him out of them, but Doo-han is a handy boy and so he manages to beat the guys up and get the tickets back despite being stabbed in the thigh. The altercation brings him to the attention of a local gang boss who decides to recruit him because he’s in need of street muscle and even helps him get a job at the cinema which turns out to be a hub for the local organised crime community. 

The complication is that this small area of Jongno which is ruled by the gangs is also the last remaining outpost of a “free” Korea where Japanese interference is apparently minimal. There is, however, a Japanese gang presence in the form of traditional yakuza led by the youthful and handsome Hayashi (Shin Hyun-joon), who becomes the central if not direct villain. In typical gangster origin fashion, Doo-han climbs the ranks by using his fists, taking down one big boss after another but, crucially, only while his own guys collectively decide to make way for him. As one after the other is killed or arrested, they each affirm that their era has passed, they’ve been beaten, and it’s all up to Doo-han now. In fact, in this highly ritualised setting, most fights ends with the defeated party solemnly admitting that they have lost and will politely leave Jongno at their earliest opportunity. 

As for Doo-han himself, he belongs to the noble brand of gangster and becomes something of a folk hero for his spirited defence of the ordinary man in the face of “Japanese tyranny”. Of course, that ignores all the ways in which the gangsters themselves could be quite oppressive and the film does indeed resist any mention of how they make their money other than a veiled allusion to collecting protection from the market traders in order to keep them safe from harassment by the Japanese.

At the end of the film, Doo-han receives an explanation for all the crytic hints to the film’s title to the effect that he is the son of a legendary general in the Independence Movement. His role is, in effect, to be the general in Jongno holding back the Japanese incursion and saving the soul of Korea from being despoiled by colonisers intent on erasing its essential culture. Just as his father is fighting in Manchuria, Doo-han is “fighting for our liberty” on the streets of Jongno while standing up for the oppressed wherever he finds them, including the gisaeng one of whom he saves from being sold into a Chinese brothel by her father by robbing wealthy Japanese officials to pay her debt. What he’s mostly doing, however, is fighting with fellow gangsters, proving himself in tests of strength which leave his opponents breathing but humiliated and thereafter removing themselves from the game in graceful defeat. It’s unlikely the Japanese will do the same, but Doo-han will be monitoring the streets until they do.

The 12th Suspect (열두 번째 용의자, Ko Myoung-sung, 2019)

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An inspector calls on a small group of artists in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War in Ko Myoung-sung’s taut psychological thriller, The 12th Suspect (열두 번째 용의자, Yeoldu beonjjae Yonguija). Set almost entirely within a tiny tea house, Ko’s steely drama lays bare the contradictions of the new society in slide towards authoritarianism which is itself a product of the failure to deal with the legacy of the colonial past while preoccupied about the “communist” threat in the quite literally divided nation. 

The Oriental Teahouse is home to a collection of poets, painters, and Bohemians seeking refuge from the everyday difficulties of life in the post-war city. Their peaceful idyll is rocked by the revelations that one of their number, Doo-hwan, died on a mountain the previous evening most likely murdered. As it turns out, no one seems to have liked Doo-hwan very much. He was “hateful and ignorant” not to mention a bad poet though many are sceptical of the story wondering if he might simply have had an accident. In any case, the newcomer to the cafe turns out to be a policeman, Ki-chae (Kim Sang-kyung), who confirms that Doo-hwan died of a gunshot wound and sets about asking a series of increasingly intense questions about his relations with the cafe’s denizens. 

To begin with, Ki-chae seems to be a Columbo-like avuncular detective, polite and sympathetic in his questioning until revealing his true purpose at which he turns into something of a firebreathing demon with a very particular vision of “justice”, hunting down “communist spies” in order to keep the South safe. As the murder weapon appears to be a Soviet-issue pistol, he assumes the killer(s) may be linked to the North accusing one of the patrons of having aided and abetted a cousin who was on the other side while throwing a book on Stalin at a university professor who desperately tries to explain that he’s had it since studying in Russia in his youth when times were different. 

Meanwhile, the policeman’s authoritarian sense of justice is gradually exposed as a kind of fascim born of his experiences under Japanese colonial rule. Doo-hwan may have died because of his actions during in the war when he collaborated with Japanese officers agreeing to send young men from his village as conscript soldiers to die for Japan on the frontlines or else as exploited slave labour in the coal mines. Ki-chae is hiding his own dark past while his quest for justice is riddled with corruption masked as patriotism as he vows to wipe out the “communist” threat in order to build a more secure Korea. “The existence of communists is a great misfortune to this country and also a danger” he adds before descending into a violent rage stamping on the face of his interviewee. 

His almost hysterical anti-communism is manifested in a general hatred for the kind of people who frequent the Oriental Teahouse, firstly taking them to task for their lifestyles in a time of chaos and privation while later viewing them as cowardly shirkers evading their duty to go to war. “I won’t let you ruin our country” he snarls while simultaneously embarking on an ill thought through argument that the communists are unfairly benefitting from the dire economic situation to “provoke good people”. He justifies his actions in insisting that everything he does is in order to prevent another “horrible war” while continuing to intimidate them into some kind of confession. His questioning reveals the petty jealousies and minor tensions between the artists along with the unreliability of their testimony while eventually exposing their small acts of resistance, cafe owner Suk-hyeon (Heo Sung-tae) determined to stand up to authoritarianism rather than forever be oppressed by it though others it seems are frightened enough by the potential dangers of rebellion to consider turning on their friends and allies. Locked in the tiny cafe with two soldiers blocking the exit, the artists are cornered and terrified as Ki-chae pits one against the other while all around them the prognosis looks bleak in a society in which men like Ki-chae wield ultimate power controlling the future through burying the past.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

May 18 (화려한 휴가, Kim Ji-hoon, 2007)

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Following the assassination of president Park Chung-hee in 1979, many assumed that democracy would return and that the society would be liberated from its authoritarian past. That did not, however, come to pass. While the government floundered, general Chun Doo-hwan launched a coup that led to nothing other than a second military dictatorship. Citizens continued to press for democratisation and the lifting of the martial law that had been declared in the wake of Park’s death. In order to cement his authoritarian rule, Chun embarked on an oppressive crackdown of resistance activity, actually expanding martial law and sending troops to monitor universities where the majority of protests were taking place.  

It’s against this backdrop that Kim Ji-hoon’s May 18 (화려한 휴가, Hwaryeohan hyuga) unfolds, so named for the first day of Gwangju Uprising in which citizens of the small provincial city were subject to beatings, torture, rape and murder at the hands of military forces. He opens however with pleasant scenes of the local countryside as taxi driver Min-woo (Kim Sang-kyung) heads back into the city eventually arriving to pick up his younger brother Jin-woo (Lee Joon-gi) from high school and deliver him to the local church. Min-woo also has a crush on mutual friend and fellow attendee, Shin-ae (Lee Yo-won), who works as a nurse at the local hospital. For some reason even though this is a fairly small place, Min-woo also seems to be unaware that Shin-ae is the daughter of his boss Heung-su (Ahn Sung-ki ), a former army captain now retired and running a taxi firm. 

In an attempt to make the political personal, Kim spends the first hour on Min-woo’s awkward romance which by modern standards is quite problematic in that he basically ends up following Shin-ae around and offering to give her free lifts even though she seems annoyed to see him and isn’t keen on him effectively deciding where she doesn’t and doesn’t go. Meanwhile, as he and his brother are orphaned he’s adopted a paternal role towards Jin-woo who is bright and studying hard with the aim of getting into Seoul University to study law while Min-woo most likely had to give up school to drive the taxi so he could support them both. This is also in its way a little uncomfortable in its emphasis on Jin-woo’s bright future which is about to be destroyed by the uprising as if his life is worth more because of all the ruined potential rather than just because he was an ordinary human betrayed by his government and trapped by hellish atrocity. Even so, it hints at a conflict within Min-woo as he wants to keep his brother safe but also has a natural desire to resist injustice and is moved when Jin-woo explains that one of his best friends has been murdered by state violence. 

Then again, the film’s framing is also in a sense reactionary in Jin-woo’s intense offence against being branded as a “rebel” or a “communist” rather refocusing on the fact the military’s actions are inhuman and the their attempt to slur the local people only a means of justification. As the local priest accurately suggests, the military provokes them in order to have an excuse to crack down with extreme prejudice ensuring that there will be no further resistance to increasing authoritarianism. Some army officers begin to ask questions but are quickly shut down by their overzealous commander who claims the North may be on its way to link up with these “communists” and is quite clearly prepared to wipe out the entire town rather than back down and risk a further escalation of their resistance. 

While the soldiers are faceless and implacable, the townspeople are sometimes depicted as naive bumblers with significant time spent on a “loudmouth” comic relief character who is nevertheless one of the first to pick up a gun and join the town’s civilian army led by Heung-su who like the priest is under no illusions and assumes troops will soon storm the town. The comedic tone and melodramatic undercurrent often undercut Kim’s attempts to depict the horror of the massacre even in the irony of their juxtaposition as bullets suddenly rip into a cheerful crowd which had been laughing and joking only seconds before. The closing scenes in which a man refuses to surrender and is killed are framed as heroic but in the end seem futile, as if he’s thrown his life away for no reason. Even so there is something Shin-ae’s loudspeaker pleas to remember the citizens of Gwangju who stayed strong and resisted to the last rather than consent to their oppression even if she is in a sense condemned to be the storyteller bearing the horror of it all alone along with the loss of her own happy future crushed under the boots of violent authoritarianism.

International trailer (English subtitles)