The Ball at the Anjo House (安城家の舞踏会, Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1947)

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“Old things die out so new things can be born,” according to the ruined patriarch of a once noble house in Kozaburo Yoshimura’s Chekhovian drama Ball at the Anjo House (安城家の舞踏会, Anjo-ke no butokai), though he might as well be speaking to the post-war society. The Anjos are like the declining aristocracy of the earlier 20th century mourning the disappearance of their world of privilege and gaiety and reflecting that they too must now, as younger daughter Atsuko (Setsuko Hara) says, learn to serve others.

Atsuko is really the only one who accepts the age of the aristocracy has passed and that it is only right and proper that they should join this newly egalitarian, democratic society. Her sister Akiko (Yumeko Aizome) has recently returned home after 12 years having left her husband because of his adultery, but cannot now face it that she no longer has a place here. Approached by their former chauffeur Toyama (Takashi Kanda) who has long carried a torch for her, Akiko snaps that she will always be a noblewoman in heart, unable to let go of outdated customs of class and propriety. She seems to have feelings for the chauffeur too, but won’t let herself embrace them, calling him “dirty” and resenting herself for her attraction to a man who is not her social equal. 

But times are very different now and the aristocracy has been abolished which has in all other senses dissolved the class barrier between them. The tables have turned and Toyama is now a wealthy man having done well for himself in business through honest hard work. Akiko asks him for help as a kind of symbolic gesture as if she were making recompense by handing the house to its rightful owner in their former servant. He insensitively tells patriarch Tadahiko (Osamu Takizawa) that he can easily spare a few thousand to throw away on the house as a sentimental gesture, but does so largely without malice. Only after Akiko has turned him down at the ball and he begins to drink does he start to crow, if a little sadly, that now this base and ugly servant has bought the master’s house. On his way out, he knocks over the suit of armour that had stood in the hall as if literally bringing down the feudalistic military legacy of this once great family and sending it crashing to the floor. The camera suddenly tilts to emphasise that this world is now out of kilter and has been destabilised beyond repair. It’s only this action that frees Akiko from her self-imposed repression as she skips over the armour and chases Toyama out the door. Tumbling down a sand dune she literally descends to his level leaving her pearls and shoes behind. 

The class barrier has been fully dissolved, and Tadahiko too permits himself to marry his long-term mistress, the geisha Chiyo (Chieko Murata), who declares that she doesn’t care about his loss of status and invites him to live with her if he has to sell his house. But it seems as if Tadahiko can’t let go of his ancestral legacy nor his childhood home. In truth, this Western-style country house by the sea can only have been built after the Meiji Restoration which means it’s under a hundred years old and most likely built by Tadahiko’s father, the gentleman in European-style military dress in the portrait. As such, it was likely constructed to look forward to a new era as the samurai class rebranded itself into a European-style aristocracy. Tadahiko’s older sister, married to a lord who’s faring better in this new world, tells an enraptured collection of younger women of the time she danced with a prince a year after the Russo-Japanese war when she was only 19. But this will be the last ball at the Anjo House, in memory of a “beautiful way of life” that has been now been eclipsed.  

Tadahiko had faith that they would be saved essentially through the good chap system in his relationship with a nouveau riche upstart named Shinkawa (Masao Shimizu). Shinkawa holds the mortgage on the house, and there are all sorts of rumours about his shady business. He made most of his money on the black market. Shinkawa had arranged a marriage between his daughter Yoko (Keiko Tsushima) and Tadahiko’s son Masahiko, which gave him even more confidence. But as Atsuko says, Shinkawa was only friendly with him because of his aristocratic title and now it’s gone he has nothing to offer. In marrying Yoko to Masahiko (Masayuki Mori), Shinkawa would have gained the legitimacy of a connection with nobility while Tadahiko would have gained an injection of cash that would save his social status. But none of that matters any more now that the aristocracy has been abolished under the post-war reforms that have also seen Tadahiko’s lands confiscated and estate broken up. It seems that Tadahiko let Shinkawa use his name for a munitions factory during the war, which might not play so well now, just as Akiko’s decision to part with her adulterous husband may also have been influenced by the fact that he was a general who is presumably little in demand in the wake of defeat. Still, Tadahiko prefers Shinkawa to letting the house go to a former servant like Toyama who must himself be enamoured enough with that old world to want to become master of it rather than tear it down.

For Masahiko’s part, he has little interest in marrying Yoko but on learning the engagement has been unilaterally called off and Shinkawa is little more than crook decides to rape Yoko to get back at him. His cruelty is a symptom of post-war nihilism, and we soon discover he’s been sleeping with a maid, Kiku (Akemi Sora), to whom he made promises of marriage he had no intention of keeping. But Like Akiko it seems as if he does care for her after all, only he won’t let himself feel anything in the numbness of his loss of privilege preferring instead to laugh too loudly with his boorish friends. Only on seeing the class barrier dissolve when his father marries Chiyo and his sister Akiko takes off after Toyama does he allow himself to embrace Kiku and express genuine emotion.

Masahiko is played by a young Masayuki Mori who was the son of the novelist Takeo Arishima. Arishima was also a member of the aristocracy but one who became a socialist and dissolved his estate which was something of a fashion in the 1920s. The situation is however complicated by the fact that the Anjos’ servants remain loyal and don’t want to leave them. After all, this is as much their home too and they don’t have anywhere to go either because a world with no masters has no need for servants. We too are encouraged to mourn this world, but its end is also presented as a kind of liberation in which the family are finally permitted to embrace their own desires only after casting off the shackles of the aristocracy and preparing to forge new futures in a changing world leaving the feudal past behind and waltzing into a new and brighter future.

Who’s the Woman, Who’s the Man? (金枝玉葉 2, Peter Chan, 1996)

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“I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, all I know is that I love you,” the hero had finally accepted after the heroine’s madcap dash across town in the closing scenes of Peter Chan’s 1994 rom-com, He’s a Woman, She’s a Man. But as it turns out, it isn’t quite that simple. Inverting the structure of the first film, sequel Who’s the Man, Who’s the Woman? finds the heroine romantically confused as her “masculine” persona increasingly interferes in her relationship with the still conflicted Sam (Leslie Cheung).

It certainly hasn’t been plain sailing for anyone as Wing (Anita Yuen) agrees to move in to Sam’s luxury flat but refuses to live downstairs as Rose (Carina Lau) had done, instead insisting on sharing his life and his bed in their entirety. For his part, Sam’s reluctance to share his space is reflective of his fears of intimacy while he resents Wing’s immediate attempts to install herself by remodelling the apartment to her own taste. Meanwhile, the old problem has resurfaced in that now he’s got Wing he’s not all that interested in her and hasn’t written any songs in months. In an attempt to manage her interference in his life, Sam suggests resurrecting Wing’s pop career as a male idol but proves a victim of his own success as she quickly begins earning much more money than him and gains the upper hand in the relationship. 

Wing’s increasing masculinity leaves Sam feeling somewhat emasculated while forced into the “feminine” role previously occupied by Rose. Suddenly successful, Wing is offering to pay large sums of money to help Sam fulfil his dreams which only deepens his sense of shame in his inability to earn money for himself. Wing had insisted on living together in the main apartment, but now that she’s so busy suggests moving into Rose’s old flat downstairs so that they can, after all, have their own space. Sam had wanted it that way before, but now that it’s Wing who suggests it, he’s romantically anxious while simultaneously conflicted because he cannot acknowledge their relationship publicly as he is still uncomfortable with people assuming he is “gay”.

All of which is doubly confusing for Wing who is under increasing strain trying to straddle a gender binary. Not only is she trying to deal with Sam’s contradictory behaviour and resentment of his emasculation, but in growing into her masculine role finds herself questioning her sexuality in experiencing unexpected attraction towards other women and in particular the captivating Fan Fan (Anita Mui), a mysterious former pop star who has moved into the downstairs flat after spending many years abroad. Just as Sam had in the previous film, Wing struggles to accept her desires unable to reconcile falling in love with Fan Fan with her love for Sam while Fan Fan in turn falls for her mainly in her femininity in claiming that she has been looking for something kind and innocent that she no longer believed existed in the world. 

“Love can’t be explained,” Sam admits when talking to his decorators, a gay couple who ironically tell him how much it means to them to see a same-sex couple in the public eye, though Sam still refuses to acknowledge the relationship because he doesn’t want to be seen as “gay” and Wing is in any case a woman. Mirroring Sam’s relationship with the openly gay Auntie (Eric Tsang), Fan Fan’s assistant O (Theresa Lee) is a lesbian who is relentlessly courted by Fish (Jordan Chan) despite her constant rejections of him. He tries to present himself as female by shaving his legs and later crossdressing in order to win her heart, only to end up reaffirming O’s avowed homosexuality. For Wing, however, she has only a dilemma in being faced with a choice between her love for Fan Fan and that for Sam which seems as if it may have run its course just Sam’s love for Rose once did. 

Sam only really begins to understand his himself after a more mature discussion with Rose regarding the realities of their relationship, while Fan Fan effectively plays a similar role in sacrificing her own desire believing that Wing belongs with Sam but taking the new hope their love has given her back out into the world. Neatly inverting the first film’s conclusion, it’s Sam who has to make an active choice about what it is he wants though the ironic ending may suggest he doesn’t have much control over his destination either even if discovering he already has what he was looking for.

He’s a Woman, She’s a Man (金枝玉葉, Peter Chan, 1994)

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A frustrated composer in a moribund relationship with his former muse experiences a moment of existential confusion on feeling an unexpected attraction to his latest prospect whom he assumes to be male in Peter Chan’s hilarious meta comedy, He’s a Woman She’s a Man (金枝玉葉). Broadly progressive in its views of gender and sexuality, the film also takes aim at a growing obsession with celebrity in an increasingly consumerist culture. 

The heroine, Wing (Anita Yuen), is a case in point. She’s completely obsessed with the singer May Rose (Carina Lau) to the point that she almost lives her life vicariously through her. Rose’s successes are her successes, while she earns a few extra pennies peddling celebrity tat like Aaron Kwok’s used tissues. Rose meanwhile is riding high professionally by winning yet another reward, but her relationship with songwriter/manager Sam (Leslie Cheung) has clearly run its course. He’s become bored with the “celebrity” lifestyle and hasn’t written anything new in some time while unwilling to admit that he’s fallen out of love with Rose, refusing to take on new proteges because of his habit of falling in love with them.

That’s one reason he finally agrees to take on a male star, assuming there will be no danger of romantic conflict and intending to kick back against celebrity culture if ironically by creating an “everyman” sensation. But unbeknownst to him, Wing has had a male makeover and decided to enter the auditions in the hope of meeting her idols. Unexpectedly picked up for a recording contract during a spat between Rose and Sam, Wing finds herself having to keep up the act but is conflicted on fearing her presence is only deepening the rift between the “perfect couple” whose wedding it is her life goal to witness. 

Even before her makeover, Wing makes repeated references to her atypical gender presentation in lamenting her flat chest, especially in contrast with a rival celebrity hunter she nicknames “big boobs”. She takes lessons in performative masculinity from her roommate and best friend since primary school Yuri (Jordan Chan), who appears to have no romantic interest in her, and stuffs glow sticks down her trousers to make herself feel more “complete”. Yet despite all that, she is always forced to deny her seeming femininity with several people directly asking her if she is “gay” which is a more complicated question than it seems given that she’s a straight woman but currently living as a man. To find out for sure, Rose tries to seduce her in an attempt which is admittedly predatory and ends in a chase around the bed with Wing desperately trying to avoid being accidentally “outed” in an amorous moment. 

Nevertheless, there is a degree of romantic attraction in Wing’s obsession with Rose which is also a reflection of her internalised sense of shame in her atypical femininity as seen in her wide-eyed observation of Rose’s shadow dance as she slips into something more comfortable along with her admission that she always wanted to know what it felt like to touch a breast (because she feels she has none of her own). Even so, she begins to fall for Sam who is slowly being driven out of his mind with romantic confusion in being unable to reconcile his attraction to Wing with his heterosexuality. One of Wing’s closest associates whom he refers to as “Auntie” (Eric Tsang) is an openly gay man who asks him the all important question of whether of what’s really bothering him isn’t Wing’s ambiguous sexuality but his own. The question takes on a meta dimension in the knowledge that Cheung was himself bisexual but at that point not openly. Much as Sam explains, he might personally not have a problem with it but some people in the industry are very “sensitive about this kind of thing”.

Sam doesn’t know that Wing is “really” a woman, which might neatly explain his inexplicable attraction to her, but cannot begin to reconcile himself until he accepts that it “doesn’t matter what you are” because the fact remains that he loves her. Wing might make her final dash in more stereotypically female attire, but she does so in a voluminous white dress which, aside from its matrimonial connotations, further emphasises her lack of conventional femininity in her literal inability to manage it as she attempts to run while trying not to trip over herself. “Too much reality can really get up your nose,” Rose had complained in trying to keep her fantasy of a fairytale romance alive while internally accepting she can no longer be the “ordinary” girl Sam is looking for in a world of celebrity miasma and consumerist aspiration, finally reaching her own moment of self-acceptance just as Wing decides to shoot her shot right into Sam’s tender heart.

Trailer

Classmates (あゝ同期の桜, Sadao Nakajima, 1967)

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There had been films that dealt with the war before, but it was really with the generational shift that occurred among filmmakers in the mid-1960s that there was a greater willingness to reckon with the wartime past. Sadao Nakajima’s Classmates (あゝ同期の桜, Aa Doki no Sakura) was the first in a planned trilogy of war films at Toei, which was in other ways a studio that often leaned towards the right with its steady output of yakuza films, and most likely for that reason struggled to gain approval from studio heads. Taking its name from the military academy song, the film was inspired by a collection of essays put together from the letters and diaries kamikaze pilots had left behind. Nakajima had seen some of the letters sent back by the brother of a school friend, and reading them again on publication was determined to turn them into the film.

Nevertheless, only 25 years on from the end of the war it remained a sensitive topic. The film follows the men of the 14th class of reserve students who had previously had their draft notices deferred until they finished university but were now called up early because the war was going so badly. The majority of these men were allocated to kamikaze units and subsequently died in suicide attacks on US warships, though they received little in the way of training and mostly failed to hit their targets due to having limited fight experience. 

What might seem most surprising is that several of the men voice their opposition to the war along with the realisation that Japan is going to lose. Early on in training, one man deserts but the others are reminded that to do so amounts to treason and once caught, deserters will be executed by firing squad. This turns out not quite to be the case. Shiratori (Hiroki Matsukata), the resigned hero, encounters Taki (Mitsuki Kanemitsu) in Okinawa. where he’s working as ground staff. He’s insensible and appears to have lost his mind. The man working with him suggests that he was tortured so badly that it’s left him in a vacant state, though he’s still deployed for mindless tasks because they just don’t have the manpower.

Part of the reason for that is that they keep ordering people to die in a validation of the death cult that is militarism. On their arrival, the instructor tells the men he will have them all die, because dying for the emperor is their duty and destiny. The top brass insist this is the only way to win the war even though it’s counterproductive in that they’re running out of aircraft and skilled pilots even if one officer callously remarks that they have an endless supply of bodies. There’s also no real reason to send the planes up with two pilots as opposed to one, but they leave fully manned. The suicide missions are supposedly “voluntary”, but the men can’t really refuse due to a combination of peer pressure and military order.

When one pilot, Nanjo (Isao Natsuyagi), returns to base having been unable to reach his target, he’s immediately set upon by the others as a coward and a traitor. They accuse him of being afraid to die, leaving him feeling ashamed and frustrated by a sense of injustice while admitting that he didn’t want to die like a dog. He knows that he would not be able to go on living afterwards if he simply didn’t go through with it because the stigma of being a coward who let other men die so he could live would always be upon him. Eventually, he becomes so determined to prove himself that he insists on getting right back in his plane once it’s repaired and then blows himself up on the runway to prove a point.

Nanjo’s case is all the more poignant because he was a new father whose son was born after he was called up. He appears to have married quickly against his parents’ wishes and is now anxious that his family won’t accept his wife and child who will be left alone when he dies. His wife (Yoshiko Sakuma) desperately tries to see him to show him the baby, but manages only a few seconds before he’s forced to return to the barracks. Given a little more time, she brings a wedding dress for the impromptu ceremony they presumably skipped before, but ends up tearing it and giving Nanjo a strip as a kind of good-luck charm though like everything else it’s a gesture filled with futility.

It’s this sense of futility and resignation that seems to overtake Shiratori who knows he cannot escape his fate. To desert to is be killed anyway or to experience a spiritual death like Taki. He had introduced a friend, Hanzawa (Shinichi Chiba), to his sister and the two had become close, but he is forced to abruptly break up with her because he knows it’s unfair to string her along when he’s been sentenced to death. Reiko (Sumiko Fuji) will lose her brother and her boyfriend on the same day. Hanzawa and the other men visit a brothel on the night before their mission where they are treated as “gods”, though he sees only irony in the situation in which they are more like human sacrifices offered in prayer for an impossible victory. Their deaths will have no real meaning and are really only intended to instil fear in the enemy and weaken their morale rather than cause actual material damage to their fighting capability. Making use of stock footage, Nakajima freeze frames a plane in flight and points out at that point the men inside were still alive before cutting to a title card confirming the war ended just four months later. The title card at the beginning dedicated the film to the souls of those who died in the Pacific War, though it’s perhaps as quietly angry as it was permitted to be in 1967 in the senseless sacrifice of these men’s lives who were shamed, tricked, or forced at gunpoint into their cockpits and told they were disposable while those who stayed on the ground cheered and whooped at the grim spectacle of death.

Red Nails (홍이, Hwang Seul-gi, 2024)

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A not quite middle-aged woman watches as her mother takes an aerobics class with other similarly aged people at a nursing home. The attendant turns to her and remarks that it can’t have been an easy decision, leading us to think that she has reluctantly decided her mother may be better off living where she can be properly looked after. But Hong (Jang Sun) has actually arrived to take her mother home. Not because she’s had a change of heart, and not exactly because she’s having a hard time and can’t afford to pay for the home any more, but because she’s realised her estranged mother’s a cash cow and the only one she has left to tap.

Hwang Seul-gi’s complex drama Red Nails (홍이, Hong-i) never shies away from its heroine’s flaws even if it tries its best to empathise with her. Hong is clearly irresponsible with money. The piled up boxes in her living room hint that she may have fallen victim to a multi-level marketing scam, but whatever the root causes are, she’s pretty much bankrupt with the bailiffs about to be sent in to seize her goods due to her phenomenally large debts. Even so, we later see her going on shopping sprees as if she were trying to fill some sort of void through guilty consumerism that is really just punishing herself by making her situation even worse. 

Hong’s borrowed money from an ex-boyfriend who has since married someone else but continues to sleep with her while badgering Hong for his money back, claiming his wife’ll throw a fit if he doesn’t get it. Meanwhile, she’s engaged in a fantasy romance with a man from an app, Jin-woo, whom she misleads about her financial circumstances and later uses when she needs a free ride. Hong has a habit of taking advantage of people, including her mother’s old friend Hae-joo who agrees to watch her in the day. Hong often messes her around, staying out late without calling and just expecting Hae-joo is figure something out. Hae-joo eventually confronts her about her unreasonable behaviour while taking advantage of her free labour, but Hong tries to give her money as if that was the problem. Hae-joo is insulted, and bringing money into the equation only threatens to change the nature of the relationship. It makes Hae-joo feel cheap and used when she had been doing this as a friend because she cared about Seo-hee. 

Seo-hee, meanwhile, seems ambivalent about her new living standards and, at times, berates Hong complaining that she wishes she’d never been born. It’s not clear what happened in Hong’s childhood, but they evidently did not get on and still don’t now. Seo-hee wants to go home, complaining that there’s a thief in the house though whether or not she knows that Hong has been dipping into her savings to pay off her debts, she’s still aware that she brought home because she needed money rather than companionship. 

But then Hong is also lonely, and her romance with Jin-woo is an attempt to escape her disappointing circumstances. Her ex suggests she once dreamed of becoming a teacher, but is currently teaching a literacy class for a group of older woman at a local institute where she also cleans the toilets. She also has a second job directing traffic at a construction site where the foreman hates her, docking her pay for neglecting her duties by using her phone while on the job. She cannot her escape her debts through any legitimate means, though that hardly justifies stealing from her mother. 

Even so, it appears that on some level Hong wanted comfort and companionship along with her mother’s approval. As they live together, they begin to draw closer but at the same time it’s clear that they remember things differently, though whether Hong is right to blame Seo-hee’s dementia or has misremembered herself is destined to be an eternal mystery. Hong tries to fulfil her mother’s dream of lighting sparklers, but the pair are yelled by some kind of environmental officer and forced to put them out. Hong looks on forlornly as the glow fades away as if symbolising the flame going out of the relationship between the two women. Despite their growing closeness, there are some things that it seems can never really be made up and all Hong really has is a frustrated memory of a longed-for closeness that can never really be.

Red Nails screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (no subtitles)

YMCA Baseball Team (YMCA 야구단, Kim Hyun-seok, 2002)

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Kim Hyun-seok’s sporting comedy YMCA Baseball Team (YMCA 야구단, YMCA Yagudan) opens with sepia-tinted scenes of Korea in 1905 in which most people still wear hanbok and live little differently than their distant ancestors. Modernity is, however, coming as evidenced by the streetcar that runs through the centre of town even if it’s surrounded on both sides by unpaved ground. Reluctant scholar Hochang’s (Song Kang-ho) father (Shin Goo) complains that the cranes no longer stop in Seoul. Too many scholars have picked the wrong side, he says, but Hochcang counters him that these days you can get to Incheon in hour by train. Maybe the cranes are saying there’s no need to emulate them anymore. 

Hochang doesn’t want to be a scholar or take over his father’s school. His father wanted his brother to do that anyway, but he’s run off and joined the resistance to the Japanese. Just as Hochang discovers the new sport of baseball thanks to a pair of American missionaries and the pretty daughter of a diplomat, the Japanese further increase their dominance over Korea by forcing it to sign the Eulsa Treaty in which they effetively ceded their sovereignty and gave additional provisions for Japanese troops to remain in their nation.

Hochang had been playing football alone as his friend practised reading English before he kicked a ball into Jungrim’s (Kim Hye-soo) garden and found a baseball instead. The early scenes see the local population adopting this Western game in makeshift fashion, using paddles and tools as bats while putting festival masks on their faces in weaponising their culture to make this sport their own. In baseball, Hochung finds the vocation he hasn’t found in scholarship or anywhere else. As a child, he wanted to be a King’s Emissary, but the Korean Empire is drawing to a close and the position no longer exists. His battle is in part to be able to live the life he chooses rather than simply continue these ancestral traditions and be a teacher like his father. In a cute public event unveiling the team, children sing a song in which little boys sing about how they don’t want to be an admiral as their fathers wanted them to be but want be something else, while the girls don’t want to marry a powerful man as their mother’s advised, but would rather marry someone else. The joke is that they both want to be or be with the YMCA Baseball Team, which has, in its way come, to represent a new modernising Korea that is keeping itself alive by embracing the new.

To that extent, Jongrim herself comes to represent “Korea” in that Hochang uses his scholarly skills to write her a love scroll in beautiful calligraphy, but it somehow gets mistaken for her father’s will and read out at his funeral after he takes his own life to protest the Eulsa Treaty. Hochang’s heart felt and rather florid poem is then reinterpreted to reflect her father’s “love” for Korea which has been stolen from him by the Japanese. Jungrim and her Japanese-educated friend Daehyun (Kim Joo-hyuk) are secretly in the Resistance and later forced into hiding when Hochung’s friend Kwangtae (Hwang Jung-min) figures out that it was Daehyun who attacked his politician father for betraying the nation by letting the Eulsa treaty pass. 

The baseball team becomes another resistance activity, with Jongrim admitting that the people “became one and felt proud” every time the team won. When they discover that their training ground has been commandeered by Japanese troops, they end up agreeing to play them to reclaim their lost territory. But the Japanese still have superiority over an underdeveloped Korea as seen in the opening footage as they started playing baseball 30 years earlier. Just as Hochang didn’t want to be a scholar, general’s son Hideo (Kazuma Suzuki) didn’t want to be a soldier either, but in a world of rising militarism he had little choice. His father thinks baseball’s a silly waste of time too, and like Hochang’s father is secretly proud of his son when he’s doing well, but is very clear that this game cannot be lost because the great Japanese Empire cannot be seen to lose to the nation it is currently in the process of subjugating. The day is saved, ironically, by Hochang’s royal seal, given to him by Jongrim, who seems to have returned his affections even if she had a greater cause. The baseball team even allows a snooty former nobleman to accept that class divisions no longer exist and he can in fact be friends with a peasant, especially when they’re uniting in a common goal like kicking out the Japanese. Sadly, the Japanese turned out to be not such good sportsmen after all, and predictably sore losers, but Hochang has at least found a way to resist and fight for a Korea that is free of both onerous tradition and colonial oppression.

YMCA Baseball Team screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Commission (커미션, Shin Jae-min, 2025)

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What is it about art that conjures such frustration? Dan-kung (Kim Hyeon-soo) is consumed by resentment and deep-seated feelings of inferiority while certain that she will forever be trapped beneath the shadow of her sister, Ju-kyung (Kim Yong-ji), a popular webtoon artist. Dan-kyung dreams of being a webtoon artist too, but she’s convinced herself she isn’t good enough, mainly due to a childhood incident when she won first prize in a competition but only after her sister had made her mark on her painting. 

The tragedy might be in a way that it never seems to have occurred to the sisters that they could simply have worked together and that even if someone else helps you, that doesn’t mean that the work is any less your own. After all, most manhwa artists have assistants who do the bulk of the actual drawing. Ju-kyung has them herself, as does the kindly Mok, a former master taking his first steps into a new digital world. Mok sees potential in Dan-kyun, even if her colleagues haze and bully her and she only got the job thanks to Ju-kung’s connections. He’s working on a space epic titled Ozymandias that’s an attempt to make up for a project that never got to see the light of day having been suppressed during the authoritarian era. 

Dan-kyung uses the title of Mok’s lost manhwa, Taiji, as her username on a Japanese dark web forum that her sleazy colleague introduces her to where people pay vast sums to commission extreme artwork. The most obvious meaning of “Taiji” in Japanese is “foetus” (胎児), though it can also mean “extermination” (退治) as in of pests or demons, or “confrontation’ (対峙). It’s not clear that Dan-kyung would know this, nor that Mok intended the title of his manhwa to be read as Japanese or what he might have meant by it if he did. There is however, something in the idea that Dan-kyun still taking shape, as yet unborn just like Mok’s never released manwha. She defines herself in confrontation with her sister, as if she were the unborn twin forever languishing in darkness. Ju-kyung’s hit manhwa is titled Day and Night, and might itself hint at the contrast between them. While Jun-kyung enjoys the trappings of success, Dan-kyung finds the key to her art in her internal darkness, producing her best work drawing images of vile and sickening things for the benefit of her online fans. Her success mirrors Ju-kyun’s even it’s underground where only those in the know can see.

It gives her a new sense of confidence that would allow her to make progress in the mainstream world too, if her self-destructive actions didn’t have a habit of ruining things. Ju-kyung has a point when she describes Dan-kyung as a kind of jinx who ruins everything and everyone around her. Her biggest fan online is calls Hannya (Kim Jin-woo), which is the name for a demonic noh mask representing a woman who has become consumed by her jealousy. As Dan-kyun gets deeper into the online world, it becomes more difficult to tell if any of this is real or merely a symptom of her delusions. Hannya talks to her in a mix of Japanese and Korean, their androgynous quality inviting some uncomfortable readings but also echoing Dan-kyun’s nature as something as yet incomplete or a part of a separated whole. 

Another teacher at the art academy where Dan-kyun had been working bluntly states that some of the students aren’t worthy of teaching because they’re afraid to push themselves in case they find out that they’re not good enough. Ju-kyung initially seems sympathetic, telling Dan-kyung that understanding your limits is also a “talent” while seemingly encouraging her by getting her the job with Mok, but Dan-kyung later wonders if it isn’t Ju-kyung who is afraid and actively standing in her way because she can’t bear the thought that Dan-kyung might actually be better than her. Mok tells that “perseverance” is a “talent” too, though his frustrated apprentice who lost out to “genius” Ju-kyung, speaks of it more like purgatory. He knows deep down that he doesn’t have what it takes to make it, and doesn’t think Dan-kyung does either, but they keep at because of that vague hope that just maybe it’ll happen one day. But Mok described Ju-kyung’s talent as curse too, correctly predicting the paralysing fear and self-fulfilling prophecy that one day it’ll just abandon her and she won’t have anything to say any more.

The irony is, however, that every time Dan-kyung makes one of her bad decisions, something good would have happened anyway. The harsh teacher whom she wronged after they won an award she wanted, mellows once she gets used to success and apologises to Dan-kyung for “overreacting”. Dan-kyung discovers she’s actually getting a job she thought she lost a little while after plotting revenge and ruining the opportunity. Things would have worked out for her, if only she’d had a little more patience and self-confidence. It’s true enough that she’s motivated by spite and resentment, pettily striking back at those that have what she wants or have caused her to feel humiliated, but not really thinking through the consequences and assuming that everything will go the way she wants it to once she’s removed this one piece of the puzzle or replaced it with one of her own.

In unmasking herself, she reclaims her identity from Ju-kyung and finally becomes whole while echoing Mok’s words that Taiji needs readers, as if her art would remain forever unborn if no one ever got to see it. The pain in her wrist hints at the physical labour of creation, one that a more successful artist may no longer need to endure, while in other ways she is in the process of giving birth to herself. But Dan-kyung’s vision of art may also be flawed in her need for other people to see it, fixating on the fame and acclaim, even the money that comes with it, rather than in the simple art of creation in which it wouldn’t matter if her art sat in a desk drawer for the next 40 years because she had made it and made it for herself. Hannya has their “art” too, as grim as it may be, though aside from their first piece, they seem to hide the results. Another tortured artist, Dan-kyung has turned inward in bitterness and resentment, but wreaks her vengeance externally while otherwise continuing to dream of a mainstream success that may in itself be merely artifice.

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hero (영웅, JK Youn, 2022)

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An Jung-geun is a key figure in modern Korean history whose story has been dramatised numerous times and given rise to its own legend. JK Youn’s Hero (영웅, Yeong-ung) is, however, the first movie musical devoted to his life and adapted from a stage hit that has been running since 2009. It has to be said that structurally the musical owes a fair amount to Les Misérables with a dramatic first act closer that is more than a little reminiscent of One Day More, while a number about meat buns echoes the kind of comic relief provided by Master of the House, though the rhythm might hint at Sweeney Todd’s meditation on pie making.

It is certainly out of keeping with the intensity surrounding it as the focus is, after all, on an attempt to stop the Japanese colonising Korea and practising even more cruelty. An Jung-geun abandons his family in the early part of the film, but this isn’t seen as a moral failing or irresponsibility so much as evidence of his devotion to the cause that he sacrifices a peaceful life as a husband and father. His revolutionary activity is furthermore filial because his mother encourages it, later writing him a letter while he is imprisoned urging him not to appeal his sentence but accept his death as a martyr. To appeal would mean accepting the Japanese’s authority in begging for his life. Jung-geun had wanted to be tried not as a murderer, but as a soldier fighting a war and therefore sees his trial as illegitimate. He insists he is a political prisoner, a rousing number outlines 15 reasons why the man he assassinated, Ito Hirobumi Japan’s first prime minister and resident-general of Korea, deserved to die which include dethroning the Emperor Gojong, assassinating the Korean Empress Myeongseong (Lee Il-hwa), lying to the world that Korea wanted Japanese protection, plunder, and massacring Koreans (all of which the Japanese had done). 

It’s the assassination of Empress Myeongseong that motivates the film’s secondary heroine, Seol-hee (Kim Go-eun), a former palace made now operating as a resistance spy in Japan under the name Yukiko. Seol-hee’s impassioned songs have curiously homoerotic quality and take the place of a central romance which the piece otherwise lacks except in the tentative relationship between Jin-joo, sister of one of An’s closest men, and the youthful recruit Dong-ha. Even if “Myeongseong” is effectively “Korea”, Seol-hee’s passionate intensity is quite surprising while her motivation is more revenge for her murdered mistress than it is saving the nation and eliminating Japanese influence. In this, her arc might not quite make sense in that her final actions almost derail Jeun-guen’s mission in putting the Japanese on high alert. 

But at the same time the film leans in far harder on Jeun-geun’s religiosity than other tellings on his story in which his faith presents only a minor conflict as evidenced by his offering an apology to God for killing Ito while justifying his actions as those of a righteous man in the courtroom. While placing him at odds with the left-wing ideology of other Independence activists, his religiosity is aligned with his humanitarian decision to release Japanese prisoners rather than execute them, abiding by the commonly held rules of war while his men are eager for blood. The decision backfires, but is depicted more favourably than in the narratively more complex Harbin and Jung-geun is otherwise an uncomplicated hero who makes no wrong decisions and never fails even if he is at the mercy of the Japanese.

As such, the musical sticks to the familiar beats of Jung-geun’s story from the Japanese counterstrike to his talent for calligraphy and the letter from his mother instructing him to go bravely to his death. Anchored by an incredibly strong vocal performance from Chung Sung-hwa who originated the role on stage, the film portrays Jeun-geung as the hero of the title, defiant to the end and thereafter wronged by the Japanese who buried his body in an unknown location and prevented him from ever returning home to a free Korea. It also glosses over the possibility that Ito’s assassination may actually have accelerated the course of Japan’s annexation which it failed to prevent and otherwise had little lasting effect. Nevertheless, despite its overt patriotism, the film does present the rousing spectacle of Jung-geun’s embodiment of the good son of the nation who fought hard for a liberated Korea he never got to see.

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

Trailer (English subtitles)

Living the Land (生息之地, Huo Meng, 2025)

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When a way of life has gone on unchanged for centuries, the idea that it might soon disappear seems unthinkable, but change is indeed coming to the village in Huo Meng’s elegiac drama, Living the Land (生息之地, shēngxī zhī dì). Set concretely in 1991, the economic reforms and impact of the One Child Policy are beginning to make themselves felt, while incoming mechanisation begins to destabilise the rural environment. Farmers will always have to work the land, one utters in exasperation as a local man employs a large American tractor he says is capable of doing the work of a hundred villagers, while other young men decide it’s time to go south and seek their fortunes in the factories of a new era.

Even so, the film opens with a literal digging up of the past. 10-year-old Chuang’s (Wang Shang) great aunt has died, and his uncle and grandfather want to exhume his great uncle from the makeshift grave he was placed in after getting on the wrong side of the authorities so they can be buried together. Villagers talk cryptically about those who didn’t make it through the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, but otherwise continue living their traditional lives in harmony with the landscape. The irony is that Chuang is a left behind child whose parents are working away in the city, but the reason he’s not with them is because he’s a secret. He’s their third child and they can’t afford to pay the fine for violating the One Child Policy while his father works for the government and would probably be fired if they found out.

And so, Chuang is living with his maternal grandparents while his siblings are with their parents. The fact he keeps wetting the bed at a comparatively late age is likely down to this sense of rootless anxiety. He doesn’t know if he should say this is his home village because he has a different surname to the people he’s living with. While his grandfather plots out burial spaces for the rest of the family, he leaves Chuang out, and when the boy asks why, he says he doesn’t belong here because his name isn’t Li. He’s mainly been cared for by his aunt, Xiuying (Zhang Yanrong) but she soon comes under pressure to marry, especially when a wealthy local man takes a liking to her and her tentative romance with the local school teacher falls flat when he too goes south without her. 

Xiuying attends the regular pregnancy screenings on her aunt’s behalf to hide the fact that she is pregnant with an unauthorised third child, which is one way in which the village attempts to get around these restrictions imposed from outside which threaten their way of life and livelihoods. They need more children to help work the land, while they’re finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet selling wheat and bricks. Half of their wheat crops are destroyed when oil prospectors arrive with some in the village excited about the prospect of any being found, believing they’ll all be rich or that factories will open offering new jobs so the young won’t leave the community. But the prospecting leads to tragic consequences and seems unlikely to prove rewarding for the locals. 

When Chuang’s great-grandmother is interviewed by the authorities, she tells them that she doesn’t actually have a name. Before her marriage, she was just “third sister” and after that someone’s wife, mother, grandmother. The authorities don’t like that, and someone suggests calling her “Mrs Li Wang”, but there are a few of those already so she ends up becoming “Third Mrs Li Wang”, which doesn’t seem like a tremendous improvement. The lives women are continually devalued in the traditional, patriarchal community in which they are still chiefly valued for the ability to give birth, which they now can’t do because of the One Child Policy. Xiuying is bullied into marrying a man she doesn’t like, and then is mistreated by him because she didn’t bleed on their wedding night so he doesn’t believe she was a virgin likely because of the rough treatment she received during the pregnancy exam when they suddenly began to suspect she wasn’t a married mother of two. Chuang gets left behind again as the village slowly depletes and mechanisation forever disrupts this very traditional way of life, though the elegiac music suggests that even those who went south didn’t fare all that much better in amid the economic instability of the 90s reforms which destroyed not only communities and ways of life our very relationship with the land itself.

Living the Land screens as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

SAVE (생명의 은인, Bang Mi-ri, 2025)

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There’s an old adage that if you save someone’s life, you become responsible for it, but equally perhaps some have come to expect reciprocity and the act of being saved places you into a debt you can never hope to repay. There are definitely different kinds of salvation on offer in Bang Mi-ri’s empathetic maternal drama Save (생명의 은인, Saengmyeong-ui eunin), but each of them comes with a cost both literal and spiritual in trying to draw lines in the complex interplay of guilt and gratitude.

As the film opens, Se-jeong (Kim Pureum) is being interviewed for a television programme about young people leaving care. The interview is being film at the hair salon where she has been working for the last few months in the run-up to graduating high school to prepare for “self-reliance”, but it’s obvious that one of her colleagues resents the intrusion and does not want to appear on camera with her. The young woman later rolls her eyes, claiming that she understands her circumstances but that’s she’s causing too much inconvenience, while her boss is unsympathetic when she’s distracted by the difficulties she’s facing and burns herself on a pair of curling tongs that she subsequently drops to the floor. 

Se-jeong’s friend from the children’s home gives up on studying at a university in Seoul because of the cost and goes to one locally instead, using the settlement money they’re given on leaving to buy designer clothes and telling her new classmates that she’s from a wealthy family to avoid the stigma of having no parents. Se-jeong has no such recourse, but it’s obvious that she’s bright and conscientious. She often has a notebook with her to jot down advice and instructions and is very thorough when searching for an apartment that’s within her means but ticks all of her boxes. Nevertheless, she is naive and has no one to help her, so it’s no wonder that she gets scammed out of her money by accepting an offer that’s too good to be true and falling for a landlord’s false reassurances that it’s fine to rent privately rather than through an estate agent because scammers only go for high value apartments. All of that does, however, leave Se-jeong even more isolated with no money or place to stay forcing her to rely on a woman who approaches her claiming to be the person who saved her from a fire at a home for single mothers in which her birth mother died.

Se-jeong wants to believe her, even if her friend advises her not to. Eun-sook (Song Sun-mi) too is after her settlement money, she claims for an operation to treat her lung cancer. “Can’t you save me this time?” She manipulatively asks, as if she meant for this debt to be repaid in kind. But Se-jeong has to wonder if she’s really telling the truth or is also trying to con her. Isn’t it a little too convenient how her “saviour” resurfaced in her life at just this moment?  Eun-sook can also be quite scary and knows a suspicious amount about how to manipulate social media and root out someone who values their reputation in the eyes of others and is on some level ashamed of making their money by deceiving people. In any case, Eun-sook offers the source of maternal warmth that Se-jeong has been craving while dropping hints about her birth mother and early life that further add to her credibility.

But on one level at least, Eun-sook doesn’t really want “saving” and isn’t looking for the same kind of salvation as Se-jeong who is looking for a new home while otherwise presented only with “self-reliance” and no other way to anchor herself in a society which is hostile to people like her and offers very little in the way of support. When she graduates high school, Se-jeong and her friend look on as the other girls take photos of their families with no one there to celebrate with them, except for Eun-sook who unexpectedly arrives to fill this vacant space. What she may be trying to do is save herself spiritually in saving Se-jeong, repaying an old debt and giving her the roots she needs to establish herself in adulthood. Her constant coughing is a symbolic reflection of her trauma from the fire that suggests she never really escaped it. Yet what she tells Se-jeong is that there’s no need for her to feel guilty. Her survival, just like their meeting, is just something that happened like fate or destiny, and she has a right to live her life to its fullest. Poignant in its implications of maternal sacrifice and intergenerational healing, Bang’s moving drama is infinitely forgiving of its flawed antagonist and suggests that, in the end, salvation is found only in saving others. 

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