Tag: Bae Je-ki

Recalled (내일의 기억, Seo Yu-min, 2021)

Posted on by

A traumatised woman finds herself trapped in an uncertain reality in Seo Yu-min’s puzzle box neo noir, Recalled (내일의 기억, Naeileui Gieok). Situating itself in a world of future ruins, Seo’s tragic tragic tale of existential mistrust is as its sci-fi-inflected Korean title “Memories of Tomorrow” might imply also a paradoxical exploration of the importance of dreams and the belief that other lives are possible while the heroine struggles to piece together the shards of her fractured identity only to realise there are some truths it may be better never to learn. 

30-something Soo-Jin (Seo Yea-ji) wakes up in hospital after an accident she has no memory of to realise that she has no idea who the extremely upset man at her bedside could be, or who she herself is for that matter. The nurses ask her if she recognises her husband, Ji-hoon (Kim Kang-woo), which she doesn’t but evidently does feel some degree of closeness to him as he continues to care for her with the utmost devotion. On leaving the hospital, he takes her home to a well-appointed flat in an affluent area and though she tries to restart her life from zero she can’t escape her sense of anxiety and begins having what she regards as premonitions of impending disaster centring on two other apartments one with two small children and the other a teenage girl and an intense middle-age man. Her doctor tells her that she is most likely hallucinating because of her brain injury, while even Ji-Hoon snaps at her that she’s obviously unwell and ought to take things easy. Nevertheless, Soo-Jin can’t simply ignore the increasing uncanniness of the world around her especially when she begins to discover discrepancies in the backstory she’s been fed by Ji-Hoon and the evidence presenting itself about her former life. 

Perceptive policeman Ki-sang (Park Sang-wook) himself hints that there might be something not quite right with Soo-jin’s life in remarking that her apartment looks like a model home seconds after walking in and then noticing a few other details that set off alarm bells in his admittedly suspicious mind. Meanwhile, he’s investigating the theft of materials from a nearby abandoned building site for a never completed block of luxury condos suggestively titled “Dream Town”, a project cancelled when the architecture firm Ji-hoon worked for went bust. The foreman who reported the theft remarks that the apartments pre-sold like hotcakes, but even in the building where Soo-jin lives a banner outside advertises a “big sale on unsold units” hinting at a kind of economic hubris or perhaps suggesting that the “dream” they’re offering of luxury living is either unrealisable for most or simply undesirable. According to Ji-hoon, Soo-jin wanted to emigrate to Canada for a quiet life surrounded by nature hoping to escape the unsatisfying present for an ironic return to the pastoral past. 

Soo-jin meanwhile struggles to orient herself having only Ji-hoon as an arbiter of truth but unable to trust him, doubting not just his identity but her own, while burdened by prophetic visions which may be less missives from the future than intrusions from the traumatic past. As she later puts it, her Canadian dream became a memory which sustained, both beacon of hope and escapist fantasy in its promise of idyllic peace and happiness. There is however a cruel irony in the suggestion that good and bad all this is happening to her because of love and its competing desires for salvation and destruction, while she only blames herself consumed with misplaced guilt and confused by an imperfect grip on objective reality. “Our memories await us there” she’s ironically advised of her Canadian dream, urged to abandon this failing reality for a new one exchanging her traumatic memories for those not yet made which in a sense already exist and have only to be attained. The final revelations may therefore be somewhat cruel as Soo-jin gathers the shards of her broken past to come to a long delayed understanding of herself, but Seo’s finely crafted puzzle box mystery does at least afford her the opportunity of reclaiming her identity while resolving the multi-layered trauma of her life in a patriarchal society ruled by personal greed. 

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Anarchist from Colony (박열, Lee Joon-ik, 2017)

Posted on by 1 Comment

anarchist from colony posterLee Joon-ik follows his poetical mediation on the Korean independence movement, Dong-ju, with an equally philosophical, if not quite as rigorous, tale of rebellion and tragedy inspired by real life revolutionary anarchist, Park Yeol. Where Dong-ju was a tale of a world in in black and white, Anarchist from Colony (박열, Park Yeol) is one of glorious colour and the strange joy of pithily rejecting an oppressor’s authority. The oppressor’s authority is, however, infinite and no amount of anarchy will be enough to evade it even if there may be long term advantages in losing a battle in grand style.

Park Yeol (Lee Je-hoon) is a Korean left wing agitator living in Tokyo and earning a living as a rickshaw driver. He is also a hero to local Koreans and has gained a lot of fans (many of them female) thanks to his poetry including his latest entitled “Damn Dog” which laments his lowly status as an oppressed Korean man. One of his many fans, Fumiko Kaneko (Choi Hee-seo) – a Japanese woman who spent some time in Korea as a child, manages to work her way into his heart and becomes both a lover and an integral part of his revolutionary movement known as The Revolt.

In 1923, The Great Kanto Earthquake caused wide scale destruction and general chaos in the capital. Martial law was instituted, but a rumour soon spread that Korean insurrectionists were using the confusion to fuel their revolutionary ambitions, poisoning wells, committing arson, and plotting to assassinate the Emperor and his son. Of course, the rumours were baseless but led to a citywide pogrom in which around 6000 Koreans are thought to have been murdered both by ordinary people and by the army. Hoping to avoid the violence, Park decides he might be better off turning himself in to the police, but even police cells are not free of vigilante justice.

Unlike many recent films set during the colonial period, Anarchist from Colony is not particularly interested in demonising the Japanese. Generally speaking, the Japanese government are depicted as a collection of buffoons ill equipped to deal with the unexpected disaster of the earthquake and obsessed with rules, protocol, and Emperor worship. The major antagonist is a moustache twirling idiot and committed racist nursing a grudge against Koreans over a career setback to do with the suppression of the March 1, 1919  protest which kickstarted the Korean Independence Movement. The other officials mostly regard Mizuno (Kim In-woo) as an embarrassment, calling him out on his obvious racism and attempting to circumvent his machinations but more often than not failing to successfully outmanoeuvre him.

Having been partly responsible for the massacre in failing to stop the racist rantings of Mizuno and co, the government are eager to suppress all knowledge of it and distance themselves from anything that could make them look bad on the international stage. In this Mizuno makes a serious miscalculation when he decides to fit up the most popular Korean political activist he can get his hands on as a “traitor” and have him tried and executed as an example to the others. Park is wise to this scheme right away and decides to play along even if he knows it may eventually cost him his life. In fact, he almost hopes it will because not only will he lend weight to the cause of independence through his own martyrdom, but it will be much harder for the government to suppress news of the massacre with him on trial for his supposed terrorist activities which are being touted as its cause.

Yet the tale is framed not so much as suppressed revolution but ill fated love in the tragic romance of Park and Kaneko. The mini band of anarchists are a surprisingly cheerful bunch for hardline leftists, and Park and Kanenko’s intense bond is one of both political solidarity and true affection. Being anarchists through and through, they do not believe in marriage but agree to live together after signing a contract of cohabitation in which they mutually affirm their loyalty to each other and their cause. When Park is arrested, Kaneko turns herself in and follows him despite his pleas with her not to. The couple remain fiercely together to the end presenting a united front delighting in mocking their joint show trial even knowing they may soon be heading for the gallows.

This strange kind of lightness and dada-esque surrealism is an odd fit for the grim tale at hand. Lee mostly glosses over the wider implications of the massacre aside from minor references to longstanding prejudices such as Park’s beating by a customer who has short changed him and the vigilante gang’s repeated use of a particular phrase to flag up Korean accents. The overriding sense of flippancy undercuts the seriousness of Park’s plight and ultimately robs it of its power as his struggle is played for broad comedy rather than subtle satire. Perhaps overly ambitious, Lee’s reframing of of Park’s story as surrealist vaudeville romance never quite takes off, sacrificing passion for laughs but finding that they ring hollow surrounded by so much suppressed terror.

Screened at the London East Asia Film Festival 2017.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Battleship Island (군함도, Ryoo Seung-Wan, 2017)

Posted on by 4 Comments

battleship island posterKorean cinema has been in a reflective mood of late. The ongoing series of colonial era dramas have sometimes leaned towards uncomfortable and uncompromising nationalism but among the more recent, there has also been an attempt to ask more serious questions about collaboration and capitulation of ordinary people living under a brutal and often cruel regime. While Age of Shadows dramatised this particular problem through the conflicted figure of a former resistance fighter turned Japanese military police offer, The Battleship Island (군함도, Goonhamdo) goes further in its depiction of those who dedicated themselves entirely to the Japanese Empire and were willing to oppress their fellow Koreans to do so. That is not to ignore the hellish conditions which define the very idea of Hashima as an off shore labour camp where depravity rules, exploitation is hidden, and the camp commander is free to run his ship however he sees fit.

In early 1945 Korea is still under Japanese colonial rule and ordinary Koreans are liable for conscription into the Imperial Japanese army whether they like it or not. Gang-ok (Hwang Jung-min) and his daughter Sohee (Kim Soo-ahn) are members of a popular jazz band but Gang-ok has a habit of getting himself into trouble and so they are tricked into getting on a boat to Japan hoping for a safer, more lucrative life. Where they end up is Hashima – otherwise known as “Battleship Island”. Gang-ok and Sohee are separated with Gang-ok stripped of his musical instruments and Sohee, who is only a child, carted off with the other women destined for the “comfort station”.

Ryoo wastes little time demonstrating the immense evil buried in places like Hashima. A deep seam coal mine in the middle of the sea, the island is a fortress prison from which escape is impossible. Early on, three small boys decide to flee after their friend is killed in a cave-in only for one to be shot and the other two drowned by the lazy soldiers of a Japanese patrol boat who couldn’t be bothered to fish them out of the water. The miners are beaten, starved, tortured and manipulated into submission knowing that capitulation is their best route to survival. Not only are these men the subjects of forced labour, they are also made liable for the “costs” involved in their own enslavement with the bill for their transportation, food, clothes, and tools deducted from their “wages” which are supposed to be paid into their bank accounts for access on release. Those killed whilst working are supposed to receive compensation for their families but as will later be revealed, systematic corruption means their families may not even know their loved ones are dead let alone that they are being denied the money rightfully owed to them.

Things get even worse for little Sohee who is forced into a kimono and smothered with makeup to “entertain” some of the Japanese officers on the island. She manages to buy herself some time when she realises the Korean record the camp commander puts on to “comfort” the “comfort women” is one she is actually singing on. This new discovery earns her and her father a slightly improved status in the camp though she may not be safe for long. Gang-ok has already reverted to his tried and tested methods for getting out of sticky situations, making himself a kind of camp fixer aided by his ability to speak Japanese.

The Korean prisoners are represented by a former resistance leader, Yoon Hak-chul (Lee Kyoung-young), who offers rousing speeches in public but privately is not quite all he seems. Gang-ok gets himself mixed up in a Resistance operation run by an OSS (Song Joong-ki) plant on site to rescue Yoon who eventually uncovers several inconvenient truths which make his mission something of a non-starter. Yoon’s empty rhetoric and self serving grandeur represent the worst of the spiritual crimes discovered on Hashima but there is equal ire for the turncoat Koreans who act as enforcers for the Japanese, issuing beatings and siding with their oppressors in the desperation to escape their oppression. Tragically believing themselves to have switched sides, the turncoats never realise that the Japanese hold them in even lower regard than those they have betrayed.

It is hard to avoid the obvious nationalistic overtones as the Japanese remain a one dimensional evil, smirking away as they run roughshod over human rights, prepare to barter little girls and send boys into dangerous potholes all in the name of industry. At one point Gang-ok cuts an Imperial Japanese flag in half to make the all important ramp which will help the captive Koreans escape the island before being summarily murdered to destroy evidence of Japanese war crimes which is a neat kind of visual symbolism, but also very on the nose. Once again, the message is that Koreans can do impossible things when they work together, as the impressively staged, horrifically bloody finale demonstrates, but as Ryoo also reminds us there no “heroes”, only ordinary people doing the best they can in trying times. 

Currently on limited UK cinema release!

Original trailer (English subtitles)