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.
Windows on Worlds 