Tag: Korean

Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Lee Jang-ho, 1985)

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“The commoners get to have all the fun” a lady in waiting laments to her mistress in Lee Jang-ho’s historical drama set in the reign of good king Sejeong, Er Woo Dong: The Entertainer (어우동, Eo Udong). It is however the titular heroine Eoudong’s (Lee Bo-hee) determination to enjoy herself that becomes a threat to the social order, not only in her ability to subvert the Confucianist philosophies of the era by making men her playthings but doing so with those not of noble birth. 

Legends seem to surround Euodong, a little more of her history revealed with each step in the investigation into the murder of a man she had slept with at a festival. The man had attempted to rape her, but Eoudong was soon able to gain the upper hand in the situation, realising that he is a servant boy who often visited her home. She sleeps with him willingly, dominating him by getting on top and making it about her pleasure and agency rather than his. Soon after she leaves, however, the boy is killed by an assassin apparently hired by her cruel and perverse husband, who is technically the king’s uncle, to tidy up after her. 

Set in 1479, the film is clear in its criticism of the feudal order while insisting that it is the nobles who are the most constrained because they must act by these arcane codes to which the commoners are not subject. The commoners revel at their festival, something more or less forbidden in the revered word of the court and most particularly for a woman like Euodong who craves freedom and excitement, longing to fly like a bird. People of often say of her that should have been born a commoner where her behaviour would not be regarded as so deeply problematic to the social order in its direct attack on notions of class and gender. Though she herself is niece to the prime minister, an assassin (Ahn Sung-ki) is later hired to neuter the threat she poses though there is a kind of care in the unusual request, instructing that death should come suddenly and without pain. Afterwards, the assassin should be sure to bury her in her beautiful place. 

The assassin, however also has a painful past in which in which he was quite literally castrated for a similar kind of transgression of class boundaries having become friends with a young noblewoman. While he lost his penis, his friend lost his tongue so that he would never speak of what happened rendering them both outcasts left with no option but to serve the system that had harmed them by becoming spies and assassins. Eoudong’s rebellion is towards this same system, a system in which women are regarded as worthless if they do not serve their proper function. Married at an early age, some recount that Eoudong was once cheerful but less so after her marriage. Her husband rarely visited her and in fact took a concubine but she was still blamed for the “failure” to conceive a child and threatened with the shame of being sent back to her birth family. In this era, a woman was forbidden from remarrying even in widowhood while it was relatively easy for a man to divorce his wife. Simply “talking back” was enough grounds to send a woman packing. 

The opening and closing text reminds us that the feudal era was “the hardest time for Korean women” if also perhaps inviting us to consider what our times are like too, insisting that Eoudong lives on in the hearts of oppressed women as one who fiercely resisted the constraints of her era. Lee roots the corruption firmly in the king, who is indeed the patriarch of a nation and presider over an oppressive social order founded on shame and misogyny as a means of maintaining male power. Coloured with the softcore excesses of ‘80s Korean cinema, Lee nevertheless signals the crushing austerity of noble life which slowly erodes the soul in robbing it of emotional fulfilment or individuality saving the artiest of his sex scenes for that between the liberated woman and an emasculated man each betrayed by the society in which they live and seeking the only escape that it presents itself to them. 

Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Park Hoon-jung, 2020)

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Sometimes being too good at your job can be a definite liability. So it is for the hero of Park Hoon-jung’s melancholy gangster noir, Night in Paradise (낙원의 밤, Nagwonui bam). Park’s worldview is often nihilistic and sometimes downright unpleasant, though it’s a sense of fatalistic sadness that dominates this otherwise over familiar tale of a noble gangster cruelly misused by those who choose not to obey their shared code and thereafter finding himself on a dark path towards if not exactly redemption then at least an inevitable ending. 

Rising foot soldier Tae-gu (Uhm Tae-goo) has found himself in the middle of an old-fashioned gang war, serving an ambitious boss, Yang (Park Ho-san), who has unwisely decided to press into territory operated by the well established Bukseong gang. Getting some of his guys back after being kidnapped by Bukseong and held in an apartment block where the community is currently protesting the take over and demolition by gangster redevelopers, Tae-gu is told by his opposing number that Yang is a crazy upstart who would be a nobody without him and that he made a mistake turning down a job offer from Bukseong boss Doh. Tae-gu is however an old school mobster loyal to his gang which is why he doesn’t stop to think things through when someone close to him is killed in a car accident in which he assumes he was the intended target, believing Doh is striking a low blow. Encouraged by Yang, he meets with Doh in person and daringly knocks him off at a swimming pool sauna escaping through a window in the nude. Yang arranges to send him to Jeju Island to lay low before moving on possibly to Russia, but Yang has also been engaging in a failed pincer movement which left them all in hot water after failing to take out Doh’s no. 2, Ma. 

As the title might hint, even the island “paradise” of Jeju is not free of death and crime as Tae-gu discovers after bonding with their contact, Kuto (Lee Ki-young), a fixer smuggling guns from Russian mobsters hidden inside consignments of fish. Like Tae-gu’s sister, Kuto’s niece Jae-yeon (Jeon Yeo-been) is suffering from an undisclosed terminal illness that seems to have few obvious symptoms but has left her with suicidal tendencies. Kuto’s decision to take Tae-gu in is motivated by his desire for money to take Jae-yeon to America for treatment though she and Tae-gu are also much the same both having lost people close to them because of their proximity to the gangster world while he and Kuto search for ways to make up for the harm their lives of violence has caused. 

Jae-yeon is quick to remind Tae-gu that she will soon be dead and that therefore nothing really matters and her life has no meaning while he perhaps as a gangster feels something similar that his life ended the day he first picked up a gun yet there are also ways in which he must act in satisfaction of his code. His tragedy is that he’s operating under a misapprehension, blindly trusting in the wrong people when the truth is painfully obvious to all but him.

Park inserts a series of ironic pillow shots of the idyllic Jeju night scene with comforting lights swinging from tropical trees and gentle waves rolling on the horizon, before closing with a series of eerie daytime shots of familiar locations now devoid of people as if this were a hell our heroes had recently been haunting, ghosts of a violent landscape. His fight scenes are visceral yet also occasionally cartoonish, several taking place in the confined space of a car expertly framed by Park as the heroes fight desperately for life while constrained by their environment. A high octane chase through an airport with its ubiquitous escalators soon gives way to an impressive motorway-bound set piece with an unexpected resolution, the gangsters later scattering on hearing far off police sirens though as we also realise police collusion is an inescapable factor in the fragile equilibrium of the underworld even if it might not stretch all the way to idyllic Jeju. “Don’t waste your tears” Tae-gu unironically offers in weary resignation to his fate, a noble gangster to the last too good to survive in a world of nihilistic futility. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Call (콜, Lee Chung-hyun, 2020)

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The call is coming from inside the house. It’s a final revelation intended to chill, the idea that the source of threat is located in the very place where you ought to feel safe, protected, invulnerable. Of course, there are many reasons someone might not feel completely safe at home, those who perhaps live with hidden threat every day, a hidden darkness that lies at the centre of twisty Korean thriller The Call (콜). Another in a small series of time travelling communication, The Call makes connection through outdated technology, an almost literal ghosting in a voice from the past that, like an inverted Strangers on a Train, offers the tantalising promise of mutual salvation only to prove extremely unreliable. 

28-year-old Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) has just returned to her rundown country home because her mother, whom she intensely resents blaming her for the death of her father in a fire, is suffering with a brain tumour. Though her strawberry farmer uncle Sung-ho (Oh Jung-se) describes the place as the most desirable property in town, the home in which Seo-yeon finds herself is cold and austere, a creepy old mansion decorated in an outdated style and filled with gothic furniture. To make matters worse, Seo-yeon has left her phone on the train but unexpectedly assures Sung-ho that she’ll be fine with the landline, later calling herself and getting through to a woman who claims to have found it but asks for a reward and then hangs up presumably to assess her options. Then, the landline starts ringing with calls from a young woman trying to reach a friend and claiming that her mother is planning to set fire to her. Though obviously disturbing, Seo-yeon assumes the calls are a simple wrong number until she discovers a hidden room with what looks to be some sort of tiled experimentation area along with a box of memorabilia which lead her to think the phone is somehow connecting her to the girl who lived in her room at the turn of the millennium. 

Also 28 only born 20 years earlier, Young-sook (Jeon Jong-seo) claims to be at the mercy of a wicked shamaness step-mother convinced that she has a dark destiny. The two women engage in a strange act of intergenerational bonding between two people who are the same age, Seo-yeon mystified by the meaning of the word “Walkman” while Seo-yeon struggles with the concept of the multifunctional smartphone. The force which unites them is parental dissatisfaction as Seo-yeon claims a hatred for her mother she does not perhaps really feel and cannot in any case compare with that of Young-sook for the religiously abusive stepmother who fully believes she is possessed by the devil. In in this the time difference proves useful, Seo-yeon realising that Young-sook has the power to prevent her father’s death, but only latterly that she also even from the future has the ability to change her new friend’s fate. 

Essentilally a Strangers on a Train scenario, the two women agree to save each other, Young-sook dutifully restoring Seo-yeon’s imagined fairytale future, the creepy mansion transformed into an elegant modern dwelling, her mother and father now both healthy and happy. Seo-yeon, however, begins to neglect her promise, too busy enjoying her repaired family life to remember that Young-sook is imprisoned in the house suffering horrifying abuse. Young-sook is, in a sense, the embodiment of Seo-yeon’s familial trauma, the violent resurfacing of a long buried memory that threatens to tear to her life apart but also has the ability to repair it in revealing the truth that allows her to reconnect with her mother who, we learn, has repeatedly sacrificed herself for her daughter’s sake. Nevertheless, you begin to wonder if the shamaness had a point and the lid was best left on Young-sook as her hurt and resentment in being neglected by her new friend eventually take a turn for the dark. 

In essence, Seo-yeon’s decision to interfere with the past engineers a chain of disastrous events robbing her of her illusionary happiness while eventually landing her right back where she started if perhaps with a little more insight and having healed her relationship with her mother. Part tale of millennial anxiety, part gothic nightmare, The Call may not always be internally consistent but charts a dark tale of trauma and response as a haunted young woman finds herself stalked by the psychopathic embodiment of her buried guilt only to discover that a call from the past is always hard to ignore. 

Original trailer (English subtitles)

In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Park Dong-hun, 2022)

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Education is supposed to be the great leveller, a true meritocracy in which a combination of hard work and innate ability can enable anyone to follow their chosen path as far as it will go. The reality is however far less idealistic. Park Dong-hun’s In Our Prime (이상한 나라의 수학자, Isanghan Naraeui Suhakja) is the latest in a series of Korean films taking aim at corruption within the educational system along with a persistent classism that ensures only the “right” kind of people are allowed to prosper. 

Han Ji-woo (Kim Dong-hwi) knows he’s not the “right” kind of person and feels out of place at the elite boarding school where he is bullied by teachers and students alike for being a scholarship boy amid the children of mostly wealthy families. Though he won the place though being a top student at his previous school, now his grades are merely average and he’s bottom of the class in maths. Ji-woo’s odious, elitist teacher coldly tells him that his case is hopeless and he’ll never get into a top league university with these kinds of grades at this kind of school. He pressures Ji-woo into applying to transfer out which he is reluctant to do because he knows how much his attending such a prestigious school means to his widowed single mother. In any case as we later discover, the teacher merely has it in for him openly complaining with other members of staff about having to fuss with paperwork for kids on scholarships and bursaries who in his opinion don’t really belong in a place like this which is clearly geared towards perpetuating the privilege of the children of the elite at the expense of those like Ji-woo. 

When Ji-woo is caught smuggling in pork and soju at the behest of his exploitative roommates he refuses to dob them in, making the unlikely claim that he intended to consume all four meals himself. The teacher first praises his idealistic stance but then calls him an idiot because the other boys wouldn’t do the same for him nor are they coming forward themselves to take responsibility. Perfectly happy to let the scholarship boy take the blame one of them even crassly slips Ji-woo some money afterwards, genuinely confused when Ji-woo tries to turn it down claiming such things are unnecessary between friends. Nevertheless, the incident brings him the attention of the “commie officer”, a North Korean defector (Choi Min-sik) working as the nightwatchman who easily solves Ji-woo’s impossible maths problems. The officer eventually agrees to teach him maths but only on the premise that he doesn’t care about tests or grades but solely on the art of learning. 

What he teaches Ji-woo is a valuable lesson that cuts straight to the quick of the issues within the educational system in which children are being taught to blindly answer standardised questions without developing critical thinking skills. The first problem he shows him has a deliberate error in it, but Ji-woo is so focussed on giving the correct answer he doesn’t stop to consider the question itself may be wrong and as the officer is fond of saying there can be no correct answer to an incorrect question. Yet this new philosophy of maths in particular being a purely rational science in which there is only one true answer brings Ji-woo back into conflict with his teacher who complacently teaches to test and humiliates him when he points out one of the test questions is badly formulated. The teacher tells them the correctness of their answer is irrelevant for they must answer in accordance with the textbook and willingly say that black is white if the textbook says it’s so. Meanwhile it also becomes apparent that he has been taking kickbacks from parents getting wealthy students into an elite tutoring group where he leaks the questions on upcoming exams.

This discovery prompts a minor rebellion by rich kid Bo-ram (Jo Yun-seo) who becomes disgusted with her elitist mother after being unwittingly enrolled in the cheating cabal while already resenting her for having made her give up playing the piano. For the officer, music is a mathematical language and merely an expression of the beauty of numbers which can used to explain everything there is in the world, yet as we discover he left North Korea after finding out that his research was used in weapons production only to become disillusioned with the South on realising that here people merely use it as a tool for advancement towards dull and conventional lives in the service of capitalism. When Ji-woo admits that he supposes he wants good grades to get into a good uni and then get a good job to be set for life, the officer decides to broaden his horizons encouraging the better instincts the elites at the school had rejected and showing him how to think for himself rather than blindly follow what he’s being taught. 

All that might seem quite ironic for a man from North Korea pointing out the unhelpful brainwashing of a rote learning system along with the unpleasant complacency of Ji-woo’s teacher not to mention his unethical hypocrisy. Nevertheless, the officer has his own tragic past which suddenly rears its head just as the two begin to form a paternal bond and Ji-woo finds himself at a moment of crisis once again pushed towards a transfer. Though the system is stacked against them, Ji-woo and Bo-ram eventually find their way through it in their shared resistance bolstered by the officer’s teaching as they gain the strength to fight back with honesty and integrity. It may be a slightly rosy conclusion implying the system has been corrected as if Ji-woo’s teacher were the only problem rather than the product of its corruption but does at least make the case that integrity is the one thing that pays but can’t be bought.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Starting Point (원점, Lee Man-hee, 1967)

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A hired thug and a sex worker dreaming of a new life are set on a collision course at mountain retreat in Lee Man-hee’s noirish thriller, Starting Point (원점, Wonjeom). A melancholy existential drama, the film nevertheless has a darkly comic absurdity and becomes for a time almost a satire of changing sexual mores and the anxiety surrounding the post-war population explosion while simultaneously hinting at corporate corruption in economically straitened times. 

Played in near total silence, the opening pre-credits scenes find the otherwise unnamed (the name given in the promotional material is never spoken) lackey (Shin Seong-il) raiding an office building with the intention of retrieving some mysterious documents the people who hire him later claim threaten to expose their “seven-year-secret”. The Lackey takes time to smoke a cigarette and read through some of the papers before putting them into a briefcase to make his escape but is soon met by a man with a rifle who challenges him. A fight ensues on the staircase from which the Lackey is able to escape, activating a rolling gate to get out of the building. But the other man keeps coming after him, managing to cling on the briefcase while his neck is crushed by the unstoppable motion of the shutter. 

Mirroring him, the unnamed Sex Worker (Moon Hee) is also intruded in a wordless sequence shot with the kind of realism seen in American independent and European arthouse cinema as she stares forlornly at the pretty dresses behind the glass in a small boutique before sadly making her way towards a streetlight near the Choseon Hotel where she wordlessly picks up a customer through suggestive looks and gestures. 

The Lackey knows too much, which is why his bosses want to take him out but for unclear reasons Mr Choi comes up with a bizarre and convoluted scheme which involves hiring the Sex Worker to pose as the Lackey’s wife during a honeymoon getaway to Mt. Seorak. What the Lackey thinks is going on or why the mountain is important is never really explained just like the nature of the seven-year-secret, but once there the film changes tack becoming a kind of ensemble mystery as the various guests each become suspicious of one another while the Lackey and the Sex Worker slowly fall in love for real perhaps bonding their mutual sense of existential peril and outsider status. 

In the liminal space of the mountain, both fear rejection by those around them who come to represent mainstream society, the Lackey because he has killed and Sex Worker because of her profession. Ironically, one of the other guests is a dodgy gynaecologist who makes a point of saying that most of his clients are sex workers from around the Choseon Hotel at least implying that he regularly performs abortions. He recognises the Sex Worker as a previous patient and tries to take advantage of her sexually but commits a breach of medical ethics by leaking her profession to the rest of the group who then shun her. When the planned camping trip encounters a snag seeing as only two tents have been provided and the obvious solution is for men to take one and the women the other, the women all immediately leave on the Sex Worker’s arrival refusing a share a space with a “fallen woman” in case they are somehow tainted by her shame. 

But then, the goings on at the mountain inn are strange in themselves. A middle-aged man who inexplicably doesn’t seem to have encountered a transistor radio before accidentally tunes into a news broadcast discussing the effectiveness of the contraceptive pill while the young people dance with wild abandon to music they don’t really understand. Meanwhile, the gynaecologist wades in when another of the women experiences terrible stomach pains insisting that he is “familiar with women’s issues” and informs the husband that his wife is pregnant which is confuses him because they only married the day before and he’s been a good boy so the news is perplexing. He spends the rest of the film counting dates on his fingers and at one point attempts to hang himself certain that his wife must have slept with another man before their wedding instead of maybe considering that the dodgy gynaecologist may be mistaken.  

When the couples are divided into separate tents, one guest quips that it’ll be good for keeping the birth rate down hinting at an anxiety about a new sexual freedom among the young coupled with the impact of the ongoing baby boom and its economic implications. The gynaecologist’s wife is the first to join in with the youngsters, but she’s also a rabid penny pincher making sure the newlywed husband pays for her husband’s treatment of his wife while intensely jealous constantly trying to keep the randy doctor’s attention off the other women. The sense of economic anxiety is echoed in the Sex Worker’s melancholy longing onto looking into the shop window while dreaming of opening her own hair salon though sex work is the only way she can support herself and leaves her with intense shame that like the Lackey exiles her from mainstream society. 

As she says while embracing her covert identity as a cheerful newlywed, she’s been looking up all her life and would like to look down for once which she ironically does atop the stairway on which the Lackey fights his existential battle with Choi and his minions. They each want to find a way to get off the mountain and return to the world, but are prevented from doing so by the forces that pursue them and will not let them go. Finally questioned, the Sex Worker is forced to admit that she knows nothing about the Lackey, not his name or where he lived or what he did for a living, only that he did not hate her which is as close to a declaration of love as it might be possible to get in this cold and dark world of exploitation and violence. Lee films with a noirish intensity and melancholy fatalism as the pair attempt to fight back against the forces which constrain them with the pureness of their love but later discover that, as they feared, all that is left to them are painful memories of momentary happiness. 

The Apartment with Two Women (같은 속옷을 입는 두 여자, Kim Se-in, 2021)

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A mother and daughter remain locked in a toxic cycle of resentment and dependency in the debut feature from Kim Se-in, The Apartment with Two Women (같은 속옷을 입는 두 여자, gateun sogoseul ibneun du yeoja). While the English title may have an unfortunate sexist connotation implying that such a dysfunctional relationship is inevitable when two women live together, the Korean “two women wearing the same underwear” more closely suggests the awkward intimacy between them as they each seem to seek escape from the other but in the end are left with no option than to return or choose independent loneliness.

The awkwardness is obvious from the opening scenes as middle-aged, pink-haired mother So-kyung (Yang Mal-bok) chats to a friend on the phone while using the toilet even as her 20-something daughter Yi-jung (Lym Ji-ho) washes her undies in the bathroom sink. Once done, So-kyung slips off her underwear and simply throws them in with the others for Yi-jung to scrub, taking one of the newly washed but not yet dried pairs as a replacement before breezily leaving for work. So-kyung often becomes angry with her grown-up daughter for no ostensible reason, hitting and slapping her while a defeated Yi-jung can do nothing but cry no longer seeing much point in even asking what it is she’s done wrong. Matters come to a head when the pair argue in the car at supermarket car park. Yi-jung gets out and begins to walk away, but her mother suddenly jumps on the accelerator and hits her. So-kyung tries to claim the car malfunctioned but Yi-jung has long believed her mother would prefer it if she were no longer alive. 

During a blackout towards the film’s conclusion, So-kyung again insists the accident wasn’t deliberate reminding that Yi-jung that it wasn’t the first time she swore she’d kill her and forcing her to admit that she remained so calm because it wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. Later someone asks why she didn’t leave seeing as she is a grown woman with a salaried job capable of supporting herself and she answers that she thought she needed to save more money before making her escape but it’s also true that years of So-kyung’s emotional abuse have eroded her confidence in her ability to survive alone and that finally she is just so lonely that even her mother’s continual resentment is preferable to being on her own with no other friends or family to turn to. 

Yi-jung begins to bond with a woman at work who is in a similarly abusive situation with their employer, disliked by her co-workers and exploited by the boss who often hands her additional tasks to be completed for the next morning when everyone else is about to go home. But So-hee (Jung Bo-ram) evidently has troubles of her own, and in any case Yi-jung simply ends up in another apartment with two women while beginning to realise that So-hee is not interested in a close friendship with her for she too longs for “independence” and is turned off by her obvious neediness. So-kyung meanwhile is in a relationship with a genial man of around her own age, Yong-yeol, who has a teenage daughter, So-ra, to whom So-kyung more well disposed than to own but eventually cannot stand. So-ra is in many ways much like herself and So-kyung’s narcissistic tendencies prevent her from sharing Yong-yeol with another woman. When it comes to picking an apartment for them to live in after they marry, it comes as a surprise to her than Yong-yeol intended to bring So-ra to live with them roundly telling him that the “spare” room is for storage not a daughter. Given this ultimatum Yong-yeol choses So-kyung, agreeing that So-ra will live with her grandmother in a decision that shocks Yi-jung on discovering his letter prompting the realisation that her mother will happily abandon her too. 

Su-kyung is in many ways a narcissistic nightmare, refusing to apologise for who she is and always insisting other people are to blame for the way she treats them. All Yi-jung wants is an apology but what she gets is justification as her mother explains to her that her clients at her massage parlour dump all their negativity on her though she is also living a stressful life and so she dumps all of her negativity on Yi-jung whom she resents for trapping her poverty and loneliness as a reluctant single mother. Yi-jung asks her what she’s supposed to do with that, but her mother simply tells her she should have a daughter too. In any case it appears as if Yi-jung may finally be finding the strength to extricate herself from her toxic familial environment, finally being measured to figure out her correct bra size having presumably been forced to wear whatever her mother wore throughout all of her adult life in a moment which brings us back to underwear once again. At times darkly comic, Kim Se-in’s intense family drama circles around toxic dependency and an inescapable cycle of cruelty and resentment but does at least allow its heroines the glimmer of new beginnings in a more independent future.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Beast (비스트, Lee Jung-ho, 2019)

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Internal police politics frustrate the hunt for a potential serial killer in Lee Jung-ho’s dark social thriller, The Beast (비스트) inspired by Oliver Marchal’s 36 Quai des Orfèvres. As a pathologist suggests, we all may have a hidden beast and it’s certainly true of the film’s conflicted protagonist, thuggish policeman Inspector Jung (Lee Sung-Min) who finds himself dragged ever deeper into a mire of corruption as a natural result of a series of bad decisions that started long ago, while his rival, Captain Han (Yoo Jae-Myung), presents the facade of efficient modern policing but inevitably turns out to be little better. 

As the film opens, Jung and his subordinate Yang are each wearing balaclavas while driving a heavily tattooed man out into the middle of nowhere though only for the purposes of frightening him so that he’ll back off their informant, local bar owner Madame Oh (Kim Ho-jung). Jung’s inner conflict is palpable as stares at his bloodied, shaking hands asking himself how it is it’s come to this while Yang later reminds him not to become too attached to his sources because once they’ve exceeded their usefulness they’ll simply be arrested. While all of this is going on, the police force is under immense pressure and receiving a lot of negative press over their handling of the case of a missing teenage girl, Mi-jin. Unfortunately, the girl later turns up dead with the murder enquiry split between two teams, those of Jung and Han each of whom are in the running to take over from the superintendent who before all of this happened was about to be promoted which is why he is desperate to solve the case as soon as possible. 

It might at first be tempting to read Jung and Han as representatives of different kinds of policing with their rivalry representing a battle for the soul of the police force only as it turns out each is merely corrupt in their own way. Jung is very much of the jaded veteran cop school, wanting to shift the case off his books as soon as possible by pushing the most likely suspect to confess. In this case that’s a shady pastor at a church Mi-jin used to frequent who was found in possession of her underwear and a series of photos of very young girls. Jung pushes the pastor to “confess” by selling him a story that a woman he was accused of assaulting in university took her own life as did her mother while her father later developed cancer as a result of all the stress and tragedy. Of course the pastor breaks down insisting that he killed her and it’s all his fault, only he’s talking about the other girl not that Jung cares too much about that. Han meanwhile quickly exonerates him by doing actual investigating, but only really so that he’ll still be in the running to solve the case and get the big promotion thereby besting his former partner turned rival. Jung had been the first to mention the possibility of an active serial killer only to be shut down because that would mean they’d lose the case to Major Crimes and therefore the personal opportunities for career advancement solving it would present. 

Both men eventually end up at the showdown by each of their respective routes implying there’s little practical difference between them. Han jeers that he can’t tell anymore if Jung is a bad guy or a cop but all he can answer is that it might be a matter of perspective, while he is also aware of Han’s backdoor deals and willingness to compromise himself in order to win advancement. In the midst of all this jockeying for power, it gets forgotten that a young woman lost her life in the most heinous of ways while whoever really did it may still be out there looking for the next girl to torture and kill. Everyone may indeed have a beast inside them, Jung already acquainted with his in his morally compromised soul while Han battles his internal ambition but the real beast may be the contemporary city and the infinitely corrupt hierarchies of the modern Korea along with the toxic masculinity that forces these men to betray their ideals simply not to be accounted a failure trapped at the bottom of the pyramid by their own problematic righteousness. When they’ve served their usefulness, the system chews them up and spits them out but until then it’s only hanging on as long as they can in the utter futility of a morally bankrupt existence. 

International trailer (English subtitles)

12.12: The Day (서울의 봄, Kim Sung-soo, 2023)

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Sometimes, the bad guys win. Kim Sung-soo’s long-awaited return after superb underworld drama Asura, 12.12: The Day (서울의 봄, Seoul-ui Bom) explores one of the darkest hours of recent Korean history as all hopes for democracy and freedom are dashed by a 1979 coup by General Chun Doo-hwan whose reign turned out to be far worse than that of his predecessor, Park Chung-hee who had been assassinated by a member of his own security team some months previously.

Yet Kim is less concerned with the coup itself than why so few people tried to stop it. Though everything appears to be going very badly for Chun (Hwang Jung-min), he eventually succeeds in taking Seoul by force while opposed by a solo general who is the lone guardian of justice and righteousness. Lee Tae-shin (Jung Woo-sung) first turns down a promotion to command the Seoul garrison and accepts it only when it’s explained to him that Jeong (Lee Sung-min), the army chief of staff, hopes to use him as a bulwark against Chun whom he fears is indeed preparing for an insurrection. Sure enough, Jeong is eventually abducted by Chun’s minions, who run the security division, on a trumped up charge of being involved with Park’s murder while Chun desperately needs the duly elected president of a democratising Korea to sign his arrest warrant so his blatant power grab will be legitimised rather than branded a “coup”.

Only the president doesn’t play along. He insists on following proper protocol and getting the approval of the defence minister all of which is vexing for Chun who is left humiliatingly standing in his office while the president holds his ground. The defence minister has, as it turns out, fled to the American embassy in his pyjamas where he finds little sympathy while the film subtly implies that the Americans advise him to return and back Chun who is doubtless considered much more useful to them politically.

Though Tae-shin and another officer at HQ try to warn of a brewing coup, their orders are often overruled by superiors either because they do not take the situation seriously or are actively siding with Chun whose “Hanahoe” faction has taken over a significantly large proportion of the military. Kim zooms in on militarism as the fatal flaw in this botched defence system as it seems no one can act without first receiving an order from above nor are they equipped to make critical decisions on a personal level as to whether or not an order should be obeyed. Tae-shin calls on countless devisions for backup but finds them either actively allying with Chun or refusing to get involved believing it is a hopeless battle. Tae-shin asks what the army is for if it refuses to fight at the crucial moment and abandons its responsibility to protect the interests of its citizens in simply allowing Chun to seize power but receives no real answer. 

Chun has already aroused suspicion for his handling of the investigation into Park’s death, reportedly bringing in countless people with no obvious connection to the case and torturing them. The men who support him want to continue Park’s “glorious revolution” which was in itself a repackaging of Colonial-era Japanese militarism, and fiercely resist the idea of “democracy” advocating totalitarian views that the ordinary person longs for a strong hand at the wheel and to be absolved of the responsibility of choice which ironically fits perfectly with hierarchal structure of the Army. The film paints Chun, slight, small, and bald, as a man with a chip on his shoulder apparently resentful of military elites and the wealthy. He craves power because of his own insecurity and a desire to get one over on righteous men like Tae-shin which might be why his line about Chun being unworthy of the uniform of a Korean solider seems to get to him. 

Using the film language of the 1970s such as heavy grain and split screens, Kim keeps the tension on a knife edge even though the conclusion is all too inevitable. Tae-shin cuts a heroic figure, standing alone on a bridge and forcing back the advancing tanks solely with his imperious righteousness but in the end it’s not enough, there are too few like him and too many like Chun whose maniacal laughter is intercut with scenes of Tae-shin in the torture facility which lies beneath the facade of government. Bleak, but also angry, Kim’s extraordinarily controlled political thriller is damning in its condemnations of a militarising culture and the ever present threat which accompanies it.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Man with Three Coffins (나그네는 길에서도 쉬지 않는다, Lee Jang-ho, 1987)

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“What a piteous soul who wanders around with sorrow.” The echoes of a funeral song haunt the melancholy hero of Lee Jang-ho’s Division Film, The Man With Three Coffins (나그네는 길에서도 쉬지 않는다, Nageuneneun kileseodo swiji anhneunda). Adapting a novel by Lee Je-ha, Lee Jang-ho positions the divided nation as a more literal kind of limbo filled with wandering ghosts and souls who no longer have a home to return to in which the echoes of shamanism ring with fatalistic intensity.

In Lee’s elliptical screenplay, moments replay and reverberate in a stream of memory that echoes the protagonist’s fractured state of being. What eventually becomes apparent is that he is on a quest to return his wife’s ashes to her hometown, the problem is that she was one of many displaced by the Korean War. She became separated from her parents and no longer knew where her hometown was except somewhere in the North. The man who is being discussed in the opening sequence, Mr Kim, is also on a quest to return to his hometown but like that of Sun-seok’s wife (Lee Bo-hee) it lies in the North and it is unlikely he can reach it. The old man tightly grips a photograph of his family before the war, finally releasing it only when some henchman working for his son who only sees the South as his home come to retrieve him and destroy his hopes of dying in the place where he was born.

During his journey, Sun-seok (Kim Myung-gon) passes a sign which reads “Road to Reunification” but the bridge alongside it has been removed with only the supports remaining like thorns embedded in the landscape. Another sign reads “Restricted Area” marking the line beyond which Sun-seok cannot pass, like the man in the funeral song unable to pass through mountain or water. As he nears his destination, Sun-seok’s paths are blocked by snow preventing him from moving on or from returning to his ordinary life in Seoul. He is in more ways than one a purgatorial figure, a man already dead but trapped in the mortal realm even as the shamans attempt to guide him towards his rightful direction, a direction which Sun-seok may finally realise only on witnessing a woman with whom he may have fallen in love join in with the shamanistic dance though she two had been as soulless as he was and it may be impossible to say which of them is bound for the land of the dead. 

Mrs. Choi (Lee Bo-hee), the only woman given a name, remarks that a shaman had told her that at 30 she would meet a man by a river who was carrying three coffins and that this man was her husband in a previous life. This might explain why all of Sun-seok’s women are played by the same actress, as if they are all echoes of the same soul though equally it could reflect Sun-seok’s myopic view in which there is only ever really one woman. In any case, their connection seems both fated and frustrated because in this divided world there are only ever partings. Unable to reach his destination, Sun-seok scatters his wife’s ashes in the closest town to the DMZ, the same town where Mrs Choi and Mr Kim are also prevented from moving forward though in this case pulled back towards the soulless capitalism of the contemporary South as symbolised by Mr Kim’s son and his political ambitions. 

The implication is that is the division itself which caused the death of Sun-seok’s wife, ultimately unable to reconcile the division within herself and eventually consumed by it. Her death is echoed in that of a sex worker who dies gripping her throat and foaming at the mouth shortly after an encounter with Sun-seok, while a sex worker he meets in another town suffers a similar fate as if he were somehow spreading death along his way bringing him to his three coffins, which are in a way one and also four including perhaps his own. The washed out red of Lee’s distinctive colour palate lends the dusty land a hellish glow while the unusual camera techniques, a copulating couple superimposed on Sun-seok’s playing cards and a giant hand suddenly appearing in the sky for example, add a sense of ominous dread enhanced by the constant intrusions of shamanic ritual. It seems that as the song says, a funeral lament for a boy who disappeared feared drowned but also for Sun-seok himself, he really can’t go anywhere and is condemned to wander, a lost soul in a divided land who cannot any longer return to his home.

Noryang: Deadly Sea (노량: 죽음의 바다, Kim Han-min, 2023)

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The strange thing about Noryang: The Deadly Sea (노량: 죽음의 바다, Noryang: Jugeumui Bada), the third and final instalment in Kim Han-min’s trilogy about 16th century admiral Yi Sun-sin is that everyone wants to end the war but they all want to end it definitively and so are unable to simply let it run its course. Then again, there is a little more complexity involved in the depiction of Yi in asking whether his desire to repel the Japanese once and for all is really about the national good or personal vengeance for the death of one of his sons at the hands of Japanese raiders.

The opening scenes taking place in 1598 witness the death of Toyotomi Hideyoshi who had launched two invasions of Korea in the previous decade which were in themselves precursors to an invasion of Ming China in an attempt to disrupt the Chinese Tributary System that prevented Japan from trading with China without agreeing to pay them taxes and recognise their political superiority. In the film at least, his deathbed order is to withdraw troops from Korea where they had been unsuccessfully fighting for the previous year. The leader of the Japanese forces, Konishi Yukinaga (Lee Kyu-hyung), is however prevented from leaving by a naval blockade placed by Admiral Yi around their fort on Suncheon Island. With Hideyoshi dead, Yukinaga is keen to return to Japan as quickly as possible in order to defend Hideyoshi’s young son, Hideyori, from Tokugawa Ieyasu who makes a very sinister appearance at Hideyoshi’s deathbed.

One might wonder why Yi does not allow Yukinaga to simply leave and return to Japan now that the war is technically over yet he insists that without a full surrender nothing is guaranteed and the Japanese may simply regroup and return as they had done before. Then again, he’s haunted by nightmares of his son’s death in which he witnesses him cut down by Japanese pirates while unable to intervene dragged back by shadowy figures rising from the water. Yi also later makes clear that his motivation is coloured by a desire for revenge to the extent that he is willing to sacrifice his life for it, which is one thing but it also necessarily means he’s willing to risk the lives of his men over what is partly a personal vendetta. 

Yukinaga, meanwhile, and the Japanese in general are depicted as cruel, ruthless, and cowardly. Shimazu (Baek Yoon-sik), the admiral leading the reinforcements sent to help spring Yukinaga, wilfully fires on his own men in order to cut his way through to the enemy and then threatens to execute sailors who tried to desert. In the end Yukinaga breaks his promise and declines to come to the assistance of Shimazu’s fleet as arranged, turning away and sailing back to Japan (he is subsequently beheaded after being on the losing side of the battle of Sekigahara as he was unable to commit ritual suicide because he was a Christian). They had originally been let down by a Chinese general they’d bribed to assist them but had decided not to turn up given the war was already over, making a secondary agreement with Admiral Chen (Jung Jae-young) who also desires a peaceful end to the disruption but vacillates between each side while not really wanting to get involved before making a fairly disastrous intervention in the final battle. 

There is something a little a uncomfortable in the film’s framing and most particularly in its post-credits scene which reinforces Yi’s conviction that the war isn’t really over without a complete surrender from Japan. In any case, Yi becomes a literal beating heart of the battle banging the drums of war to encourage weary fighters that it isn’t over yet and to keep going to the last man buoyed by the spirits who appear to him of his son and allies who lost their lives fighting similar battles in the previous films. That aside, Deadly Sea is mostly standalone though some knowledge of Japanese and Korean history in the late 16th century is undoubtedly helpful. Kim devotes the second half of the film to a lengthy series of naval battles as Yi tries to lure Shimazu to a vulnerable position, eventually shooting a harrowing long take from the perspective of an ordinary sailor trying to cut his way through after boarding a series of enemy boats. The senseless futility of the violence is the point, but it’s one that’s continually lost on Yi who continues to insist that this war will never really be over until they chase the invaders all the way back to their own islands and into total capitulation even as his quarry sails away towards his own unhappy destiny in an equally turbulent Japan.

International trailer (English subtitles)