Lee Joon – Windows on Worlds

When it comes to intelligent farce, Kenji Uchida is Japan’s undisputed master so remaking his 2012 tale of love, crime, and mistaken identity Key of Life was always going to be a tall order. Thankfully it’s one Lee Gye-byeok largely manages to meet as he skilfully relocates the tale to South Korea and swaps Uchida’s complicated farce for a more lateral double sided comedy. While not as accomplished as Uchida’s hilariously intricate original, Luck-key (럭키) manages to charm with its thoroughly romantic, comically absurd, approach.

On one side of town, hitman Hyung-wook (Yu Hae-jin) finishes off his latest assignment and disappears into the night, while on another out of work actor Jae-sung (Lee Joon) contemplates suicide only to be interrupted by his landlady’s exasperated pleas for the back rent. In a fairly hopeless state, Jae-Sung heads out to the local bath house, intending to bid the world goodbye in a more dignified state. Hyung-wook also ends up at the same destination to wash the blood off his hands, only to embarrassingly slip on an errant piece of soap and knock himself out cold. Remembering admiring Hyung-wook’s expensive watch on the way in, Jae-sung makes a split second decision and switches locker keys with the unconscious rich guy.

Jae-sung decides to put his affairs in order by using Hyung-wook’s money to pay off old debts as well as experience one day as wealthy man before doing himself in. When Jae-sung discovers Hyung-wook has lost his memory and assumed Jae-sung’s identity, he decides against giving back Hyung-wook’s belongings in favour of trying on life in the fast stream. Jae-sung has also grown attached to a young woman who inexplicably appears on Hyung-wook’s TV, though he does wonder why Hyung-wook has all of these weapons and telephones, not to mention a big board of investigation material, stored away in a hidden room…

Each man begins to live a different life thanks to assuming the contents of the wrong locker. Hyung-wook has the rawer deal as he can’t remember anything about himself and ends up at Jae-sung’s apartment to find it covered in old food cartons and beer cans with his hangman’s noose still lying in the middle of the floor. With only two bucks in his wallet and no cards, he even has to ask the paramedic who brought him in, Lina (Jo Yoon-hee), to lend him the medical fees. Somewhat improbably Jae-sung’s identity card tells him that he is 32 years old (coincidentally the same as Lina) which can only make one think that he must have had a very hard life. Nevertheless, Lina decides to help him by taking him home and getting him a job in her mother’s restaurant.

Even though he can’t remember who he was before, Hyung-wook gradually reveals a different side to himself as Jae-sung, enjoying being a part of Lina’s busy family life. Jae-sung, by contrast, moves further towards the shadows as he becomes increasingly determined to protected the woman on Hyung-wook’s TV screen who turns out to be a whistleblower in a high profile fraud case. Eun-ju (Lim Ji-yeon) is a woman afraid for her life who leaves her apartment as little as possible, but eventually Jae-sung tracks her down and begins to woo her in impressively romantic ways, only to discover he’s made everything worse by misunderstanding the nature of the situation she finds herself in.

Experiencing a different sort of life highlights for each of the men what was making them so unhappy – Hyung-wook realises the value of a warm and supportive family life whilst Jae-sung finds purpose and drive in his desire to protect Eun-ju. Both men had, in a sense been “acting” as a part of their daily lives, living a kind of half life which frustrated their attempts to move forward. Through living in someone else’s world, these hidden parts of themselves – Hyung-wook’s softer, more feminine side, and Jae-sung’s masculine desire to charge of his life, become “unlocked” and allow them to become the people they always meant to be all along.

Dispensing with Uchida’s farce structure, Lee Gye-byeok more or less eliminates the third major character from the original script in order to more neatly split the action between the two guys who then mirror each other as they each begin to move more towards the centre whilst also making tentative moves towards romance. Filled with gentle, often absurd humour and taking pot shots at everything from gangster clichés to diva TV stars, Luck-key makes all the right moves in its relocation to Korea, bringing both amusing comedy and genuine romantic warmth with it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGhEyQhwxkw

Review of Kim Gwang-tae’s The Piper (손님, Sonnim) up at UK Anime Network. I really liked this one!

The piper must be paid. So goes the old saying, and with good reason – one should always honour one’s promises but even so there are those should not be crossed. So the denizens at the centre of the mysterious hidden village in the debut feature from Korean director Kim Gwang-tae come to discover as they’re repaid for some not quite unforgotten sins when a travelling piper and his invalid son come calling.

Kim Woo-ryong is a travelling piper with a crippled leg journeying to Seoul with his young son after hearing that there is an American doctor there who may be able to treat the boy’s TB if only they can reach the city in time. After walking through the countryside they eventually come across a village which isn’t marked on any map and beg shelter from the village chieftain there. Life in the village seems like a scene from the middle ages, everyone is wearing traditional clothing and there’s something more than a “stranger in town” vibe about the way they look at Woo-ryong and his son Young-nam. The chieftain allows the pair to stay but warns them they can reveal nothing of the outside world to the village’s inhabitants and especially not that the Korean war is already “over” and has been for some time. Later Woo-ryong and Young-nam wander into a village dispute and in a fit of over helpfulness Young-nam exclaims he’s sure his dad can fix the problem (though he doesn’t know what it is). Woo-ryong jumps to the conclusion it must be about the rats which plague the town and offers to take care of them. The chieftain offers him the price of a cow if he can rid the town of vermin, but one gets the impression there’s more than one kind of rodent lurking in this strange, isolated place.

If you know the classic children’s fable, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, you likely know the outcome won’t be a pleasant one though the events of the The Piper turn a little bloodier and even more supernatural than in the Brothers Grimm fairytale. The story starts out pleasant enough as Woo-ryong and Young-nam start to make friends in the village – Woo-ryong playing his pipe and Young-nam enjoying spending some time with the other children. However, from their very first entrance you can tell there is something very wrong in this community. There’s not just suspicion or curiosity in the way the villagers stare at the strangers, there’s fear too. Woo-ryong is a middle aged man with a lame leg, and Young-nam is a weedy 10 year old boy with a lung disease. They are no threat to anyone, what do these people have to fear?

The chieftain himself is obviously quite a sinister fellow. He charms Woo-ryong but lies to him when asked for guidance about the journey on to Seoul and seems to instil nothing but fear in the eyes of the other inhabitants. Woo-ryong strikes up a tentative romance with the village’s reluctant shaman which further raises the chieftain’s concerns – perhaps, he thinks, he doesn’t need to pay this piper after all. As might be expected, there’s a dark past at play here. Everyone is so terrified of the war, which they still believe is going on, and the things they’ve already done to survive that they’re prepared to go along with whatever their leader says to maintain their peaceful village life. Mob mentality at its worst, even those who were growing closer to the pair of strangers are quick to turn on them in a paranoid frenzy.

Like the original story, the moral is that you reap what you sew and if you don’t keep your promises, you deserve everything that’s coming to you. These are people who have lived in difficult times and done cruel things to survive. The rats which plague the town take on an almost supernatural air and have apparently developed a taste for human flesh. They become a kind of metaphor, a haunting presence which refuses to allow the villagers to forget the crimes they’ve committed and reminds them that their present safety was bought with innocent blood. A perfectly pitched fairytale with an all pervading sense of dread and foreboding, The Piper is an impressive effort from first time director Kim Gwang-tae and marks him out as a promising new voice in the world of Korean cinema.

Reviewed at the London Korean Film Festival 2015.

Tag: Lee Joon

Luck-key (럭키, Lee Gye-Byeok, 2016)

The Piper (손님, Kim Gwang-tae, 2015)