Tag: Park Jeong-Ja

Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team (이장호의 외인구단, Lee Jang-ho, 1986)

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After finding huge success with his debut film, Lee Jang-ho soon became disillusioned with the film industry and was in fact temporarily banned after being found in possession of marijuana. After the assassination of Park Chung-hee in 1979, Lee returned with a new focus on socially conscious filmmaking only to be blindsided by the advent of an entirely new age of oppression following the coup of general Chun Doo-hwan in 1980. In contrast to Park’s regime, Chun’s embarked on a deliberate bread and circuses policy pushing sports, sex, and screen in which social commentary was out and softcore very much in. 

Lee had opened his nonsense film Declaration of an Idiot with a scene of himself committing suicide because no one cares about movies anymore, they only like sports which lends a note of irony to his incredibly strange and very of its time baseball film, Lee Jang-ho’s Baseball Team (이장호의 외인구단, Lee Chang-houi wingudan). Adapted from a popular sports manhwa, the film is ostensibly a much more commercial affair yet in its way is attempting to subtly attack the growing inequalities of the Chun era as its poor mountain boy hero, Hye-seong (Choi Jae-sung), squares off against posh boy rival Dong-tak (Maeng Sang-hoon) not only for sporting glory but the hand of his innocent first love Um-ji (Lee Bo-hee). 

As Dong-tak joins a top-rated team and is interviewed on television, Hye-seong returns to the mountains to train and is trying to dodge the train fare while travelling with his father to discuss joining a team. He eventually strikes a blow against Dong-tak by striking him out during a perfect game, but ruins his shoulder in the process with his baseball dreams then behind him, which is a problem because he’s devoted his entire life to fulfilling the promise he made to Um-ji when they were children to become a great baseball player. Hye-song repeatedly promises to do anything he can to make Um-ji happy even if it means accepting her relationship with Dong-tak, but Dong-tak openly laughs at him for being a nobody though there is something worryingly intense in his suddenly throwing all his letters from Um-ji, which he had in his bag, on the table describing them as written by a “goddess” and his “sacred place.”

As for Um-ji herself, she seemingly has little control over her life as the daughter of an upperclass family. She began dating Dong-tak before reconnecting with Hye-seong in Seoul and originally sticks to her class-appropriate match before being tempted by her innocent childhood connection and realising Dong-tak is an arrogant arsehole who didn’t show up to her birthday dinner because he forgot and went on a date with another girl. Even so, her family continue to pressure her into marrying Dong-tak despite his manly decision to ignore her until he’s accomplished his mission of achieving 100 consecutive hits at which point he’ll propose. Hye-song ironically makes a similar decision, taking off for a training session on a remote island which ends up lasting a whole year during which his completely insane mentor Coach Byeon-ho (Ahn Sung-ki) denies him permission to write to her. When he returns, Um-ji has ended up married to Dong-tak and is in a depressive state wandering through life in a daze of guilt and disappointment that she betrayed both herself and Hye-seong because of social pressure to conform and is now stuck in this emotionally unsatisfying relationship. Hye-seong rejects her on the grounds that the spark has gone from her eyes and she’s no longer the Um-ji of his youth though also accepting some responsibility for that. At the end of the film, Hye-song loses his sight which allows him to reunite with a changed Um-ji who has separated from the now loser Dong-tak, no longer able to see the change in her remembering only the Um-ji he fell in love with. 

The men who were with him on the island where they underwent bizarre martial-arts style training regimes, were whipped and shackled, and almost killed their one-armed teammate have similar problems returning to situations that are less satisfying than they hoped. A wimpy pitcher despised by his son returns to find him unimpressed, while another discovers his wife had temporarily left him, and an incredibly short man, Kyeong-do, who’d been bothering a bank employee so much she switched branches to avoid him discovers she’s engaged to another man. Kyeong-do refuses to give up, arrogantly telling her that he’ll be replacing her groom on the big day while continuing to behave like a massive creep but actually successful in the end because of his sporting and financial success though it looks more like a case of her giving in than actually falling for him and sends some very mixed messages about a woman’s agency in this still conservative age. 

The players brand themselves losers and outsiders, each of them in some way compromised and locked out of pro-baseball from Kyeong-do’s short stature to Hye-seong’s poverty though the decision to include a mixed race man which may have been intended as a progressive gesture seriously backfires by having a Korean actor perform in blackface while insensitively mimicking racial stereotypes. The coach, Byeong-ho is also an outsider by virtue of walking with a cane and purposefully creates a team of others like himself he can train with his cruel and bizarre methods to take on the Dong-taks of the world. Even so, others brand them “inhuman”, “beasts trained with whips”, and continue to resent their attempt to subvert the contemporary class order. 

On the surface, however, Lee has simply made a baseball film about a group of outsiders who triumph over adversity. He fills it with the spirit of the times, throwing in several sequences accompanied by contemporary pop songs along with an atmosphere of ridiculous excess not to mention inconsequentiality as if he were actively mocking the current direction of Korean cinema despite the occasional moment of artistry such as the gothic scene in which Um-ji realises Hye-seong has returned but the pair are separated by a billowing white curtain. An oddity, but perhaps one that speaks of the oddity of its times. 

Ieodo (異魚島 / 이어도, Kim Ki-young, 1977)

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Ieoh Island restoration posterIn the hyper-masculine and intensely patriarchal atmosphere of Korea under Park Chung-hee, Kim Ki-young spins a tale of male obsolescence in the mysterious Ieodo (異魚島 / 이어도, AKA Ieoh Island). The eponymous island, apparently a kind of paradise home to the lonely ghosts of fishermen lost at sea, becomes a symbol of the impossible life drive of its impotent protagonists who find themselves taken by the island before their time while the community of women asserts its primacy in rendering men “redundant” through finding new ways to procreate.

The hero, Hyun Seon-woo (Kim Jeong-cheol), is an executive at a tourism company who is struggling to conceive a child with his wife and undergoing the early stages of IVF treatment. Alarmed to realise that his wife could have a child without him thanks to his frozen sperm, he throws himself into his work, planning for a new hotel development to be called “Ieodo” after the mythical fisherman’s paradise. Organising a publicity stunt in which journalists and industry guests are asked to board a boat to an unknown destination backfires spectacularly when a reporter, Chun Nam-seok (Choi Yoon-seok), becomes extremely upset and insists on turning the boat around on learning they will be heading towards the mythical island. Nam-seok accuses of the hoteliers of appropriating local culture, while even the boat’s captain expresses dismay at the thought of breaking such a strong taboo. Seon-woo offers to settle the matter with a drinking contest, eventually passing out during which time Nam-seok “falls” off the boat, leaving him the prime suspect in the man’s death. Convinced that Nam-seok must have taken his own life, he determines to investigate the case himself with the help of Nam-seok’s editor (Park Am).

Seon-woo’s quest takes him to the nearby island where Nam-seok was born, Parang – a place inhabited solely by women which all men must leave on having a child. Parang is a place where tradition reigns and superstition is prevalent. Guided to the local shamaness (Park Jeong-ja) by a timid widow, Seon-woo and the editor are told that Nam-seok’s family were under an ancestral curse in which all the men of previous generations were eventually taken by the “Water Ghost” of Ieodo, including Nam-seok’s own father. After his mother died of grief, Nam-seok tried to escape, but now, the villagers seem to believe, he too has returned to embrace his fate proving that the Water Ghost will always take what is hers by right.

In order to get around the lack of menfolk, the women practice what a friend of Nam-seok’s calls “both the most primitive and the most modern” form of marriage in which they copulate with men of their choosing during a candlelight ritual. Having sworn off having children himself, at least on the island owing to the curse, Nam-seok takes up with the wealthy widow Mrs. Park (Kwon Mi-hye) who finances his unusual business venture – an abalone farm designed to bring prosperity back to the island where the traditional diving business has begun to flounder thanks to the corruption of the modern world.

The fish in the ocean are dying because of industrial pollution – itself a problem produced by the thoughtless capitalism of the Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian regime and its relentless drive forward into economic dynamism at all costs. Watching his seed fall on stony ground (literally and figuratively), Nam-seok becomes enlightened to environmentalism, bemoaning that the ancestors of humanity cared for the planet for thousands of years only for recent generations to destroy it. It’s the end of the world, he says, everything is rotting. Which might, after a fashion, explain why everyone seems to be finding it so difficult so have children.

Nam-seok’s attempts to artificially breed abalone link straight back to Seon-woo’s inability to father a child with his wife whom, we are told in the very beginning, eventually died without ever giving birth. We’re told that sperm survives its host, that the sperm of a man who froze to death on the mountains was found to be perfectly viable once defrosted and that, therefore, Seon-woo himself is a largely irrelevant presence in his his wife’s ongoing quest to have a child. The island women too who do things the “traditional” way, had also stumbled on a way to conceive children in the absence of men, or at least in the absence of “living” men in realising that sperm could often be harvested from the dead and applied by means of ritual.

Kim returns to his favourite themes of sex and death as two literally become one. “All fears disappear when men and women unite”, the mysterious barmaid (Lee Hwa-si) tells an increasingly confused Seon-woo who has come to embody for her the soul of the lost Nam-seok whom she believes to be her spiritual husband. “Everything is only momentary”, he answers her, “eternity is a word which deceives us”. Seon-woo admires “the incredible energy of women who risk their lives to have children”, but if the island is to survive it can only be in the absence of his destructive male energy. Like countless men before him, he must leave, not for the paradise of Ieodo, but for the rapidly declining modern society, while a woman remains behind alone – the sole guardian of a child who is also, of course, the future.

Ieodo was screened as part of the 2019 London Korean Film Festival. It is also available on English subtitled blu-ray courtesy of the Korean Film Archive in a set which also includes a complete script (Korean only) bilingual booklet, commentary by critic & director Chung Sung-ill, commentary featuring critic Kim Young-jin and director Oh Seung-uk (not subtitled), an interview with actress Lee Hwa-si, and clips of Lee Hwa-si with Jeong Beom-sik, and Park Jeong-ja with Lee Yoon-ho (no subtitles).

Rainy Days (장마, Yu Hyun-mok, 1979)

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Rainy Season posterOften regarded as an “intellectual” filmmaker, Aimless Bullet’s Yu Hyun-mok returns to one of his central preoccupations in 1979’s Rainy Days (장마, Jangma). Released close to what would be an abrupt end to the oppressive and authoritarian rule of Park Chung-hee (which would be followed by another repressive military regime), Yu’s literary film falls into the anti-communist subgenre though Yu is careful to reframe his tale not as one of left versus right but of right versus wrong and of the dangerous gulf in-between. As it would in 1979, the political wind shifts without warning and then reverses itself leaving few untouched by the chaos and confusion of a government in flux. Rainy Days is a season of silence and tension, waiting for the sun but weathering a storm which may never end.

In the early 1950s, a family moves from Seoul to stay with relatives including Dongman (Choi Yong-weon) – the grandson of the older woman who is coming to live with her daughter’s family along with her university educated son Giljun (Kang Seuk-woo) and student daughter Gilja (Ju Hae-kyeong). Towards the end of the war, Maternal Grandmother (Hwang Jung-seun) has a prophetic and traumatic dream of trying to pull her own tooth which she interprets as a warning that Giljun, a serving soldier fighting for the South, has been killed in action. Sure enough, the next day a telegram arrives carrying the dreadful news back to the family. Maternal Grandmother tries to comfort herself as best she can, pretending to have grown used to the news thanks to her dream but in reality heartbroken and distraught by the loss of her only son.

Meanwhile, Dongman’s other uncle, the son of Paternal Grandmother (Kim Shin-jae), is off fighting for the North as a communist partisan hiding in the mountains. Suncheol (Lee Dae-geun) was once so kind hearted that as a boy he released the fish he caught in the local river, but when the communists took his village he was quickly seduced by their recently acquired power. While Giljun was forced to hide in a makeshift hollow covered by leaves in the woods, Suncheol was busy getting in with communists and though he claims to want to protect his family eventually informs on his brother-in-law only to find it blowing back on him when they doubt his commitment to the cause in not having turned the “Southern Sympathiser” in sooner. A simple man, Suncheol joins the communists and turns on Giljun as a reaction against his feelings of inferiority in the face of urban sophistication. Suncheol is cheerful and goodhearted, broadly liked by those around him, but he is also like a child who acts on impulse and takes things too far without considering the consequences of his actions just as he does when instigating a little “mob justice” against a villager who had tried to crack down on the trafficking of illegal moonshine much to the consternation of his neighbours.

The central conflict is dramatised by the sparky relationship between the two grandmas who have each passed into the age in which it becomes appropriate to voice one’s concerns openly without particularly caring how those views will be received. Paternal Grandmother, having opened her house to Maternal Grandmother and her children, feels herself to be in a position of superiority and is often wilfully unkind to her guests, offering a series of truly unforgivable words to the bereaved Maternal Grandmother who has, quite reasonably, cursed all the communists who are responsible for the death of her son. Seeing as Paternal Grandmother’s son Suncheol is a communist partisan she takes exception to this which provokes a fierce, accidentally political family row which may be eternally irreparable.

The North is, however, beaten back and the village retaken by the South. Suncheol is now a fugitive hiding in the mountains who has killed many men and fears he will not be forgiven even if he gives himself up to the authorities in the hope of rejoining his family. Proud Paternal Grandmother remains proud of her brave son, refusing to believe what they say about the partisans and secretly hoping for a resurgence of the North though like Maternal Grandmother before her she cannot say these words plainly for fear of getting into trouble with the authorities. When Suncheol makes a brief visit back to the family home, broken and desperate, to float the idea of turning himself in, it has grave consequences for little Dongman who is tricked into to informing on his uncle and earns the wrath of Paternal Grandmother in the process. Maternal Grandmother, however, has had more time to come to terms with her grief and is sympathetic to her grandson’s plight, knowing that he is just a child and did not understand the consequences of his actions.

Played by the wonderful Hwang Jung-seun, Maternal Grandmother becomes the heart of the drama. Having lost everything – her only son, her life in Seoul, her hopes for the future, she remains stoic, repeating the mantra that everything is fine because she knew all along how it would be. Following her painful outpouring of grief and war of words with Paternal Grandmother she comes to terms with her situation and tries to carry on as best she can with warmth in her heart. She even tries to forgive Paternal Grandmother and expresses sympathy for her as another mother losing a son in a stupid and senseless war. Paternal Grandmother cruelly pointed out that Maternal Grandmother would have no son to perform her funeral rites, but it is Maternal Grandmother who eventually performs the shamanistic ritual at the film’s conclusion in place of Paternal Grandmother, provoking a reconciliation of the two women and a banishment of the rancour which had existed between them.

Focussing tightly on the realistic emotions of the contemporary villagers who hold no particular political views but are caught in the middle of a war and simply trying to survive, Yu dramatises the tragedy of division not in a question of “good” Southerners, and bad “Communists”, but of bereaved grandmothers and broken families, ruined futures and fractured pasts. Yet once again he departs from the tragic ending of the novel for one which allows hope for the future. Little Dongman, put on house arrest by his irritated father, is finally allowed to go out to play with the other village children, rejoicing in the sunny skies and beautiful forrest scenery, returning to a childhood idyll now free of wartime confusion.

Available on DVD as part of the Korean Film Archive’s Yu Hyun-mok boxset. Also available to stream via the Korean Film Archive’s official YouTube Channel.