Tag: Seong So-min

The Love Marriage (自由結婚 / 자유결혼, Lee Byung-il, 1958)

September 12, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

A hot button issue at the centre of the tradition vs modernity debate – who knows best when it comes to love, a bevvy of relatives with lifetimes of experience behind them or the youngsters themselves still filled with youthful idealism? Then again, as the wise father of Lee Byung-il’s The Love Marriage (自由結婚 / 자유결혼, Ja-yugyeolhon) points out, perhaps both options are bad. An arranged marriage may not work out for a variety of reasons, and a love match may only result in heartbreak, but perhaps there is a third way after all – something which he intends to figure out through gentle manipulations of his lovelorn daughters and feisty conservative wife.

Inverting the normal pattern, Lee opens with the wedding. Dr. Ko’s (Choi Nam-Hyun) eldest daughter, Suk-hee (Choi Eun-hee), has scandalised her family by marrying for love, making a modern future in a modernising world. However, her new husband, Seung-il (Seong So-min), is pensive. He has something he feels he needs to get off his chest to start married life on the right foot. Seung-il confesses that he was once in love before, somehow believing this is a terrible secret which his new wife needs to know. Suk-hee is of course sympathetic and understanding, she never assumed herself to be marrying someone without a past. In an effort to console him she makes a confession of her own. She too was once in love with someone else – the older brother of a school friend who died tragically years ago never knowing of her deeply held affection. Despite his earlier plea, Seung-il is horrified, abruptly walks out on his new wife on their wedding night, and sails to America to make a new life for himself alone.

Flashforward four years and Suk-hee, humiliated, has retreated to her bedroom, seldom leaving the house and only then to walk along the paths she used to take with Seung-il when she does. Dr. Ko has two more daughters – Moon-hee (Lee Min-ja) and college student Myeong-hee (Jo Mi-ryeong), as well as a young son, Gwang-sik (Park Gwang-su), still in school. Ko’s wife, Mrs. Ahn (Seok Geum-seong), is convinced all Suk-hee’s problems are down to getting married for love – after all, Mrs. Ahn was always against it. To prevent the same thing happening again she plans to find good matches for her other two daughters, hoping to set Moon-hee up with the son of one of her best friends, Wan-seop (Lee Ryong), who has recently returned from studying abroad. Moon-hee, however, has taken a liking to the timid college student who has been tutoring Gwang-sik, Jun-cheol (Choe Hyeon). Meanwhile, Myeong-hee has also developed a fondness for Ko’s assistant, Yeong-su (Park Am).

The times are changing, but only to an extent. Mrs. Ahn doesn’t like it that they’re changing at all. The romantic destiny of her daughters was, perhaps, one of the few things over which she exercised complete control and control seems to be something she is reluctant to give up. Suk-hee’s decision to get married for love is a new one – a rejection of the oppressive pre-war system of total deference to one’s elders in favour of exercising her individual right to choice. Her choice, however, did not work out, in part at least because of some very old fashioned ideas embedded in the head of Seung-il who is unable to cope with the idea of his wife as a real flesh and blood woman rather than the idealised picture of passive femininity he had conjured for himself.

Love and marriage enter a conflict with each other. Ko and Mrs. Ahn have extremely different temperaments but seem to have built a happy and harmonious home for their four children, raising love between them as they go. Yet not all arranged marriages work out, especially when relatives might not have their children’s future happiness as a priority. Meanwhile, young people in love might not be best placed to make serious decisions about a long term future whilst caught in the throws of passion. Ko, otherwise sympathetic, has his doubts about Moon-hee and Jun-cheol, not because of Jun-cheol’s “weak” character which is his wife’s chief complaint, but because he worries that though they are in “love” they have not yet reached an understanding of each other. Rejecting both ideas – the hyperrationality of the “arranged” marriage, and the emotional volatility of the “love” match, Ko wonders if there isn’t a way to meet in the middle, that if the older generation could perhaps guide the youngsters towards a series of likely candidates they believe to be well suited, love might blossom in a place it can take root.

Ko, quiet yet wise and permanently amused, tries out his idea on his youngest daughter, Myeong-hee, who might be the most like him and also the most modern among her sisters. Spotting the obvious attraction between Myeong-hee and his assitant Yeong-su, Ko tries to set them up and then puts a wedge between them through using Wan-Seop who is at a loose end while Moon-hee pines after Jun-cheol and refuses to meet any other suitor. Wan-seop, despite Mrs. Ahn’s obvious esteem for him, is the very example of the new Korean man who tries to make a virtue of his modernity but only exposes his old fashioned conservatism. Caught in a small debate with Yeong-su and Myeong-hee, Wan-seop who has recently returned from study in America sings the praises of life overseas and declares himself a feminist – he hates the way women are treated in Korea which is why, when he’s married, he plans to 100% obey the housekeeper and not make waves in the domestic domain. Yeong-su, quite fairly, finds this ridiculous and even if his ideas are perhaps no more “progressive” he is at least transparent in his constant verbal sparring with the confident Myeong-hee.

For all its inherent comedy, love is still a painful business and parental rigidity has a potential dark side as we see in an attempted suicide brought about by heartbreak and frustration at not being listened to by parents who insist they know best. Yet in the end love conquers all. Ko’s gentle manipulations eventually work their magic, guiding each of his daughters towards their most hopeful path but leaving the decision to take it entirely up to them. Even Mrs. Ahn begins to see the beauty of young love rather than its destabilising qualities and cannot help being touched by the happiness each of the sisters seems to have found in their chosen men even if they’ve suffered quite a lot along the way. Love is never easy, but it doesn’t need to be so hard and it only takes a little bit of understanding to set it on its way.

The Love Marriage is the second of three films included in the Korean Film Archive’s Romantic Comedy Collection of the 1950s box set. It is also available to stream online from the Korean Film Archive‘s YouTube Channel.

The Descendants of Cain (카인의 후예 / 카인의 後裔, Yu Hyun-mok, 1968)

April 13, 2018by Hayley Scanlon1 Comment

Yu Hyun-mok, often regarded as among the more “intellectual” of film directors in Korea’s Golden Age, is also among those to have been arrested for violation of the Anti-Communist laws. Yu was later exonerated and went back to filmmaking as before but it remains true that Yu betrays a little more ambivalence to the anti-communist message so often required than many of his colleagues. That is to say, Yu often leans economically left in his frequent criticism of social inequality and his anti-consumerist stance, but remains socially conservative if with a strong desire for social justice. The Descendants of Cain (카인의 후예 / 카인의 後裔, Kainui Huyea), adapted from a novel by Hwang Sun-won, is as anti-communist as they come, but also offers its share of ironies in painting “communism” as a kind of disease born of greed and self-interest which thrives on fear and eventually consumes those who are seduced by its false promises.

Irony is indeed our starting point as our cheerful villagers enjoy a raucous celebration in honour of Independence Day only for the communists to suddenly turn up and spoil the party. Worst of all, one of the communists is a long lost son of the village – Choe is the absentee husband of Ojaknyeo (Moon Hee), a maid, who has developed an affection for her boss, the nephew of the local landlord, Park Hun (Kim Jin-kyu). The communists’ first action is to close down the school that Park Hun opened to provide education for the peasants and co-opt it as their base. Park knows he’s in a dangerous position and has little power to resist, opting to wait it out and see how far the communists really intend to go. The peasants, however, are becoming excited hearing about the land redistribution programme and are starting to forget everything that Park and his family have done for them over the generations, swayed by the false promises of the communists who preach equality while insisting on deference.

The central conflict is, in many ways, between the feudal past and the “democratic” future. Set in what would shortly the “the north” in 1946, Descendants of Cain positions itself on more than one kind of dividing line with the lingering spectre of tragedy always on the horizon. High on a ridge there’s a large stone slab erected as a memorial to the late Park, Park Hun’s grandfather, whose solicitous care for the villagers had earned their eternal respect and perhaps their love. The Parks are “good” landlords. They take their “feudal” responsibilities seriously as evidenced by Park Hun’s school and his father’s desire to finish construction on the local reservoir which is both his legacy and an important failsafe precaution against draught which is in the interests of all. By all appearances this is a well functioning village where no one is hungry or alone. The peasants have not felt “oppressed” or been unhappy, which is not to say they don’t want to better their lot but they have no burning desire for revolution and have nothing in particular to rebel against.

This leaves the communists with a problem – they have little leverage over happy peasantry which has never acknowledged its own oppression let alone longed for freedom from it. Their approach is therefore one of divide and conquer. Cynical in the extreme, the communists set about exploiting petty village disputes to foster discord between people – something which eventually contributes to a murder which they also manipulate for political gain. The “landowners” are of course a prime target, but their judgement must be at the hands of “the people” by means of a farmers’ trial. Having recruited something close to a former village leader, the communists assume they will have the villagers on side but they all (bar two) refuse to indict the Parks. The communist leader, fond of irony, gestures towards towards his armed men and reminds the villagers that no one here is “impinging on their freedom”. That is, their freedom to express the views they are required to express or suffer the consequences.

Threatened with violence and intimidation, feudal deference bends or perhaps shifts to a different master. The villagers, losing their attachment to the Parks, salivate over the possibility of “redistribution” and of being handed “free land”. Their desires are material and not political. Thus when the Parks’ estate is “returned” to the people, they simply walk in and start taking things. Not the most sensible way to redistribute wealth concentrated in the hands of the elite – the fast get horses, the indecisive dented pans which sounds like a recipe for rancour and discontent. When the old village chief becomes disillusioned with his choices and smashes the memorial to old Park, a small fight breaks out among villagers keen to snag the large pieces of stone for various other projects. Happy peasants who once shared everything and wanted for nothing, are now fighting with each other over rubble and trinkets.

The communists, far from fostering collective spirit, have become the evil feudal lords they rail against, oppressing the peasants with their rules and regulations while wilfully creating an atmosphere of fear in order to better oppress them. Their hypocrisy is rammed home early on by the slimy Cheol who complains about his wife’s supposed faithlessness while molesting a barmaid and smugly repeating the story of a large scar he has on his forearm. His superior, believing he got the scar during a labour dispute at a mine, promoted him for his communist spirit, but Cheol really got the scar in a scuffle over a girl (not his wife, incidentally).

Cheol is “a” force which comes between the two lovers, Ojaknyeo and Park Hun, as both are too morally upright to pursue a full romance when Ojaknyeo is still married to another man, even if the other man’s first action on seeing her is to throw her to the ground and begin kicking the living daylights out of her. Later Ojaknyeo gets another, more serious, beating from her father but this time because she’s chosen the wrong side in refusing to step away from the feudal world in her responsibility to Park Hun and his household, even if that responsibility is partly romantic desire. Yet Park Hun and Ojaknyeo are also separated by the feudal world’s rules in their obvious class difference. Communism is supposed to break down these barriers, not to mention removing the “patriarchal tyranny” of marriage, yet the communists would rather award Ojaknyeo to her former husband, little caring that he is abusive and neglectful. Ojaknyeo, at least, will not be freed from her oppression any time soon.

If Yu is making a mild defence of paternalistic feudalism as a metaphor for compassionate government, it is probably a little ambitious given the times in which he lived. Following a regular pattern, Yu paints the world as a terrible place where fear and self interest trump all, only to find small rays of light in the closing moments when an act of violence provokes a series of unexpected epiphanies and reconciliations. He ends on a note of hope in which an older man sacrifices himself for a younger one but is then rewarded with the possibility of salvation and a happier future with the woman he loves (and is now unafraid to pursue) south of the border. Communism seduces and betrays, whereas liberal democracy at least affords the “freedom” to be miserable with personal integrity.

Screened as part of the Korean Novels on Screen season at the Korean Cultural Centre London.

The Guests of the Last Train (막차로 온 손님들 / 막車로 온 손님들, Yu Hyun-mok, 1967)

March 22, 2018by Hayley ScanlonLeave a comment

Despite ongoing social and political oppression, the Korea of the 1960s was an upwardly mobile world in which increasing economic prosperity and global ambition was beginning to offer the promise of financial stability and a life of comfort to millions of young men and women, albeit at a price. Yu Hyun-mok, often thought of as among the most intellectual of “golden age” film directors, was a relatively infrequent visitor to the “literary film” but Guests of the Last Train (막차로 온 손님들 / 막車로 온 손님들, Makcharo on Sonnimdeul, AKA Guests Who Arrived on the Last Train), adapted from a novel by Hong Seong-won, is perhaps comfortably in line with his career long concerns in its focus on those who for one reason or another have been running to catch the rapidly departing train of modernity, pulling themselves on board just it prepares to pull away. A disparate tale of three men and their respective love interests, Yu’s film once again rejects the consumerism of the modern society in its cold and lonely search for soulless acquisition and finds comfort only in the fragile connections between the lost and hopeless.

The film opens behind a train station where a young woman, Bo-yong (Bo-yong), staggers and stumbles, grasping for something to hold on to but hardly able to stand. Eventually a man, Dong-min (Lee Soon-jae), turns up and tries to hail a taxi. Noticing the distressed woman, he manages to get her into a car and when she tells him she has nowhere to go, takes her home with him. Dong-min is currently off work with an illness which turns out to be terminal lung cancer and has only a few months left to live as a second opinion from his doctor friend, Kyeong-Seok (Seong Hoon), makes clear. Kyeong-seok is also facing a problem with a female patient, Se-jeong (Nam Jeong-im), suffering a nervous complaint after losing her wealthy husband and subsequently being hounded by her relatives over the inheritance. When Se-jeong leaves the hospital the pair end up having an affair but the money continues to present a problem – neither of them want the hassle of dealing with it. Meanwhile, Dong-min and Kyeong-seok reunite with another old friend, Choong-hyeon (Kim Seong-ok), who has just returned from Japan apparently having become fabulously wealthy. Choong-hyeon has pretensions of becoming an avant-garde artist, but is unable to get over his ex-wife who has left him to become a famous actress.

Each of the three men is in someway arrested, unable to move past something towards the future rapidly rolling away from them like a train leaving the station. Dong-min’s depression and listlessness is understandable given that he’s facing a terminal illness and knows that he has already reached the end of the line. Yet his ennui began long before. Kyeong-seok, describing his friend to a colleague, disapprovingly remarks that he used to be a mild-mannered bank teller but left to become a freelance translator and journalist. Unable to put up with the stringent, high pressure world of work Dong-min removed himself from it to try and grasp his freedom only to remain dissatisfied and eventually defeated by a cruel and arbitrary illness. Even so he retains his human feeling as demonstrated by his decision to help Bo-yong rather than leave a vulnerable woman alone to suffer on the streets. Staring blankly at the calendar on his wall, avoiding tearing off the sheets which serve as an all too obvious symbol of his limited time, he falls slowly in love with the woman who remains at his side whilst knowing that his existence is futile and doomed only to tragedy.

Kyeong-seok, by contrast, is merely disaffected. Dragged into a relationship with Se-jeong originally unwillingly, what he resists is responsibility. He wants to help her, but he does not want to get involved with her complicated familial and financial problems. As so often in Yu’s films, money is the root of all evil, presenting barriers between people where there should be none. Neither Kyeong-seok or Se-jeong are very interested in the money for its own sake, they want only simple lives of adequate comfort and emotional fulfilment – something which the hassle of dealing with other people’s money hungry machinations will actively destroy.

Money has also, in a sense, destroyed Choong-hyeon’s hopes though more through his misplaced faith in its ability to buy him back what he’s lost. His relationship with his wife is clearly over, she has chosen something else which is her right and privilege, but Choong-hyeon can not accept it and continues to look for her in all he does. Attempting to become an “artist” himself, he uses his money to get himself a show featuring his avant-garde pop art creations but neither of his friends rate his work or is careful enough about his feelings to avoid criticising it. Choong-hyeon spirals out of control, becoming dangerously obsessed with a schoolgirl he somehow wants to imagine as his wife. Dong-min and Kyeong-seok suspect that he will kill himself, but by this point they aren’t sure if they should care. What would they be saving him for? There is no possible salvation – no one can save anyone else, and no one can save themselves. Each is an individual and can offer no excuses. Love and friendship are but scant comfort in a cold and lonely world.

Meanwhile, the women continue to suffer in silence. Yu chooses to focus on his trio of male misfits rather than the pair of unlucky women whose story lies at the centre of the narrative. Se-jeong married an older man for apparently legitimate reasons but the marriage was unsuccessful and also ruined her friendship with her husband’s daughter who, unsurprisingly, turns out to be Bo-yong. Looking for love and not money, Se-jeong is only holding on to her inheritance in the hope of someday reconciling with Bo-yong and handing it all to her. Meanwhile, Bo-yong has been on the run from her former life. Once an air stewardess, Bo-yong dropped off the radar when a former fiancé planted drugs in her suitcase and got her sent to prison. Like Se-jeong she is looking for support and companionship and finds it in the kind if melancholy Dong-min, vowing to stay by his side even if she knows their time it limited. The two women are eventually “reunited” at a wedding, but the crowd keeps them apart, breaking into factions fighting over the inheritance that neither Se-jeon or Bo-yong actually want.

Yu declines to tell us whether the women are eventually able to meet and repair their friendship, but he does make clear that both have rejected the superficial comforts of wealth in asking for a small and simple life with their respective partners. In this he offers both hope and despair. The couples are rejecting the new future their nation has planned for them, yearning for small comforts and an end to their loneliness and struggling to find it in an increasingly alienated world. Bo-yong, at least, steps forward to grasp her chance at happiness however small it maybe, waiting for the train and seeing red lights change to green only when her gesture of sincerity is finally accepted.

Available on DVD as part of the Korean Film Archive’s Yu Hyun-mok boxset. Not currently available to stream online.