Tag: Sol Kyung-gu

The Moon (더 문, Kim Yong-hwa, 2023)

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Feeling slighted by the international community, Korea attempts to dominate in space by becoming the second nation to send a man to the moon but does so apparently with egalitarian principles in Kim Yong-hwa’s futuristic science drama, The Moon (더 문). The conceit is that that pretty much everyone, having learnt nothing, is intent on colonising the moon because it is a rich source of a particular mineral that could become a valuable means of sustainable energy for Earth. Of course, Korea wants in but crucially wants to share what it finds with the world unlike the Americans who just want to keep everything for themselves.

A running current of Anti-Americanism is deeply felt early on as NASA and the US initially refuse to help when a Korean spaceship gets into trouble in a solar flare, while the International Space Committee from which Korea is expelled because of “conflicts between nations” also seems to be led by Americans. Moon-Young (Kim Hee-ae), the ex-wife of former flight director Jae-gook (Sol Kyung-gu), also works at NASA and has taken an American name after marrying an American, yet is treated with chauvinistic contempt by her bosses who question her loyalty and qualifications. The implication is that America wants to conquer the moon to secure its bounty for themselves in an ironic act of futuristic colonialism, but that the Koreans are going to the moon in the interests of science hoping to discover something that will benefit all mankind. 

Having been expelled by the committee seems to fuel an exceptionalist drive among the Korean scientists who feel that they aren’t being afforded the respect they deserve internationally. This sense of internalised shame stems from the failure of their first rocket, the Norae-ho, which exploded shortly after taking off killing the three astronauts on board. Introduced to the three members of the Woori-ho, we can immediately sense that their chances of survival can’t be good seeing as the two older members mostly talk about their children, one of them planning to decide on a name for his as yet unborn daughter on the way. The third, Sun-woo (Doh Kyung-soo), has some complicated baggage with the mission and former flight director Jae-gook who was on duty at the time the Norae-ho exploded.

Sun-woo isn’t the only one with baggage as the scientists strive to overcome the traumatic failure of their first attempt. The Science and Technology Minster (Jo Han-chul) has his eyes mostly on his own reputation not wanting to oversee another catastrophic failure in Korea’s space programme. One of the two men in charge of the Norae-ho mission took his own life in atonement, while Jae-gook split up with his wife and retreated to the mountains working in a rural observatory. Perhaps precisely because of this, the quest to save Sun-woo, a former Navy Seal hired for his agility and athleticism who lacks experience and is unable to pilot the spacecraft alone, quickly goes viral pushing the Americans, who had been reluctant to help, to finally pitch in on a joint operation.

It’s this kind of panglobalism that the film eventually advocates as Moon-young sheds her American name of Jennifer and is fired from NASA for trying to help Sun-woo leading her to make a direct appeal to the international crew of the space station who hail from Canada, Australia, and the UK to save him out of astronaut solidarity. A voiceover reminds us that the Moon belongs to everyone, not any one entity, while praising those who were able to transcend nationality and ideology to work for a better world for all. It’s obviously an anti-colonialist sentiment though one that is eagerly pointed at American imperialism and its continuing effects in Korea even if it’s also true that the nation is smarting from being kicked out of the International Space Committee and desperately wants to be readmitted to secure its status on the world stage. Kim throws just about everything he can at Sun-woo and his little lander from solar storms to meteor showers and increasing despair shifting from one set piece to another as Sun-woo tries to overcome yet another disaster and fulfil his mission of returning home with ice samples in an act of redemption not only for the space programme but for himself as its orphaned son. 

The Moon is released in the US on DVD, blu-ray, and Digital on 27th February courtesy of Well Go USA.

US trailer (English subtitles)

A Normal Family (보통의 가족, Hur Jin-ho, 2023)

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“Parents are weak before their children” according to an apparently doting dad in Hur Jin-ho’s A Normal Family (보통의 가족, Botong-ui Gajok), yet later he will have to ask himself what it means to be a father and what exactly it is that he’s raising his daughter to be. Based on the Dutch novel The Dinner and a departure for Hur who is best known for romantic melodrama, the film nevertheless takes aim at the chaebol culture of the contemporary Korean society in which consequences are only for those without means. 

Twin cases further exacerbate the rift between two brothers, cynical lawyer Jae-won (Sol Kyung-gu), and earnest doctor Jae-gyu (Jang Dong-gun) as one finds himself defending the feckless son of a wealthy industrialist, and the other doing his best to save the life of a child seriously injured when a case of road rage resulted in the death of her father. Meanwhile, the brothers’ respective children, Jae-won’s daughter Hye-yoon (Hong Ye-ji), and Jae-gyu’s son Si-ho are later the subject of a viral video which appears to show two teens beating a homeless man half to death. 

Jae-gyu had resented his brother and rejected the idea of Si-ho doing an internship at his hospital on the grounds that he wants him to grow up to be a person with “integrity” rather than one who’d unfairly use his privilege and connections to get ahead. Yet as time moves on we begin to wonder if it isn’t also a little because he’s ashamed of his son who is socially awkward and apparently struggling academically. His wife Yeon-kyung (Kim Hee-ae), meanwhile, is a classic helicopter parent who spends an evening out repeatedly calling Si-ho’s phone and irritated when he doesn’t pick up. The implication is that they’re so hellbent on getting Si-ho into a good university to fulfil their own sense of esteem as parents that they’ve raised a child to conventional success that they’ve lost sight of what might actually be best for him as a whole individual.

On realising Si-ho maybe the violent teen in the video, Jae-gyu’s first instinct is to go to the police but he soon loses his moral authority on failing to follow through. Once again, the question is whether they choose to protect Jae-gyu from the consequences of his actions because they fear for him or because they fear the embarrassment his criminal status would bring to them. On the surface, Jae-woo has no such qualms, immediately torching the dress Hye-yoon was wearing that night while going into damage limitation mode trying to keep the teens’ identities secret. Yet he must also reckon with the fact that he’s brought her up in a world without consequences in which conventional morality no longer really applies to her because she is wealthy and has an elite lawyer for a father. 

In any case, just as Jae-gyu’s morality began to crumble so Jae-won begins to wake up to the idea that perhaps it’s a problem that his teenage daughter and her cousin beat a man half to death and then went back to their lives without batting an eyelid. Hye-yoon shows no remorse, cheekily asking her father for a car he promised her if she passed her exams while later expressing the view that as the man was homeless, a person who in her eyes had failed to achieve personhood through attaining markers of conventional success such as a degree and steady job, his life was of no consequence. Yeon-kyung later says something similar, not understanding why they’re making a fuss over “someone like that” whose life is worth nothing in comparison to her son’s future. 

Yeon-kyung is also relentlessly rude to Jae-won’s second wife, Ji-su (Claudia Kim), who is from a much more ordinary background and does everything she can to try and get along with her. Ji-su presents a much more conventional moral compass in considering what kind of mother she wants to be not only to her own newborn child but to Hye-yoon who like Yeon-kyung mainly treats her with contempt. It’s she who begins to wonder if covering this up is really the right thing for Hye-yoon and Si-ho or if failing to show them that actions have consequences will only encourage them to behave in ways otherwise offensive to a commonly held sense of humanity. 

The brothers switch sides, but the truth is that each of them has been teaching their children the wrong lessons in creating a world in which money settles everything and consequences are only for those who can’t pay. Yeon-kyung tries to justify herself that as she’s done a lot of good deeds it somehow balances out, Si-ho too echoing her on suggesting going to church as if you could buy your right to behave badly by saving up goodness points which is also another way of saying that consequences don’t apply. The children think that as long as they fulfil the role they’re expected to play, get good grades and become successful members of society, then nothing else really matters. Darkly comic, Hur’s steely drama suggests that the inequalities of the contemporary society, the elitism and anxiety have slowly eroded not only the most essential of relationships but the soul of the nation’s children who know nothing other than those with money need not pay for their crimes.

A Normal Family screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Boys (소년들, Chung Ji-young, 2022)

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A “mad dog” policeman uncovers a miscarriage of justice but finds that his faith in his institution may have been misplaced in Chung Ji-young’s pressing judicial drama, The Boys (소년들, Sonyeondeul). Like much of Chung’s previous work critiquing the power imbalances of the contemporary society, the film is one of several recent dramas taking aim at the justice system and the utter contempt of those in power for those without most notably for the titular boys exploited by a failure of the system.

In 1999, a trio of teenagers is picked up and arrested for the robbery of a convenience store in which an old woman died. Newly transferred to the district, “mad dog” policeman Joon-cheol (Sol Kyung-gu) receives a tip off that actually someone else did it. The informant says he’d previously told the investigating officer, Choi (Yoo Jun-sang), but was ignored. Joon-cheol might assume that’s because he didn’t think there was anything in it and didn’t find the informant credible, but something nags at him and he begins to look at the case only to realise too much of it doesn’t make sense. He soon discovers that Choi and his underlings beat the suspects, who were terrified and naive due to their youth, into a false confession in order to get a promotion by solving a prominent case.

Chung switches back and fore between 1999 and 2016 when the boys’ retrial finally takes place and discovers Joon-cheol a somewhat broken, defeated man who has served out the past few years on a peaceful rural island never receiving any further promotions. With his retirement looming, he’s been offered a return to the mainland, but apparently only thanks to Choi which leaves a sour taste in Joon-cheol’s mouth. Like pretty much everyone else, he is haunted by a sense of guilt that in the end despite his promises he was powerless to help these innocent young men escape their false imprisonment. 

Then again, Joon-cheol is also a product of the system. The “mad dog” beat suspects too, and there’s something chilling in his justification that he only beat the “guilty” and never the “innocent”. He got his promotion after being stabbed on the job, a strange sacrifice that seems the inversion of Choi’s greedy venality. Choi really thought nothing of these boys, one whom had learning difficulties and was illiterate so could not have written his statement on his own, because they were poor and defenceless and is unrepentant even when confronted with the truth. He himself could have caught the real culprits but simply chose not to because it was easier and more convenient to him to destroy the lives of three innocent boys instead. 

Choi’s reach seems to be eerily extensive though the police force’s reluctance to correct a miscarriage of justice because it would make them look bad is obviously an institutional flaw along with the use of violence to elicit confessions. The older version of Choi with slick backed hair and an arrogant manner behaves as if he’s untouchable, giving an answer for everything and leaving no room to be challenged while others are only too keen to support his version of events with equally smug manipulations of the law. 

The boys find themselves powerless. They cannot challenge Choi and though they’ve served their sentences and paid a debt to society that was never theirs to begin with cannot move on with their lives because they are still branded murderers meaning no one will hire them. Meanwhile, at least one of the real killers has had to opportunity to start again and is reluctant to help because they do not want their new family to find out about their past. Everyone is harbouring some kind of guilt or desire to bury the truth for a quiet life, Joon-cheol too not wanting to get involved and cautioning the boys against applying for a retrial because it will only cause them further pain. 

Though the truth is eventually revealed and the boys’ names cleared, the overwhelming implication is that you cannot really win against men like Choi. The sentiment is rammed home by a final title card explaining that nothing happened to any of the policemen involved in framing the boys while Joon-cheol only has the satisfaction of having helped to free them neither vindicated as a police officer or successful in undercutting the corruption inherent in the police force and embedded in the society itself. Nevertheless, Joon-cheol’s righteousness and the the unexpected support he receives from those around him for doing the right thing add an inspirational quality that simultaneously suggests justice is a distant dream but also that it can be achieved if enough people can be persuaded to chase it even while against their own interests.

The Boys screened as part of this year’s London East Asia Film Festival.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Phantom (유령, Lee Hae-young, 2023)

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Neatly subverting the drawing room mystery, Lee Hae-young’s intense colonial-era spy thriller Phantom (유령, Yuryeong) positions female solidarity as the roots of resistance towards oppressive militarist rule. Inspired by Mai Jia’s novel Sound of the Wind which focused on Chinese resistance towards the Japanese puppet government in Nanking, the film does indeed begin with the suggestion that one of the people in this room is a spy but soon encourages us to wonder if they all may be or some other game may be being played by an infinitely corrupt authority in the midst of a constant series of betrayals and reversals.

Opening in Kyungsung (modern day Seoul) in 1933, the film both begins and ends with a radio broadcast in Japanese reporting on the actions of “terrorist” group known as the “Shadow Corps” which has been conducting “organised crime” through a network of spies known as “Phantom”. An assassination attempt has recently been made in Shanghai on the new Korean governor and all members of the organisation are reported as dead following shootout with the Japanese authorities, though that obviously turns out not to be the case and we are quickly introduced to operative Park Cha-kyung (Lee Hanee) who works in the intelligence division of the colonial government and utilises a local cinema permanently screening Shanghai Express to communicate with her handlers. New instructions are boldly announced in plain sight through coded messages on cinema posters including one for Tod Browning’s Dracula. 

The group plan to assassinate the new governor when he visits a Japanese shrine in the city. A young woman dressed as a Shinto shrine maiden using a pistol concealed in a tray manages to wound but not kill him. She makes an escape but is shot by an unseen hand that could have come from either side. Following, Cha-kyung witnesses her death but can do nothing other than make a swift disappearance before the authorities arrive. Cha-kyung is often depicted as a shadow presence, disappearing phantom-like from the scene both there and not there as she tries to maintain her cover, but Lee also imbues her with an additional layer of repression in that the assassin, Nan-young (Esom), had been her lover. The two women meet briefly outside the cinema in an emotionally charged scene in which they can display no emotion as they must appear to be two strangers exchanging a match on the street though it’s clear that something much deeper is passing between them. 

The exchange of cigarettes itself becomes repeated motif standing in for deepening intimacy in an atmosphere of intense mistrust. The box of matches that Cha-kyung had given to Nan-young as a parting gift and means of buying a few seconds more, blows their operation in leading investigating officer Takahara (Park Hae-soo) to a bar opposite the cinema where he figures out their code. Seemingly unsure as to who is the “Phantom”, he rounds up five suspects and takes them to a clifftop hotel where he encourages them to identify themselves or else they will be interrogated the following day. Along with Cha-kyung whom we already know to be “a” if not “the” Phantom is a police officer against whom Takahara bears a grudge (Sol Kyung-gu), the governor’s flapper secretary Yuriko (Park So-dam), codebreaker Cheon (Seo Hyun-woo) who is very attached to his cat, and terrified mailroom boy Baek-ho (Kim Dong-hee). 

Lee keeps the tension high and us guessing as we try to figure out what’s really going on, who is on which side, and if there’s to this than it first seems. Cha-kyung too seems uncertain, unable to trust any of her fellow suspects who obviously cannot trust her either while trying to maintain her ice cool cover. With sumptuous production design evoking the smoky, moody elegance of the 1930s setting, Lee drops us some clues in focussing on footwear particularly Cha-kyung’s ultra-practical boots and Yuriko’s totally impractical high heels and fancy outfits which as it turns out may have their uses after all when the simmering tension finally boils over and all hell breaks loose at the combination luxury hotel and state torture facility. In any case, as we gradually come to realise, the real “Phantom” the title refers to may be Korea itself, the resistance fighters accused of clinging on to the ghost of a nation which no longer exists while themselves rendered invisible, forced to live underground until the liberation day arrives. 

Phantom screens July 30 as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Images: ⓒ 2023 CJ ENM Co., Ltd., THE LAMP.ltd ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Rainbow Trout (송어, Park Chong-won, 1999)

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The hypocrisies of contemporary civility pass under the microscope in Park Chong-won’s creepingly intense drama, Rainbow Trout (송어, Song-o). As a collection of urbanites pile into a car and journey far into the mountains to rescue an old friend who’s dropped out and returned to the land as a fish farmer, they find themselves stepping into a world entirely contrary to their understanding but eventually expose themselves as petty, jealous, resentful and shockingly violent even in their disdain towards the “backwards” woodsmen they feel are harassing them.

The film both begins and ends with a tollbooth as the car carrying the urbanites first leaves and then returns to the “safety” of Seoul. Ominous signs pepper their journey, one of the men wondering if the pits on a mirror at a dangerous curve are bullet holes while his friend insists they’re more like pockmarks from small rocks swept up in a storm. Swept up in a storm might be one way to describe what later happens to the city dwellers, but it’s fair enough to say that they are fairly puffed up on the superiority of their urban civility over the earthy lives of the rural hunters. None of them can understand why their friend has made the choice to leave Seoul behind and live a primitive existence in a cabin in the woods. 

Chang (Hwang In-sung) even remarks that his fish sometimes commit suicide, Min (Yu In-chon) suggesting that being cooped up in a small space makes them feel anxious. The urbanites are not in a small space, they’re in the wide open countryside, but to them it is claustrophobic in its unfamiliarity. Though the trip starts off well enough as they reminisce with Chang and enjoy a night round the camp fire, the two men, bank clerk Min and his bbq restaurant owner friend Byung (Kim Se-dong), soon fall foul of a local hunter who doesn’t like where they’ve parked their car or possibly that they’ve parked it at all. Byung is forever performing his masculinity, making a show of chopping wood and lifting weights outside the cabin, but like Min otherwise unable to challenge the hunters and entering a mini vendetta of pettiness with them that is destined to end badly. Min meanwhile is preoccupied in knowing that his wife, Jun-hwa (Kang Soo-yeon), is still in love with Chang while Chang’s decision to leave the city seems in part to have been provoked by their marriage. Byung’s wife, on the other hand, ironically submits to her carnal desires after being caught stealing a rabbit from a trap by a lecherous hunter who later shows up with a gift of yet more meat which seems somehow like even more of a betrayal given that her husband runs a barbecue meat restaurant but is obviously not quite red-blooded enough for her. 

It’s the presence of Jun-hwa’s younger sister Se-hwa (Lee Eun-ju), however, that provokes further tensions in the group not least as she develops a fondness for Chang while local dog breeder Tae-joo (Kim In-kwon) develops a fascination for her. Tae-joo peeps on Se-hwa in the outhouse and creepily lurks around the cabin though he is perhaps just awkward if a little strange more than actively dangerous. Nevertheless he becomes the target for the husbands’ frustrated masculinity as they decide to exorcise some of their frustration on a mountain boy who is ill-equipped to resist them, unleashing uncivilised violence and barbarity that would bring them to the point of homicide. They assume Chang is like them, that he will side with the city, but Chang is now a mountain man and has shades of barbarity the husbands’ little suspect. As the crisis intensifies, the urbanites shift the blame and turn on each other, uncomfortably blaming Se-hwa as if it were her fault that the boy took a liking to her or that the men took it in the direction that they did. Se-hwa also finds herself a victim of male violence from an unexpected source but is again blamed for it less for her naivety than the simple fact of her existence as a young woman in this incredibly primal environment. 

The urbanites thought the hunters to be savage, but in reality were savage themselves only to convince themselves that they had done nothing wrong pleading with Chang to cover up their violence because Tae-joo is only a mountain boy while they are civilised people from the cities who could not have acted in anything other than a civilised way. They are in a sense like the rainbow trout, raised within a narrow frame and little understanding how to live outside of it, driven out of their minds by the removal of the guardrails of civility. On returning to the city they may convince themselves that the dark shadows within have disappeared but the fragility of their sophistication has already been exposed rendering them at least less honest than the huntsmen who made no pretence of their carnality. 

Rainbow Trout screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Kingmaker (킹메이커, Byun Sung-hyun, 2022)

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It’s the political paradox. You can’t do anything without getting elected but to get elected you might have to abandon whatever it was you wanted to do in the first place. Loosely based on the real life figures of Kim Dae-jung and his political strategist Eom Chang-rok, the heroes of Byun Sung-hyun’s Kingmaker (킹메이커) are obsessed with the question of whether the ends justify the means and if it’s possible to maintain integrity in politics when the game itself is crooked while the film suggests that in the end you will have to live with your choices and your compromises either way and if it’s a better world you want to build perhaps you can’t get there by cheating your way to paradise.

The son of a North Korean migrant, Seo Chang-dae (Lee Sun-kyun) is an embittered and frustrated pharmacist with a talent for spin. When his friend complains about a neighbour stealing his eggs from his chicken coop and denying all knowledge because he’s well connected and knows he can get away with it, Chang-dae’s advice is to plant one of his own chickens in the other guy’s coop and catch him red handed. Impressed by the impassioned political speechmaking of labour activist Kim Woon-bum (Sol Kyung-gu), he writes him a letter offering his services and then marches down to his office to convince him that he is the guy to break his losing streak and finally get him elected so they can “change the damned world”. 

The problem is that all of Chang-dae’s ideas are like the chicken scam, built on the manipulation of the truth, but you can’t deny that they work. He plays the other side, the increasingly authoritarian regime of Park Chung-hee, at their own game, getting some of their guys to dress up as the opposing party and then set about offending a bunch of farmers by being generally condescending and entitled. They stage fights and perform thuggish violence to leave the impression that Park’s guys are oppressive fascists while asking for the “gifts” the Park regime had given out to curry favour back to further infuriate potential voters. Later some of their own guys turn up with the same gifts to send the message that they’re making up for all Park’s mistakes. At one point, Chang-dae even suggests staging an attack on Woon-bum’s person to gain voter sympathy, an idea which is met with total disdain by Woon-bum and his team many of whom are at least conflicted with Chang-dae’s underhanded tactics. 

But then as he points out, if they want to create a better, freer Korea in which people can speak their minds without fear then they have to get elected first. It may be naive to assume that you can behave like this and then give it all up when finally in office, but Chang-dae at least is committed to the idea that the ends justify the means. Woon-bum meanwhile is worried that Chang-dae has lost sight of what the ends are and is solely focussed on winning at any cost. He has an opposing number in slimy intelligence agent Lee (Jo Woo-Jin) who serves Park in much the same way Chang-dae serves Woon-bum, but Chang-dae fatally misunderstands him, failing to appreciate that for Lee Park’s “revolution” is also a just cause for which he is fighting just as Chang-dae is fighting for freedom and democracy. In an uncomfortable touch, Lee seems to be coded as gay with his slightly effeminate manner and tendency towards intimate physical contact adding an additional layer to his gradual seduction of Chang-dae whose friendship with Woon-bum also has its homoerotoic qualities in its quiet intensity. 

The final dilemma lies in asking whether or not Woon-bum could have won the pivotal election of 1971, preventing Park from further altering the constitution to cement his dictatorship and eventually declaring himself president for life, if he had not parted ways with Chang-dae and tried to win more “honestly”. If so, would they have set Korea on a path towards the better world they envisaged or would they have proved little different, their integrity already compromised by everything they did to get there poisoning their vision for the future? The fact that history repeats itself, Woon-bum and his former rival Young-ho (Yoo Jae-myung) splitting the vote during the first “democratic” presidential election and allowing Chun Doo-hwan’s chosen successor to win, perhaps suggests the latter. In any case, it’s Chang-dae who has to live with his choices in having betrayed himself, as Woon-bum had feared too obsessed with winning to remember why he was playing in the first place. “All my ideas about justice were brought down by my own hand” he’s forced to admit, left only with self-loathing defeat in his supposed victory. Some things don’t change, there is intrigue in the court, but “putting ambition before integrity will get you nowhere” as Chang-dae learns to his cost. 

Kingmaker screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Book of Fish (자산어보, Lee Joon-ik, 2021)

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An “evil learning sinner” and a young man fixated on Neo-Buddhist thought develop an unlikely friendship while compiling an encyclopaedia about sea life in Lee Joon-ik’s contemplative period drama, The Book of Fish (자산어보, Jasaneobo). Like those of Hur Jin-ho’s Forbidden Dream, the hero of Lee’s historical tale of competing ideologies dreams of a classless future but is exiled from mainstream society not for his revolutionary rejection of a Confucianist hierarchal society but for his embrace of Western learning and religion. 

Like his two brothers, Chung Yak-jeon (Sol Kyung-gu) reluctantly joins the imperial court but later falls foul of intrigue when the progressive king falls only to be replaced by his underage son controlled by the more conservative dowager empress. Having converted to Christianity, Yak-jeon and his brothers are faced with execution but unexpectedly reprieved when the oldest agrees to renounce Catholicism and root out other secret Christians. Yak-jeon is then exiled to a remote island while his better known brother, the poet Yak-yong (Ryu Seung-ryong), is sent to the mountains. On his arrival, the local governor introduces Yak-jeon as a “traitor” and instructs the islanders not to be too friendly with him but island people do not have it in them to be unjustly unkind and so Yak-jeon is, if warily, welcomed into their community. “He maybe be a traitor, but he’s still a guest” his new landlady (Lee Jung-eun) explains as she prepares him some of the local seafood. 

Yet Yak-jeon encounters resistance from an unexpected source, intellectual fisherman Chang-dae (Byun Yo-han) who goes to great lengths to acquire scholarly books despite his otherwise low level of education. Somewhat patronisingly, Yak-jeong offers to tutor him, but Chang-dae is a rigid thinker who believes the world is going to hell because people have forgotten their Confucian ideals so he’s no desire to be taught by a treacherous “evil learner” or be sucked in to his dangerous Catholicism. Surprisingly, however, for a man who risked death rather than renounce his religion, Yak-jeong is no fanatic and in fact does not appear to practice Christianity at any point while living on the island. What he professes is that Eastern and Western thought need not be enemies but can go hand in hand while a rigid adherence to any particular doctrine is what constitutes danger. 

Chang-dae had insisted that he studied “to become a better human” but he also has a large class chip on his shoulder as the illegitimate son of a nobleman who refuses to acknowledge him, fully aware that as a “lowborn” man he is not allowed to take the civil service exam and in any case would not have the money to buy his way in to the court. Despite later professing egalitarianism, Yak-jeong treats the islanders, and particular Chang-dae, with a degree of superiority extremely irritated by Chang-dae’s refusal to become his pupil in the slight of his elite status often making reference to his “low birth”. Confessing his desire for a classless society with no emperor, however, Yak-jeong encounters unexpected resistance as the young man finds it impossible to envisage a world free of social hierarchy based on rights of birth and swings back towards desiring the approval of his elite father in the determination to climb the ladder rather than pull it down. 

Chang-dae finds himself caught between two fathers who embody two differing ways of being, Yak-jeong advising him to think for himself rather than blindly follow Confucianist thought, while his father encourages him to towards the court and the infinite corruptions of the feudal order. Chang-dae does begin to interrogate some of the more persistently problematic elements of Confucian teaching including its views on women and entrenched social hierarchy but also feels insecure and desperately desires conventional success and entrance into a world he thinks unfairly denied to him. Once there, however, he discovers he cannot submit himself to duplicities of feudalism. The islanders are being taxed to into oblivion, not only is there a random counter-intuitive tax on pine trees but the government is also extracting taxes from the family members of the deceased as well as newborn babies while cutting sand into the rice rations it promises in return. His father and superiors laugh at him for his squeamishness, seeing nothing at all wrong in the right of the elite to exploit the poor. Trying to blow a whistle, Chang-dae is reminded that the courtly system is an extension of the monarchy, and so criticising a lord is the same as criticising the king which is to say an act of treason. 

Having been accused of treason himself, Yak-jeong declines to enact his revolutionary ideas penning only a couple of books during his time in exile in contrast to his brother who published many treatises on effective government. Yak-jeong explains he dare not risk writing his real views which is why he’s immersed himself in the beauty of the natural world, exercising his curiosity writing about fish while making use of Chang-dae’s vast knowledge of the sea. The two men develop a loose paternal bond but are later separated by conflicting desires, Chang-dae eventually choosing conventional success over personal integrity only to regret his decision on being confronted with the duplicities of the feudal order. Shot in a crisp black and white save for two brief flashes of colour and inspired by traditional ink painting, Lee’s contemplative drama finds itself at a fracture point of enlightenment as two men debate the relative limits of knowledge along with the most effective way to resist a cruel and oppressive social order but eventually discover only wilful self exile as Chang-dae learns to re-embrace his roots as an islander along with the openminded simplicity of Yak-jeong’s doctrine of catholicity in learning. 

The Book of Fish screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Peppermint Candy (박하사탕, Lee Chang-dong, 1999)

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Peppermint Candy 4K posterA wise man once said that the tragedy of life is that you have to live it forwards but it can only be understood in reverse. Lee Chang-dong’s second feature, the poignantly titled Peppermint Candy (박하사탕, Bakha Satang), lays bare the wounded innocence of 20th century Korea through the story of one man betrayed by the world in which he lived, eventually destroying himself in a protracted act of self-harm intended as a perverse attempt either at atonement or grudging conformity with a society he could not resist.

Beginning and ending with a picnic, Lee opens in 1999 as a hopelessly drunk Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu) crashes a reunion party he wasn’t technically invited to held to mark 20 years of friendship among former factory workers now approaching middle age. Dressed in a suit which looks somehow wrong on him, Yong-ho hogs the karaoke mic to sing a maudlin song about failed love, dances wildly, and sobs with the crushing hopelessness of a man entirely alone in the world. While his old friends try to reclaim the cheerful atmosphere, he climbs up to a nearby railway bridge where he waits for a train with outstretched arms, screaming “I’m going back” as he prepares to greet it.

Yong-ho does indeed “go back” as the train bears us ceaselessly back into the past, showing us the moments of Yong-ho’s life which struck him like a hammer to the soul and turned him into the defeated figure on the railway bridge, howling into the wind. At 40, Yong-ho is a hollowed out shell of a man, divorced and living in a greenhouse after falling foul of the volatile late ‘90s stock market, subsequently cheated out of all his money and the possibility of a new start by a man he thought was his friend. Given what we later learn about the middle-aged Yong-ho, it’s difficult to believe he had any kind of friends at all, and even if we’re conditioned to pity him as a man already dead he does nothing to earn our sympathy, cheating a poor roadside coffee seller out of a few pennies and then quietly smirking to himself in the safety of his car.

Yet, he begins to soften when a kindly man shows up and tells him that his first love, Sun-im (Moon So-ri) – now apparently this good man’s wife, is close to death and wants to see him one last time never having given up on the man he once was. Given the suit which doesn’t suit him by Sun-Im’s husband so that she won’t realise Yong-ho has made a mess of his life and be upset, Yong-ho stops to pick up a small jar filled with the titular “peppermint candy”, suddenly revealing that perhaps he never quite gave up on that man either and that may be his tragedy.

Before he was an arch capitalist making a few shady bucks in the pre-financial crisis economic boomtown of the newly democratised Korea, Yong-ho was a policeman working for the authoritarian government brutally torturing teenage democracy activists during the dying days of the regime. As a young rookie we see him squeamishly try to resist, only to be pressured into violence and then snap. The suspect fouls Yong-ho’s hand with the kind of smell that never really washes off, but it’s just one more stop on Yong-ho’s journey to spiritual ruination. Finally we reach his breaking point, in Gwangju in 1980, where his soul is forever soiled.

The Gwangju Massacre, in the story of Yong-ho’s life which is also the story of Korea, is the great festering wound which can never be healed. He carries it with him in an intermittent limp that resurfaces at times of emotional difficulty, and convinces himself that he is unworthy of everything good or innocent in the world. He breaks with Sun-im, cruelly betraying her faith in him with a crude gesture that wounds them both equally, mutually understood as a perverse act of kindness. Becoming what he thinks he’s supposed to be, what this society has made him, he wilfully destroys himself in a decades-long act of self harm that leads only back to the train which haunts him throughout all of his encounters, so painfully central to the arc of his life. Literally railroaded by an inexorable fate, Yong-ho lacks the will to resist believing he is no better than the hand he has been dealt but consumed by self-loathing and infinite regret. There is no way back, only forward, but for Yong-ho, and perhaps for Korea, Lee sees only one way out and the soft of heart will not survive it.

Peppermint Candy was screened as part of the 2019 London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Idol (우상, Lee Su-jin, 2019) [Fantasia 2019]

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Idol poster 1“Getting others to trust something is more important, not what they choose to believe” advises a cynical politician a little way into Lee Su-jin’s Idol (우상, Woosang). Image is indeed everything. Who are you more likely to believe – the slick, seemingly upstanding politician who’s done everything “right”, or an ageing, inarticulate aircon repairman with bleach blond hair? Two fathers go to bat for their sons, if in very different ways, but only one can emerge “victorious” in their strangely symmetrical endeavours.

Lee opens with a voice-over taken from a speech later in the film belonging to bereaved father Yoo (Sol Kyung-gu) in which he confesses that as his son Bu-nam (Lee Woo-hyun), who had severe learning difficulties, grew older, he found himself having to masturbate him to prevent him harming himself trying to calm his sexual urges. Yoo’s words play over his opposite number’s return home from a research trip to Japan. Koo (Han Suk-kyu) is a politician and former herbalist with a special interest in nuclear power. Ambitious, he spends much of his time travelling for business while his wife (Kang Mal-geum) cares for their wayward adolescent son, Johan (Jo Byung-gyu). A panicked text message warning that Johan has got himself into trouble again gets ignored, but when he arrives home Koo knows he has to act. Johan has knocked someone over and rather than take them to hospital, he’s brought the body back home.

A series of quick calculations tells him that the “best” option is for Johan to turn himself in, despite his wife’s insistence that they simply get rid of the body. He drives the corpse back to the scene and dumps it, gets rid of the original car, and then drives his son to the police station before expressing contrition in front of the cameras. That would have been that if it weren’t for Yoo’s dogged determination to find out what happened to his boy, and the fact that Bu-nam’s “wife” Ryeon-hwa (Chun Woo-hee), an undocumented former sex worker from China, managed to escape meaning there are loose ends Koo knows he needs to tie up.

“This rotting smell” Ryeon-hwa exclaims on putting a number of things together. There is something undoubtedly corrupt in Koo’s superficially smooth world of neatly pressed suits and sharp haircuts. Stagnant water swells around him, along with a murky swirl of blood, as he contemplates the best way out of his present predicament. Everything here is stained, marked, or scarred as if hinting at the darkness beneath gradually seeping through.

Yoo, meanwhile, perhaps knows he lives in a “dirty” world and though he never claims to be completely clean himself, is fully aware of the implications of his actions. A widowed father, he tried to do the best for his disabled son. He offered him relief in ways others would find perverse in a strange gesture of fatherly love, finally deciding to get him a wife in the hope of putting an end to such degradation for them both only to regret his decision when he realises Bu-nam may not have died if he’d just stayed home. Koo, meanwhile, tries less to protect his son than himself, weighing up that the boy will most likely get a slap on the wrist and he’ll come out of it looking better because he behaved “honestly” and in line with the law. To get elected he will stop at nothing to preserve the image of properness, even if it means he must get his hands “dirty”.

In that essential ruthlessness, he may have something in common with the jaded Ryeon-hwa whose sister warns Yoo not to trust her because “her nature is different”. Like Koo, she has done terrible things but done them to survive rather than to prosper. Her marriage to Bu-nam might seem like no prize, but it was better than the life she was leaving behind and, crucially, a guaranteed path to Korean citizenship assuming Yoo eventually filled in the marriage papers properly.

Yoo just wants “justice”, but ruthless men like Koo who care about little other than image are not about to let him get it, which is why he finds himself trotted out as a superficial ally to bolster Koo’s appearance at the polls in return for Ryeon-hwa’s “assured” safety. In the end, all Koo’s scheming blows up in his face, but, Lee seems to say, the image always survives and men like Koo know how to spin it to their advantage while men like Yoo will always be at the mercy of the system. A bleak, often confusing, noirish thriller, Idol plunges a knife deep into the heart of societal corruption but finds that truth often matters less than the semblance of it in a society which idolises the superficial.

Idol was screened as part of the 2019 Fantasia International Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Birthday (생일, Lee Jong-un, 2019)

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Birthday posterOn 16th April 2014, a ferry carrying mostly teenagers on a school trip sank taking 304 passengers and crew down with it. The Sewol Ferry tragedy was to have profound ramifications, asking a series of questions as to corporate and political corruption in the society which had permitted such an accident to happen and then failed to mount an effective rescue. In the five years since, many films have probed the causes and implications of the tragedy, but Lee Jong-un’s Birthday (생일, Saengil) is not so much interested in the incident itself as in the nature of grief and all the more so when it takes place across a national canvas.

Lee picks up three years after the sinking as husband and father Jung-il (Sol Kyung-gu) returns to Korea after five years of working away in Vietnam. So disconnected is he from his family, that he was only vaguely aware that they had moved and has trouble finding the new apartment. When he gets there, his wife Soon-nam (Jeon Do-yeon) pretends to be out, sending Jung-il back to stay with his understanding sister who tries to fill him in on the various reasons he might not be welcome at his own door.

The loss of the couple’s oldest child, Su-ho (Yoon Chan-young), in the ferry tragedy is only gradually revealed though it’s clear that there is an absence in the family home. Soon-nam has kept Su-ho’s room exactly as he left it – school uniform hanging on the wardrobe door, unfinished school work on the desk, post-its seemingly everywhere. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Ye-sol (Kim Bo-min) is often left to her own devices while Soon-nam buries herself in work and shuts out everything that reminds her that her son is never coming home.

While some of the other parents have formed a tightly bonded community forged by shared grief and anger, Soon-nam wants no part of it. Invited to a gathering after bumping into other parents at the memorial site, she lasts barely a few minutes before accusing them of turning their suffering into an excuse for frivolity. It’s not as if she could ever forget what happened to her son, but when the ferry tragedy is on every street corner, on the radio, on the news, it becomes impossible to ignore. Soon-nam wants her grief to herself. Her son and her loss. She isn’t interested in sharing him with anyone else, be that an increasingly angry society or her little girl who is now terrified of water and worried about her mum.

Jung-il, burdened with guilt for having abandoned his family, tries to address his grief in a more positive sense by re-embracing his role as a father to Ye-sol who was so small when he left that she doesn’t really remember him. Though Lee is not particularly interested in the political ramifications of the tragedy, she does subtly point the finger at the effects of economic pressure on the ordinary family which have seen Jung-il exile himself abroad and Soon-nam working so hard just to keep her head above water that Ye-sol is caught in the middle. Jung-il wasn’t there when his family needed him, and there’s precious little he can do for them now other than try to be around.

The other members of the support group have been holding birthday parties for some of the kids who passed away, turning the solemnity of a memorial service into a celebration of life. Soon-nam is against the idea – she would rather save the day for herself in private commemoration, but Jung-il is broadly in favour. Probed, he has to admit he barely knew the young man his son was becoming and that this party might be the only way to reconnect with the boy he lost. A passport that will never be stamped, colleges that will never be applied to, weddings that will never take place – the finality of the loss is crippling, but in holding the birthday parties those left behind are able to find a kind of acceptance in shared remembrance and a confirmation that their loved ones were loved and will continue to be loved even in their absence. A sensitive yet uncompromising exploration of the sometimes forgotten personal dimension to a national tragedy, Birthday is a beautifully complex evocation of learning to live with loss and a strangely uplifting, cathartic experience.

Birthday was screened as the opening night gala of the 2019 Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)