Tag: Son Byung-Wook

The Man Standing Next (남산의 부장들, Woo Min-ho, 2020)

Posted on by 1 Comment

“You have my full support. Do as you please” so says the dictator, unambiguously manipulative but still somehow inspiring the loyalty of his many underlings perhaps still too wedded to an idea or at least an ideology to countenance moving against him. It turns out that nothing really changes and whether it’s feudal Joseon or the modern nation state, there is intrigue in the court. Neatly adopting the trappings of a ‘70s conspiracy thriller, Woo Min-ho’s The Man Standing Next (남산의 부장들, Namsanui Bujangdeul) explores the events which led to the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, father of the recently deposed president Park Geun-hye, by a member of his own security team. Many of the names have been changed and historical liberties taken, but the lesson seems to be that there is always a man standing next in readiness to inherit the throne. 

Our hero is KCIA chief Kim Gyu-peong (Lee Byung-hun), preparing as the film opens to halt Park’s (Lee Sung-min) increasing authoritarianism by assassinating him. A combination of the personal and the political Gyu-peong’s eventual epiphany is precipitated by an old friend’s “defection”. Park Yong-gak (Kwak Do-won), former director of the KCIA which operated as a secret police force propping up Park Chung-hee’s oppressive regime, is giving testimony to an American inquiry into the so-called “Koreagate” scandal in which the KCIA is accused of bribing members of Congress to propagate favourable views of the Korean president and reverse Nixon’s decision to pull US troops from South Korea. Yong-gak uses the opportunity to denounce Park Chung-hee, planning to publish a memoir titled “Traitor of the Revolution” as an exposé of the inner workings of the KCIA.  

Somewhat ironically, Gye-peong and Yong-gak are old comrades who fought together in the “revolution” led by Park in the early 1960s following the ousting of corrupt autocrat Rhee Syngman. Yong-gak has become disillusioned with their cause and with Park himself, but this largely ignores the fact that Park’s revolution was mainly a repackaging of Japanese militarism, something signalled by an exchanged between Park and Gye-pyeong in Japanese to the effect that their days of revolution were their best. All of which makes Yong-gak’s wistful eulogising of a betrayed ideal along with his supposed admiration for democracy somewhat ironic. The essential motivator in their loss of faith, however, is also a militaristic one. They learn firstly that like any dictator Park has been embezzling from the state for years and has a collection of slush funds in Switzerland. That’s not the problem, the problem is that to manage them he’s been running a “private” intelligence service unknown even to the KCIA. They’ve been displaced, and their hurt is personal more than it is political. 

Yong-gak calls Park a traitor to their revolution and objects to the continuing human rights abuses for which he himself as a member of the KCIA has been directly responsible. All of this creates a series of crises for Gye-peong who is torn between loyalty to his old friend and Park while increasingly worried for his own safety. He begins to suspect that Gwak (Lee Hee-joon), Park’s security officer who had not fought with them in the revolution, may be the mysterious “Iago” figure Yong-gak had been warned about by the CIA. Increasingly sidelined, Gye-peong continues to do Park’s dirty work but draws attention to himself in his resistance towards the president’s increasingly militaristic rhetoric. Pro-democracy protests have already broken out in Busan in response to Park’s “unfair” treatment of the city’s governor and the opposition party. Gye-peong advises reinstating the governor with an apology. Gwak says frame the protestors as communists and Northern sympathisers and send in the tanks. “Cambodia killed three million people, is it such a big deal if we kill one or two million?” Gwak blurts out in a quip which seems to catch Park’s attention, the president now thinking himself untouchable. A militarist perhaps but an educated man who speaks good English and gets on well with the Americans, Gye-peong does not see the Khmer Rouge as a source of inspiration nor, like Yong-gak, does he think those values align with the ones he fought for bringing Park to power. 

Then again, even in the immediate chaos of the early ‘60s, it’s difficult to see how you could join that particular revolution without assuming it would come to this. Gye-peong has apparently been OK with human rights abuses and mass oppression, but has been quietly reassuring himself and others that Korea is changing, Park is preparing to move aside, and they are progressing towards democracy. In true conspiracy fashion, Woo paints Gye-peong as a tragic hero, unable to reconcile himself with the choices he has made or the radically different version of the world he is now seeing, but taking what is essentially a personal revenge in return for a slighting from a man to whom he’d given his life. Perhaps in a sense he thinks he’s saving Park from himself, or merely protecting the revolution he fought for from a cruel traitor, but in the end lacks the courage to carry it through. He thought Gwak was his Iago, but he missed the “man standing next” in the shadows. As the April Revolution led only to Park, so Park leads only to Chun and second military coup even more brutal than the last. Nothing really changes, but the next revolution will have to be one enacted by more peaceful means because the spectre of authoritarianism is eclipsed only in the freedom from fear.

The Man Standing Next is available to stream in the UK from June 25 and on download July 5 courtesy of Blue Finch Releasing.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Red Carpet (레드카펫, Park Bum-soo, 2014)

Posted on by Leave a comment

red carpet posterExpectation is a heavy burden for a film. Not just the hopes built by excessive hype, but the way it chooses to define itself in advance. Of course, particularly with big budget studio movies it’s marketing men who decide all that rather than filmmakers but still, it’s hard to escape the feeling of confusion when the way a film was marketed works against its true nature. For a film like Red Carpet (레드카펫), an indie rom-com with a strangely innocent heart, it cuts both ways. The salacious hook is that this is a story of porno hell – tortured artists, egotistical men, and abused women. This is couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Red Carpet is deeper than it seems, asking real questions about the place of the porn industry in a modern society and attacking our own unfair and hypocritical judgements on its existence.

Park Jun-woo (Yoon Kye-Sang) is a lifelong cinephile who dreams of making award winning films he can watch on a Sunday afternoon with his parents, but life has been unkind to him and so he’s been working in the adult video industry for the last ten years. His life changes when he arrives home one day to find a strange young woman waiting there who accuses him of being a prowler and repeatedly hits him over the head with a frying pan. When the police get involved and take Jun-woo’s side seeing as he has the proper documentation it’s revealed that the woman, who has just returned for an extended period living in Spain, has been duped by a housing scam. Jung-woo, being the kindly soul he is, lets the woman, Eun-soo (Koh Joon-hee), live with him until she figures things out. Eun-soo is also a former child actress keen to get back into the profession and takes a keen interest in some of Jung-woo’s scripts never knowing exactly what kind of films it is that he really makes…

Though the setting is the porn industry, director Park makes sure to keep things light and humorous, showing the reality of adult video making but avoiding directly displaying it on the screen. Jung-woo’s work is almost entirely themed around porn parodies of famous movies as in the first shoot we witness where we gradually realise that the whole thing is Oldboy remade as a sex film (apparently including the corridor hammer fight, though no one’s figured out what to do with that yet). More amazing titles follow including the amusing “Inspect Her Gadget”.

Jung-woo may be conflicted about his career as a porn director, longing for the chance to make more “serious” films, but the rest of the crew is fairly happy with their choice of profession. This is, after all, just a job the same as any other. No one here is forced to work in the porn industry. There are no gangsters, no women trapped, abused, or forcibly hooked on drugs to keep them compliant. Everyone here seems to have made a free choice to engage in this type of work and is free to stop anytime they choose.

The problem, in this sense, is ours. Jung-woo and the crew face constant social stigma for what they do. At several points someone (well, always a man) is asked if they watch porn – to which they sheepishly admit, giving the impression that it is something they rarely do and are ashamed of doing. This central fallacy is the entire problem, everyone is watching the films Jung-woo makes – probably thousands more people have watched his adult movies online than have seen the legit movie which was plagiarised from a script that he wrote but was not allowed to direct because he didn’t have the “experience”. Yet everyone disapproves of pornography, tries to deny they watch it, and has the impression that people who make these films are in some way damaged or perverted. Enjoying a meal together in a restaurant, the gang are accosted by a “fan” who asks for a photo with a “famous actress” only to suddenly grab her breast. Just because she’s an actress in adult movies, the man thinks it’s OK to grab her  – “she sells her body”, so what’s the problem? The man, who obviously watches porn, does not think of the people who make it as other human beings but as commercial products existing only for his pleasure.

Jung-woo, in a sense, thinks this too but doesn’t quite realise until he’s made to read out a statement at a press conference in which he’s supposed to apologise for his “unethical” behaviour but refuses, avowing that neither himself or his crew has ever felt ashamed of the work they do. Jung-woo’s dreams are directly contrasted with Eun-soo’s as she works hard to become a legitimate actress all the while loosing her individual freedom to the marketing concerns of her agency and facing the prospect of being forced to abandon Jung-woo, whom she has come to care for, in order to keep her new career and avoid the “scandal” of being in any way associated with the porn industry.

Even if it seems like people such as Jung-woo are not allowed their dreams, it can still all work out in the end as long you’re true to yourself and accepting of everything you are and were. Jung-woo’s early career was harmed by an unscrupulous competitor who stole Jung-woo’s shot and took the credit himself but his “success” may only be temporary because he’s living a lie of artistic integrity while Jung-woo and Eun-soo have maintained their authenticity even when it looked like it may cost them everything they wanted. Improbably sweet and charming, Red Carpet is an innocent love story in which dreams come true through hard work, perseverance, and compromise but finally through truthfulness in the refusal to be shamed for simply being what you are.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Black House (검은집, Shin Terra, 2007)

Posted on by 1 Comment

Black House (korea)Yusuke Kishi’s Black House source novel was previously adapted by Yoshimitsu Morita in its native Japan back in 1999, but eight years later the tale made its way to Korea by way of director Shin Terra who opts for a much more straightforward approach than Morita’s characteristically bizarre take. Sold as K-horror, the tone is closer to nasty thriller only giving way to classic slasher action in the final stretch. In eschewing Morita’s idiosyncratic tendency to insert himself into the material, Shin crafts a more mainstream aesthetic, but loses the various layers of social and psychological commentary that went with it.

Juno (Hwang Jung-min) is a mild mannered insurance clerk, new on the job and extremely naive. His first case involves a visit to a hospital with his boss to visit a persistent claimant whom they believe is deliberately scamming the system and possibly with the hospital’s help. In many ways, Juno is an innocent, he believed in insurance as a safety net and a power for social good so he’s shocked that anyone would deliberately manipulate the rules in this way – particularly when he discovers some people will go so far as to deliberately maim themselves just to claim on their insurance policies.

Not long after he starts working at the company, Juno gets a strange phone call from a man asking if insurance policies pay out in case of suicide. It’s possible, Juno says – he’ll need to check the policy to make sure. Suddenly worried the person he’s talking to is in a dark place, he starts trying to dissuade him from the idea of taking his own life and unwisely gives a lot of first hand advice despite the highlighted section in his employee guide cautioning him never to reveal personal information to clients. Soon enough, a client has asked for him personally to go out to their remote house and chat about a policy. When he gets there he receives a nasty surprise as the man’s young son has apparently hanged himself in the back room. Appalled, Juno waits to greet the police but becomes convinced the man has deliberately killed the boy, who was his step-son, to get the payout on his life insurance.

Juno refuses the claim but Choong-bae, the claimant, won’t give up and starts coming to the office everyday to ask for his money. Choong-bae is a scary looking guy and frightens most of the other staff with his vacant staring. He also has an insurance policy on his wife leading Juno to fear that she is next but his decision to try and alert her to her husband’s plans will prove a mistaken one, drawing him into the web of a dangerous and psychopathic serial killer.

Shin’s adaptation is most likely closer to the original novel but he is far less interested in the psychological or social implications than Morita was. There is no explanation offered for the actions of the killer though the childhood sequences with their reliance on dreams and hearsay remain intact, only with lesser impact. The question of insurance fraud and scamsters, people so desperate for money that they will literally sacrifice an arm or a leg, only exists as background and isn’t presented as a societal problem so much as just something that happens because there are some shameless people out there who would rather play the system than do an honest days work. Juno has also been given his own tragic backstory which tries to play him off as a mirror of the killer though somehow this never quite works and Juno’s own flashbacks are overplayed.

Beginning as a slow burn thriller where Juno plays the nervous, softhearted neophyte as yet uninured to the murkiness of the insurance world, Black House (검은집, Geomeun Jip) takes a huge detour during the final third which sends it into slasher territory when Juno decides to travel to the titular Black House, alone, during the middle of the night, because the police won’t listen to him and there are people in danger. When he gets there he finds a veritable house of horrors with body parts and nooses hanging from the ceiling, blood and carnage everywhere. Then it’s a straightforward fight to the death as Juno faces off against the psychopathic terror despite his nervous disposition culminating in some unexpectedly gory business with a key.

Like most slasher movies, Black House has several endings and finishes on a note of uncertainty but it never quite manages to make its sudden descent into violence work in its favour. Lacking the depth of Morita’s adaptation, Shin’s Black House may have stronger genre influences but with nothing to back them up all that remains at the end is a darker than usual serial killer tale with mild slasher tendencies. A decent enough mainstream thriller, Black House has a lot to offer despite stumbling in its final third but nevertheless lacks a distinctive element to mark it out from similarly themed genre efforts of recent times.

Unsubbed trailer: