Tag: Song Young-Chang

My Love, My Bride (나의 사랑 나의 신부, Lee Myung-se, 1990)

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Following his anarchic debut Gagman, Lee Myung-se’s My Love, My Bride (나의 사랑 나의 신부, Naui sarang, naui sinbu), might seem like a more subdued affair recalling the technicolor rom-coms of 1960s Hollywood, yet makes use of innovative stylistic techniques to explore the lives of a newlywed couple in a newly democratising Korea. Like many similarly themed films, it is keen to poke fun at the protagonist’s chauvinistic perspective and self-involvement, but cannot completely condemn them either in expecting at least a degree of audience identification with this Korean everyman.

The film opens boldly with Young-min (Park Joong-hoon) directly addressing the camera to introduce himself and explain that this is the most important day of his life as he plans to propose to university girlfriend Mi-young (Choi Jin-sil). She, however, has got the wrong end of the stick and is convinced that he’s going to dump her. This set of mismatched expectations and miscommunication sets the tone for much of their early marriage as they struggle to settle into the rhythms of co-habitation and gendered expectations of married life.

Mi-young has given up work on her marriage, though Young-min often stays late at the office and expects Mi-young to take care of all the domestic responsibilities. When Mi-young tells him that she’s going to stay overnight after visiting her mother, his first question is what he’s supposed to do about his dinner. Mi-young has already prepared it and left it in the fridge for him to warm up later, specifically instructing him not to stay out too late drinking. Young-min, however, takes this as an opportunity to rebel against the constraints of his newly married life and fill the temporary feminine absence by pursuing a colleague, Seung-hee (Kim Bo-yeon).

Seung-hee is in many ways portrayed as the polar opposite of country girl Mi-young whom Young-min occasionally mocks and looks down on for what he sees as her lack of sophistication and poor cultural knowledge. Seung-hee is a poet who dresses in smart suits exuding confidence and power that suggest she will not be subservient to men but assert her power over them. She shows Mi-young up first when everyone at the office suddenly invites themselves over to Young-min’s apartment for a “house warming”, expecting Mi-young to conjure up a dinner party to show off her domestic skills at moment’s notice. Seung-hee is a fine singer and offers a poignant rendition of Love Me Tender, prompting Young-min’s boss to insist Mi-young entertain them with a song. She obliges with a popular love song, but her singing voice is much more ordinary and her inability to hit the high notes provokes horrified faces from Young-min’s colleagues who continue to make fun of the pair because Mi-young had spelled out “I love you” in peas in the lunchbox she made for Young-min. The older men, meanwhile, all go to lunch together reflecting that they can hardly expect the same from their own wives after so many years of marriage.

Young-min is also constantly asking himself what love is and wondering if his married life will continue to be happy. Split into a series of chapters, the film focuses a number of episodes in which the couple must confront various issues from a fairly traumatic honeymoon and wedding night to Young-min’s wandering eye and irrational jealousy. Though he tells Seung-hee that marriage should be about love rather than ownership, on spotting Mi-young in a cafe with another man he jumps to the immediate conclusion that she must have met with an old lover who is trying to win her back. In fact, it was her old boss whom she ran into by chance while waiting for Young-min, and the reason that she’s crying is that he informed her one of their former colleagues has passed away. Young-min makes no attempt to talk to Mi-young about any of this, but starts giving her the cold shoulder for no reason endangering their growing bond as newlyweds. Mi-young, meanwhile, looks back on first love after receiving a letter from an old boyfriend who moved to Canada. He is no longer the handsome young man she once knew but portly middle-aged father of two. 

To escape the boredom of her married life she takes a trip to a random rural town where she buys cigarettes, has her photo taken, and is offered an unexpected job opportunity after wandering into a cafe that is clearly a front for a delivery coffee service. Though Young-min is often quick to pride himself for his emotional intelligence as a writer, he’s often inconsiderate of Mi-young. When he wins the New Writer’s Award, he insults Mi-young’s outfit moments before they leave implying that she looks cheap and common and that people will expect a writer’s wife to look sophisticated. At the party, she’s sat sadly on her own ignored by everyone including Young-min, while he expects to trot her out for interviews as his loyal and supporting wife. Even when, she’s taken ill, his mind flashes to the scenario of her death on which his main thoughts are that he’s too busy for all this right now, and though it might be nice to live alone, who’s going to take care of his laundry?

Nevertheless, Mi-young’s temporary absence does make him realise that he misses her in ways other than the practical and seems to paper over the other cracks their relationship so that they can put all the petty disagreements to one side and love and accept each other. Lee uses a series of humorous devices including onscreen graphics and speech bubbles to reflect the protagonists’ thought processes, while the fantastic production design gives their world a sense of cosy unreality. Meanwhile, he uses the changing of the seasons to reflect the changing dynamics of couple, embracing romantic imagery such as the moon rising and snow falling as Young-min and Mi-young fall into a more settled rhythm and an older Young-min reflects that he is still in the process of finding out what love is, but is grateful for the happy life he’s been able to make for himself as a husband and father.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Remember (리멤버, Lee Il-hyung, 2022)

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An elderly man suffering with a brain tumour and advanced dementia is determined to expose the abuses of the colonial past all too easily forgotten by the contemporary society in Lee Il-hyung’s remake of the 2015 Atom Egoyan film of the same name, Remember (리멤버). The film’s title works on multiple levels, firstly in the mind of the hero who both wants to remember and doesn’t as he feels his mind slipping away, and then in the minds of the men he seeks asking them both to remember the man who’s come calling with vengeance on his mind and who it is they really are. 

As in many other similarly themed films of recent times, Pli-ju’s (Lee Sung-min) main problem is that those who chose to collaborate with the Japanese during the colonial era and directly contributed to the deaths of all his family members have largely gone on to extremely successful careers at the heart of the establishment. Ironically enough, right-wing Korean nationalist ideology is largely pro-Japan and the legacy of Japanese militarism was a key component in the post-war military dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-Hwan. To that extent, Pil-ju is the inspector that calls visiting each of the men who caused the deaths of his father, brother, and sister in turn while exposing a series of colonial abuses. One of the men he visits is a working professor who teaches that Japanese colonial rule was actually beneficial in that it helped “modernise” the society though building infrastructure such as roads and railways without really considering that they were largely built with forced labour. 

This casual disregard for human life has continued into the present day with the general Pil-ju targets, Chi-deok (Park Geun-hyung), also the head of the company, in which the Japanese effectively have a controlling share, responsible for a workplace accident that injured the father of Pil-ju’s getaway driver In-gyu (Nam Joo-hyuk) and refused to compensate him. Chi-deok, a hero of the Korean War, even makes a rousing speech instructing the audience that they must remember those who fell in defence of democracy which is a little rich seeing as his values are anything but democratic. Chi-deok also tries to justify himself to the police officer investigating the murder of the first man Pil-ju knocked off that those days were just about survival and that “Korea” no longer existed so all he could do to save it was to become Japanese. But like many of the other men, such as the professor who tricked Pil-ju’s brother into forced labour in a mine where he eventually died, he did so for personal advancement wilfully selling out his fellow countrymen throwing those who refused to change their names or continued to speak Korean in jail while sending off their sisters to become comfort women for the Japanese army. 

The first man that Pil-ju killed tortured his father to death on a trumped up charge so he could steal his land. It’s not even ideology, it’s just greed and oppression. Everyone keeps telling him that no one cares about this kind of thing anymore, but conservative politicians nevertheless continue to weaponise it suggesting that anything is permissible in the battle against communism while imperialism is therefore a lesser evil. Pil-ju’s dementia is a metaphor for the literal erasure of history and the simple act of forgetting, the process by which many of these men have been able to rewrite their pasts to justify their actions. Yet it’s also true that there are things Pil-ju too does not want to remember and actively denies until finally forced to reckon with himself, with his complicity, guilt, and regret that he was as Chi-deok puts it not all that different as a man who survived those times when so many did not. Shot through with a gentle humour, Lee’s admittedly unsubtle drama (a Japanese soldier named Tojo literally says he’s going end the pacifist constitution so Japan can start wars whenever it feels like it) is also a gentle tale of intergenerational bonding as Pil-ju comes to develop a paternal affection for his workplace buddy In-gyu that suggests the past is only exorcised when spoken and passed down to new generations free of justifications or omissions and most importantly remembered as it was by those who really lived it.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Herstory (허스토리, Min Kyu-dong, 2018)

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When Kim Hak-sun held a press conference and offered her testimony as a former comfort woman following a statement in the Japanese Diet in which the government rejected any responsibility for wartime sexual slavery, it brought an issue into the public consciousness that many had been unwilling to reckon with. One of many films focussing on the same subject released in the last few years, Min Kyu-dong’s Herstory (허스토리) dramatises the events of the Shimonoseki Trials which took place between 1992 and 1998 and resulted in the first admission from the Japanese authorities that the basic human rights of women had been breached but nevertheless found it not incumbent on the government to offer a direct apology. 

That the trial takes place in Shimonoseki is itself somewhat symbolic, given that this was the harbour from which boats to Korea and China departed and at which the women who were trafficked to Japan would have arrived. The film begins, however, in Busan where successful travel agent Moon Jung-sook (Kim Hee-ae) has ironically been accused of breaking the prevention of prostitution laws when a Japanese man is found dead after visiting a sex worker and it is revealed one of her employees had been running tours specifically geared towards sex tourism. Struck by Kim Hak-sun’s testimony, the association she leads of female business owners wants to do something to help and seeing as her company has been suspended, Jung-sook sets up a call centre on her premises for other victims of wartime sexual slavery and forced labour to come forward. 

Unlike some of the recent dramas dealing with the same issue, Min focusses on the resistance towards the former comfort women coming from within Korea itself. A taxi driver Jun-sook gets a lift from goes off on a rant describing the women as former sex workers out for a paycheque who should be ashamed of their sordid pasts while in any case all of this happened decades ago so why bring it up now? He is far from alone, even the Mayor describes them as “filthy women” when Jung-sook approaches him for help, and it’s obvious that many find the subject so embarrassing that they simply do not want to discuss it and blame the women for breaking the peace by speaking out. 

It’s also true that in the peculiarities of the political landscape of Korea, conservative elements tend to hold a more favourable view of Japan and the colonial era than might be expected. Economically, there are strong ties and Jung-sook, a fluent Japanese speaker, has close business relationships with Japanese clients which are endangered by her involvement with the comfort women cause. Her friend in the women’s association who runs a traditional-style hotel can be seen warmly greeting Japanese guests, at one point as she expresses her admiration for Kim Hak-sun in Korean to the television as they pass behind her. It’s clear that some would rather not rock the boat because this kind of politicking is often incompatible with running a successful business. 

Jung-sook is minded to buck the trend because she sympathises with the women’s suffering and with their rejection by mainstream society. She has the confidence to do this in part because the wealth she has accrued through business success gives her an unusual amount of power in a male-dominated, capitalistic society. Still she too struggles with contemporary notions of proper womanhood in being accused of neglecting her daughter through her workaholic lifestyle especially as she is considering leaving education claiming that studying isn’t for her. Even so, the women’s association seems to have female solidarity at its heart, collecting money to support single mothers even before taking up the cause and trying to help elderly women who have no remaining family members or means to support themselves. 

As she later comes to realise, the trial has meaning outside of winning and losing in allowing the women to express their trauma and regain some of their dignity. Even so, they are subject to further rejection in Japan, not least from a hotel which asks them to leave because other guests are unwilling to share the space with former sex workers. The Korean-Japanese lawyer also relates having faced racism in his life in Japan because of his Korean ethnicity while his mother’s restaurant is later graffitied because of their support of the case. Right-wing nationalists also hold protests outside the court and in Seoul accusing the women of lying, insisting that they are just “sex workers” as if sex workers weren’t worthy of human consideration anyway. In interpreting the testimony, Jung-sook becomes a kind of everywoman speaking for all women in her emotionally charged translation while inwardly conflicted in realising the toll the process is taking on some of the witnesses who are all in advanced age and often poor health. Min depicts their struggle with as much empathy as possible, avoiding the temptation to demonise while instead presenting a more nuanced perspective focussing on the women themselves and the rejection they continue face even within their own society.

Herstory is available digitally in the USA courtesy of Well Go USA.

The Foul King (반칙왕, Kim Jee-woon, 2000)

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A dejected office worker seeks release from a mundane life of constant degradation as a masked wrestler but finds himself ultimately unable to escape the headlock of the corporate society in Kim Jee-woon’s pro wrestling farce The Foul King (반칙왕, Banchikwang). As the title may suggest, you might have to play a little dirty in order to claw back some dignity but then perhaps everyone’s struggling to free themselves from something be it old debts, middle-aged disappointment, or complicity with the dubious business practices of turn of the century capitalism. 

Even before he enters the ring, Dae-ho (Song Kang-ho) is wrestling, fighting his way onto and out of a packed rush hour train only to arrive at work a few minutes late to be given a passive aggressive dressing down from his boss (Song Young-chang) during the morning pep talk. His boss then in absurd fashion corners him in the gents and places him in a headlock while telling him off some more just to ram the message home. Poor Dae-ho finds this so humiliating that all he really thinks of is a short term solution of learning how to evade his boss’ control while mooning over his attractive desk mate Miss Jo and further berating himself for being too shy to ask her out. His other problem is that he’s not very good at his job as a low-level bank cashier. He and his work friend Doo-sik (Jung Woong-in) are bottom in the office rankings for failing to secure any new accounts.

Trapped between his abusive boss and dismissive father (Shin Goo) with whom he still lives, Dae-ho finds himself both emasculated and infantilised while continuing to indulge childhood fantasies drifting off into a dream sequence in which he is Elvis in the wrestling ring trying to impress Miss Jo but still defeated by his giant bug of a boss. He first turns to a friend who teaches Taekwondo to children but he tells him Taekwondo is a “mental discipline” while a real martial artist would never end up in a headlock anyway. But then as if by magic he wanders past a moribund wrestling gym and ventures inside only for the coach, Jang (Jang Jin-young), to throw him out for being a bit odd. Threatened by a gangster into training up a comic relief character specialising in cheating to bolster the profile of another wrestler, Yubiho (Kim Su-ro), hoping to drum up publicity for a Japan tour, Jang relents remembering Dae-ho’s manic rank about his love for classic heel Ultra Tiger Mask as seen on TV decades earlier. 

Being a heel is not quite what Dae-ho had in mind, after all what he wants is to figure out how to escape a headlock yet he finds himself bizarrely in his element if a little clumsily rejoicing in moustache twirling villainy, cartoonish pranks, and comic pratfalls. He begins to grow in confidence but also overreaches, managing to teach a gang of youths (amusingly standing under a huge mural ironically reading “Korea! Fighting!”) a lesson and redeeming his sense of masculine pride after a defeat while making a total drunken fool of himself in his unrequited love for Miss Jo at the office karaoke party once again getting pummelled by his boss. While Dae-ho turns to wrestling in search of freedom and personal fulfilment, Doo-sik tries to regain his self-respect by doing the right thing refusing to be a part of his boss’ obviously dodgy business practices while threatening to blow the whistle if like Dae-ho perhaps realising that there is no way to beat this system while remaining inside it. 

Dae-ho discovers that he gains confidence by putting on a mask, specially the Ultra Tiger Mask worn by his childhood hero, while “winning” in the ring through “cheating” getting audience laughs with zany cartoon stunts. Only when the mask is torn by an unnecessarily aggressive Yubiho does he enter full on rage mode attempting to take revenge for his constant belittlement by ignoring the script to teach Yubiho a lesson as the pair of them brawl all over the stadium making weapons of random chairs and even at one point the session bell itself. Yet in a real sense Dae-ho never really achieves much of anything, scoring a symbolic victory in provoking a tie but never figuring out how to escape the corporate headlock while continuing to be bullied by his boss, rendered entirely powerless within the hierarchal corporatised society of early 2000s Korea. A darkly comic take on existential futility, Foul King meditates on the compromises inherent in playing the game Dae-ho ironically finding confidence in wilful humiliation as a dishonourable heel while unable to escape his constant degradation wrestling for agency within the confines of his regular office worker life. 

The Foul King streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Collectors (도굴, Park Jung-bae, 2020)

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“Grave Robber” is ordinarily not a nice thing to call someone, let alone to be, yet the heroes of Park Jung-bae’s Collectors (도굴, Do-gul) are just that if in effect more like cultural Robin Hoods robbing the dead to reclaim the past than heartless thieves interested only in profit. Operating with a “this should be in a museum!” mentality, these grave robbers have a variety of motives, among them revenge both personal and national, as they take aim at lingering historical betrayals stemming back to the days of Japanese colonialism. 

As the film opens, intrepid thief Dong-gu (Lee Je-hoon) manages to trick a pair of Buddhist monks suspicious on the grounds that he’s a bit handsome for the religious life into letting him “guard” a pagoda that’s set for imminent dismantling in order to nab a precious miniature Buddha located inside. What puzzles the authorities is that Dong-gu leaves obvious evidence of the theft along with a trademark chocopie wrapper which suggests he wants everyone to know how clever he is. This may be true, Dong-gu is quite smug about his obvious abilities as a tomb raider, but he may also have ulterior motives in play. As a duplicitous broker points, out, however, it’s surprisingly difficult to make money trafficking artefacts because they are simply to famous to be sold openly meaning thieves and fences are all dependent on a small pool of super rich “collectors” with whom they have personal relationships or else are stealing to order. 

Stepping back a little, what this means is that not only are those like Dong-gu robbing the dead and selling their affects on the black market, but that they are in a sense traitors to their nation often selling these precious historical artefacts to foreigners and most problematically to the Japanese, ironically enough grave robbers themselves in having looted half the country during the colonial era. It will come as little surprise that the main villain Jin Sang-gil (Song Young-chang), a hotel entrepreneur and head of the Korea Cultural Asset Foundation, in fact owes his inherited wealth to his family having sold artefacts to the Japanese from 1910 onwards, and himself is keeping a large selection of plundered treasures in an ultra secure vault underneath his offices. 

The Buddha brings Dong-gu into Jin’s orbit, first made an offer by his gangster underling Gwang-chul (Lee Sung-wook) who is, perhaps conveniently, Chinese-Korean hailing from Yanbian, and then by his smart assistant Sae-hee (Shin Hye-sun) who is fluent in English, Chinese, and Japanese acting as a broker for wealthy Japanese clients which is how she finances Dong-gu’s upcoming operation to steal an ancient frieze from a grave located in what is now technically China but was then Korean. Dong-gu, meanwhile, despite claiming he got into grave robbing because he realised he’d never be able to buy a house working “like regular people do”, is remarkably uninterested in the money refusing Sae-hee’s “gift” of a fancy car, and instantly losing his fee in the hotel casino. As we later realise, what he seems to want is for the artefacts to be returned to their rightful owners, the Korean people. 

To complete his heist he recruits a series of “experts” including the slightly nerdy souvenir peddler nicknamed “Dr. Jones” (Jo Woo-jin) who even dresses like Indy himself, as well as a former miner recently released from prison renowned for his tunnelling abilities. Dong-gu’s methods are traditional in the extreme, locating the entrance to a burial mound by tasting the soil looking for traces of decomposing flesh, while his sister Hye-ri (Park Se-wan) is much more technologically advanced making frequent use of drones and angering her father and brother by drilling a tiny hole in the Buddha to insert a GPS tracker hoping to figure out what Jin is doing with the artefacts. In a touch of irony, the vault has itself been designed to mimic the security features of an ancient tomb if updated with biometric eye scanning and fingerprint technology topped off with a good old-fashioned key, but as it turns out there’s no security system that can protect you from betrayal especially if you’re generally unpleasant and no one trusts you anyway. 

Dong-gu’s target, however, is a royal tomb located in the centre of Gangnam from which he intends to steal the “Excalibur of Joseon” appealing to Jin’s sense of hubris, leaning into a kind of mythical prophecy in which he’d become a contemporary hero ruling over all Korea as the wielder of the sword. Taking in some additional social commentary in which the government has chosen to improve their approval ratings through spending money buffing up a tomb while when the guys try to rent a subbasement the flirtatious realtor admits the rents are low in this area because it often floods only to shake off some of her disapproval when they tell her they’re part of the restoration team, the central message is that the historical relics of Korea’s past belong to the Korean people, not to the shady businessmen further corrupting an already compromised economy, nor to former colonial powers. Sometimes, it seems to say, digging up the past is a necessary act of national reclamation. 

Collectors screens 13th November as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Deliver Us From Evil (다만 악에서 구하소서, Hong Won-chan, 2020)

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A melancholy hitman bids for paternal redemption but finds himself literally stalked by the mistakes of his violent past in Hong Won-chan’s pulpy action drama, Deliver Us From Evil (다만 악에서 구하소서, Daman Akeseo Goohasoseo). Aptly named, Hong’s noirish thriller takes us from the back streets of Osaka to underground Bangkok while the hero longs for the tranquil horizons of Panama but finally discovers that he cannot outrun himself even if he can perhaps repay his karmic debt by freeing others from the riptide of his moral transgressions. 

A former government agent apparently unceremoniously burned, In-nam (Hwang Jung-min) has been earning his keep as a killer for hire hiding out in Japan. His “one last job” is knocking off a Zainichi Korean mob boss, Koreda (Kosuke Toyohara), after which he’ll be free to go wherever he wants, arbitrarily setting his sights on Panama solely because of the tranquil scene featured in a picture opposite his favourite seat in his local izakaya. The past is however not done with him yet. His old handler gets in touch to let him know old flame Young-ju (Choi Hee-seo) has been trying to contact him, but so consumed with shame and defeat is he that he declines to respond only to hear a short time later that Young-ju has been found dead in Bangkok and as she’d listed him as next of kin he’s responsible for the repatriation of her body. Remorseful, he’s shocked to discover that Young-ju had a daughter, Yoo-min (Park So-yi), whose kidnap by her Korean-Chinese nanny may be connected to her murder. Switching up his plans, In-nam determines to save the daughter he believes to be his own but is pursued by flamboyant Korean-Japanese gangster Ray (Lee Jung-jae) hellbent on getting revenge for his estranged blood brother Koreda. 

In-nam finds himself in a sense caught between a series of codes of masculinity, apparently a former government spy who seems to have been involved in state sanctioned acts of torture and murder that may privately be against his sense of morality only to fall still further as a killer for hire even if we’re told in no uncertain terms that Koreda was a bad guy, a killer of women whose death is perhaps morally justifiable within the codes of chivalry. In-nam’s partner warns him about Ray, reminding him that they should have killed him at some point in the past but apparently let him live, a decision that has led, as Ray later states, to their present confrontation. Quizzed by a local Thai mobster, Ray claims he can’t even remember why he’s so set on killing In-nam but is mindlessly bound to follow his own code of manliness in avenging the death of a blood brother he had apparently fallen out with some years previously.

Meanwhile, in retrieving his daughter In-nam attempts to reclaim the right to a peaceful life making up in a sense for the mistakes of the past in having first abandoned Young-ju because of his manly code and then failed her in refusing her request for help. He attempts to reassert himself as a father by saving his little girl, but in doing so opts only for the personal, unmoved on discovering a child trafficking network enabled by the peculiar medical regulations of Japan and Korea which prohibit child organ transplants looking to save only Yoo-min while making no real effort to help the others. On reporting her daughter missing to the police, Young-ju had been horrified to discover Yoo-min’s photo pasted onto a wall entirely covered in similar notices for other children the police, as we later discover somewhat complicit, have so far failed to find. Yet saving the children is more happy accident than design, an indirect consequence of In-nam’s violent intervention. 

Indeed, In-nam more or less leaves the kids to his local sidekick a Korean transgender woman whose confirmation surgery he’s promised to fund in return for her assistance as guide and translator while he remains bound to a nihilistic path of manliness knowing there’s no way out for him that does not end in violent confrontation with past sins. Caught between the outlandish pulp of the flamboyant Ray and the noirish fatalism of In-nam’s journey into the darkness of the Bangkok underworld, Deliver Us From Evil defiantly refuses to marry its conflicting sensibilities as the two men pursue their respective codes each looking for their own particular deliverance but finding that salvation lies only in confrontation. 

Deliver Us From Evil screens at Edinburgh Filmhouse on 22nd June and Genesis Cinema London 24th June as the first Teaser Screening for this year’s London Korean Film Festival. The next screening in the series, Voice of Silence, will screen at Edinburgh Filmhouse on 1st July and Curzon Soho 3rd July, while Samjin Company English Class will then screen at London’s Screen on the Green on 8th July.

International trailer (English subtitles)

The Drug King (麻藥王 / 마약왕, Woo Min-ho, 2018)

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Drug King posterKorean cinema has been in a reflective mood of late, keen to re-examine the turbulent post-war era in the wake of a second wave of democratic protest and political turmoil. Even so, dealing with the difficult Park Chung-hee era has remained sensitive with the legacy of life under a repressive regime apparently very much still felt. Woo Min-ho’s Drug King (麻藥王 / 마약왕, Mayakwang) is first and foremost a crime doesn’t pay story, but it’s also a subtle condemnation of authoritarianism and the corruption and cronyism that goes along with it. Painting its hero’s rise as a consequence of the society in which he lives, it perhaps implies the new wind of egalitarian democracy made such amoral venality a thing of the past but then again is at pains to show that nothing really changes when it comes to greed and resentment.

Our hero, Lee Doo-sam (Song Kang-ho), starts out as a jeweller dabbling in smuggling in Busan in 1972. Just as the smuggling business starts to take off, Doo-sam’s boss falls out with his friends in high places and decides to throw him to the wolves while he escapes abroad to safety. Doo-sam, not one to be beaten, starts coming up with ideas. Mobilising his wife (Kim So-jin) to get him out of jail through a combination of bribery and blackmail, he teams up with the area’s smuggling king to act on a tip-off he got from a Korean-Japanese yakuza and begins producing popular drug Crank for export to Japan.

As the opening voice over explains, Crank is a dangerous stimulant developed by the Japanese during the war and given to factory workers and kamikaze pilots because of its ability to eliminate both fear and fatigue. It is also highly addictive and provides an extreme high which have made it a popular recreational drug but, crucially, the real value is economic. The rising Japan is keen to make use of foreign labour, and Korea is keen to up its export capability. This, coupled with poor regulation of the workforce, has led to extreme exploitation in which factory workers are encouraged to hop themselves up on stimulants to keep working overtime for the sake of economic expansion. Thus, the influx of Crank is, in many ways, simply another facet of ongoing Japanese imperialism.

Not that Lee Doo-Sam cares very much about that. An honest prosecutor later puts it to him that he’s contributing to the exploitation of ordinary workers who might earn a few pennies extra for working a few more hours but at the cost of their health and wellbeing, while he gets filthy rich off the back of their misery. Doo-sam is, however, unrepentant. In the beginning he just wanted to provide for his wife, children, and unmarried sisters, but perhaps he also wanted to kick back against his reduced circumstances and he certainly did enjoy playing the big man. In any case, it has paid off. Doo-sam too has friends in high places and they won’t want to let him sit in a police cell for long in case he starts feeling chatty.

Times change, however, and whatever standing and influence Doo-sam thought he’d accrued his life is built on sand. When Park is assassinated by a member of his own security team, all those contacts are pretty much useless because the cronies are now out in the cold. There are protests in the streets and the wind of a new era is already blowing through even if it is still a fair few years away. That bold new era will, it hopes, do away with men like Doo-sam and their way of thinking, eradicating corruption and backhanders in favour of honest meritocracy. Naive, perhaps, and idealistic but it is true enough that Doo-sam is a man whose era has passed him by while he, arrogantly, burned all his bridges and gleefully sacrificed love and friendship on the altar of greed and empty ambition.

Hubris is Doo-sam’s fatal flaw, but he remains a weasel to the end only too keen to sell out his associates in order to save his own skin. He may claim he was only trying to live a “decent” life, but his definition of “decent” may differ wildly from the norm. Nevertheless, perhaps he was just like many scrappy young men of post-war years, desperate, hungry, and left with few honest options to feed his family if one who later found himself corrupted by backstreet “success” and the dubious morals of the world in which he lived which encouraged him to disregard conventional morality in favour of personal gain. Much more about life in Korea in the authoritarian ‘70s than it is about crime, The Drug King is nevertheless an ironic tragedy in which its drug peddling hero eventually enables the birth of a dedicated narcotics squad and helps to dismantle system which allowed him to prosper all while grinning wildly and, presumably, planning his next move.

Currently available to stream online via Netflix in the UK and possibly other territories.

International trailer (English subtitles)

Key tracks from the (fantastic) soundtrack:

Jung Hoon-Hee – Flower Road

Kim Jung Mi – Wind

Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage (악질경찰, Lee Jeong-beom, 2019)

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Jo Pil-ho- The Dawning Rage posterThe Man From Nowhere’s Lee Jeong-beom returns five years after No Tears for the Dead with another retro crime thriller, though this time one with additional bite as he digs into a nation quite clearly failing its young. Another of the recent films set in the post-Sewol world, Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage (악질경찰, Akjilkyungchal) is a noirish voyage through an intensely corrupt society in which Chaebols act with impunity while goodhearted schoolgirls are branded delinquents and left to fend for themselves by the “adults” who seem to have abandoned all sense of social responsibility.

Our hero and the titular “bad cop” of the Korean title, is Jo Pil-ho (Lee Sun-kyun) – a corrupt police officer who abuses his position to force criminals to commit crime on his behalf. Recently, he’s teamed up with a teenage safecracker, Gi-chul (Jung Ga-ram), and is also involved in an ill-advised business relationship with a petty gangster. IA are all over him, but they don’t have anything yet. Everything is about to change, however, when an angry Pil-ho decides it would be a good idea to rob the police warehouse. The gangster’s minion makes a mistake and the place blows up with Gi-chul trapped inside. Suddenly it’s not looking so rosy for Pil-ho who is now implicated in a series of crimes only to discover that there is far more going on than he could have anticipated. The warehouse fire appears to be connected to an ongoing corruption case involving one of Korea’s biggest conglomerates and Pil-ho may have just destroyed key evidence without realising in an attempt to save his own skin.

Despite himself, Pil-ho is not such a bad guy. He’s corrupt and greedy, but he has a moral compass and probably sees himself as kicking back against the system rather than abusing it seeing as he only seems to take money from sources he feels could stand to lose. This is perhaps why he finds himself increasingly shaken by his investigations, eventually forced to pick a side – surrender to Chaebol influence as a willing underling or expose the corruption possibly at the cost of his own life.

In true noir fashion his own past comes back to haunt him as he re-encounters the father of a young woman (Im Hyeong-gook), Song Ji-won (Park So-eun), who died in the ferry tragedy and had wanted to become a policewoman when she grew up. Pil-ho was the officer charged with the empty gesture of presenting him with a police uniform with his daughter’s name on it. In an unlikely coincidence, the girl Pil-ho needs to find, Mina (Jeon So-nee), was Ji-won’s best friend. Alone and without family, Mina has been living by her wits on the streets but as Mr. Song points out she’s not a bad kid at heart and goes to great lengths to protect those close to her.

Despite their original mutual distrust, a kind of camaraderie eventually builds up between the cynical cop and the jaded teen who views the so-called “adults” around her with nothing more than contempt. Her admiration for Pil-ho begins when he beats up a sleazy backstreet doctor who tries to swap treatment for sexual favours and then continues as Pil-ho, against the odds, begins to look out for her in ways no one else ever has. Mina, like many kids, is simply trying to survive in a world which is often actively hostile to her existence, but unlike Pil-ho she has avoided becoming cynical and remains committed to protecting those weaker than herself even if others may write her off as a lost cause delinquent.

Set in Ansan which, as an ironic sign tells us before falling to the ground, is the “city of happiness”, Dawning Rage locates itself in a haunted land in which the lingering effects of the ferry tragedy are impossible to ignore. Pil-ho begins catching sight of teenagers everywhere but their presence only seems to highlight absence while providing a kind of chorus watching and observing the adults around them in order to learn how to live. The corrupt Chaebol cites his provision of scholarships as evidence of his commitment to building a fairer society, all while knowing that by doing so he is really buying influence and loyalty. He spins a yarn about his humble origins and makes a show of inspiring the next generation, but thinks nothing of silencing those who stand in the way of his selfish aims.

The corruption rains down from above – the Chaebols make their money and they cut corners, leaving ordinary people squeezed. Fear and deference are the primary contributors to the societal decline which placed innocent young people directly, if unwittingly, in harm’s way. This is Pil-ho’s “dawning rage” as he awakens himself to the depths of injustice within his own society with which he had blindly gone along thinking only of himself. With a distinctly 1970s aesthetic, Dawning Rage is a dark conspiracy thriller in which the system is so hopelessly corrupt as to be beyond saving. Pil-ho is a “bad cop” who turns out to be acting for the public good after all but finds himself pushed towards the dark side by the intransigence of his society and forced into an act of violent revenge both personal and social.

Currently available to stream online via Netflix in the UK and possibly other territories.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Bros (부라더, Chang You-jeong, 2017)

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The Bros posterTime passes differently in the country. Two brothers from rural Andong thought they’d escaped the relative restrictions of an oddly feudal upbringing, but something keeps pulling them back. Ghosts literal and figural force them to return home, confront each other and their remaining family, and then attempt to come to some kind of acceptance of their places in the grand scheme of things in light of their newly acquired knowledge. The Bros (부라더, Buladeo) stars unlikely siblings Ma Dong-seok and Lee Dong-hwi and is adapted from the stage musical “The Brothers Were Brave” which was also directed by Chang You-jeong. Set in rural Andong, the film is an affectionate, if not entirely sympathetic, portrayal of the fiercely traditional way of life in tiny country towns in which it really still matters who accedes to be the head of a family and women are expected to know their place.

“Estranged” brothers Seok-bong (Ma Dong-seok) and Joo-bong (Lee Dong-hwi) have each skipped out on their familial responsibilities for lives of modern “freedom” in Seoul. Seok-bong is a “treasure hunter” who gives eccentric lessons on archeological ethics to bored students while overspending on the latest tools to aid him in his (permanently unsuccessful) quests, while Joo-bong is an ambitious salaryman whose career runs into a problem after he is accused of “embezzlement” for ruling out the cheapest route for a new road because (unbeknownst to his bosses) it would cut right past his childhood home. Just as Seok-bong realises he’ll have to pay back the outrageous sum of money he “speculated” on new equipment when a civil war breaks out in his prospective dig site, and Jong-boo frets over his workplace blunder, both sons get an unexpected text informing them that their “estranged” father has died and they’re “welcome” to attend the funeral, if they should wish. As both brothers are in need of a getaway plan (and also an opportunity to ask for some financial assistance), they find themselves finally going “home” only to unexpectedly find each other on the road, start bickering in the car, and then accidentally run over a random young woman (Lee Honey) apparently out walking in this otherwise barren and deserted stretch of land.

On their arrival, the brothers are not exactly embraced by their loving family. Nobody really expected to see them and, as it turns out, their grandfather didn’t even realise they’d been invited. The boys’ rural country home is one of fierce traditionality, seemingly cut out of time and existing in the feudal past where people refer to each other via archaic titles and it really seems to matter who is declared “first son” of the family. Both Seok-bong and Joo-bong left the village because they had no interest in all this feudal nonsense and resented the old fashioned authoritarianism which defined their relationships with the apparently tyrannical patriarch they have both come home to bury, if not perhaps to mourn. Seok-bong, in particular, remains extremely resentful towards his late father for the way he treated their mother who, he assumes, must have been very unhappy all her married life.

Rural Andong, it turns out is not a great place for women. The brothers do have a “friend” in the family complex in the form of Mi-bong (Jo Woo-jin) – a policeman recently married to a very nice but often frustrated young lady who has taken to smoking (still considered scandalous in these parts) in secret in order to relieve the stress of being a married woman suddenly expected to undertake all these arcane social responsibilities, which include being “nice” to her overbearing mother-in-law who seems to delight in scolding her for doing everything wrong. In fact Mi-bong’s wife wants to move to Vietnam to get as far away from the family as possible, but  finds it difficult to abandon the feudal way of thinking in wondering what it would be like to be the wife of a “first son”. Women here are supposed to know their place – stay silent, serve the men. When Joo-bong’s “lady friend” from the city shows up unexpectedly, everyone reacts to her as a “potential daughter-in-law” and sets about giving her the third degree which includes a pop quiz on the three duties of an Andong woman which include obeying a father, then a husband, and then presumably a son. In a running joke, no one can even remember the given name of the boys’ mother because she was always just referred to as “first daughter-in-law”.

All in all, it’s no surprise that Seok-bong and Joo-bong wanted to leave but then again, it turns out there was a lot more going on with the family than they were ever privy to know and they have perhaps judged their father unfairly without knowing all the facts. This being a comedy, the central point is the repair of a broken family – firstly in the brothers repairing their bond as they face the crumbling of their individual quests and are forced to work together, unwittingly uncovering the truth about their family history. Meanwhile, they also have to cope with the strange woman they apparently ran over who seems to have lost her memory but has valuable information to impart to each of them. Haunted by the ghosts of home, neither of the boys finds what they originally came for but gets something (arguably) better in rediscovering their roots and experiencing the upsides of familial connection.

Filled with the strangeness of the village tradition with its mourning suits, wandering monks, shamanic rituals, and uncles who speak only in incomprehensible four character idioms The Bros is an absurd affair but one with its heart in the right place. Chang enlivens the otherwise unremarkable comedic narrative with interesting visual compositions as the mysterious woman seems to drag the brothers away into a pretty fairytale land filled with oversaturated picture book images in which the moon is just a little bit bigger than you’d expect and oddly ‘70s fashions of purple and yellow lend a cheerful and nostalgic air. A comedic tale of family, brotherhood, and the unexpected endurance of feudal tradition, The Bros is a warm and fuzzy tribute to rediscovering one’s roots but also one with unexpected bite in its subtle undercutting of the pervasive misogyny which underpins it.

The Bros is currently available to stream in the UK (and possibly elsewhere) via Netflix.

Original trailer (Korean subtitles only)

Nowhere to Hide (인정사정 볼 것 없다, Lee Myung-se, 1999)

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Nowhere to hide poster

One of Korea’s foremost visual stylists, Lee Myung-se’s work has often been under appreciated at the time of its release. His desire to experiment finds fertile ground in the intensely kinetic ode to the police procedural, Nowhere to Hide (인정사정 볼 것 없다, Injeongsajeong bol Geos Eobsda). A tale of cops and robbers, Nowhere to Hide follows a cop who talks too much on the trail of a silent assassin who is, in fact, an expert at hiding in plain sight through the art of disguise. Moving quickly from one intense, beautifully choreographed set piece to the next, Lee draws inspiration from the crime-tinged tragedies of old Hollywood and beyond whilst embracing those of his home nation in the classic twin pairing of actors Ahn Sung-ki as the enigmatic assassin, and Park Joong-hoon as the bullheaded cop hot on his trail.

Lee opens in black and white with Inspector Woo (Park Joong-hoon) in full on gangster mode as he wanders through a ruined landscape, pausing only to tie his shoelace while the pulsing, punkish music continues in the background, before he walks in on an entire room of besuited gangsters and calmly sits down to introduce himself. Sometime later, Sungmin (Ahn Sung-ki), in sunshades and trench coat, patiently bides his time before committing a dramatic murder and making off with a mysterious briefcase.

What follows then is a game of cat and mouse as Woo chases the ghost of Sungmin through dingy back allies and neighbourhood dive bars, taking his more serious partner, Kim (Jang Dong-kun), whose more primary motivations include his family or more particularly his little girl, along for the ride. Woo lives only for his work, drawing more thrill from the chase than he is likely to admit. Through his pursuit of Sungmin, Woo draws closer to a side of himself he hoped to avoid, burying his natural rebelliousness in service of the law. We see him brutally interrogate suspects, even at one point trussing one up like a prize pig and suspending him between two desks in the middle of the police station. It is, in this sense, Woo who is left with “nowhere to hide”. As a young man, he had a violent streak which might well have led him into crime if his father had not pointed him towards the police, but he can no longer claim to be very much different than the quarry he pursues. His true nature has been laid bare by his opposing number.

Woo’s rage and unpredictable energy are tempered by Kim’s evenhandedness, but after a job goes wrong and Kim kills a suspect by mistake he starts to fall apart. Suddenly Woo cannot rely on Kim to save him from himself and then tragically fails to save Kim during another operation, leaving him open to serious injury. His quest is now as much one of vengeance and personal feeling as it is of justice.

Sungmin, by contrast, says not one word in the entirety of the film. A felt presence more than a seen one, he slips in and out of personas, escaping from the scene in various disguises as a figure more of legend than of reality. A close relationship with a bar hostess girlfriend is Woo’s way in to Sungmin’s world, correctly identifying a weakness and pressing it, pursuing a more concrete route to the centre of Sungmin’s existence than simply tracking him through the shady netherworld in which he lives.

The two men run from and mirror each other as pictures of action and stillness, resistance and urgency. Through a relentless pursuit of capture or escape, neither can evade the shadow of himself, each moving closer to their true selves as repressed elements surface and threaten to destroy the whole. Woo and Sungmin are each on a mutually destructive pursuit of the self as much as they are for their own, self defined goals.

Lee frames all of this within his characteristically ironic world view, painting the drama as comedy imbued with its own kind of cartoonish slapstick. Throwing in cinematic homages from a brief nod to Battleship Potemkin to an ending plucked straight out of The Third Man, Lee mixes freeze frames with an odd jump dissolve technique which lends his intensely beautiful choreography an impressionistic, fleeting quality. Two men chase the shadow of the other, engaged in a desperate game of hide and seek, but when the game is up neither may like what they see.

Screened at London Korean Film Festival 2017.

Robbery sequence (dialogue free)