One of the things I like about Korean cinema is that it is so varied. Most of my own experience has been with auteur cinema from Korea - that is a strong point, with Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-Wook, Lee Chang-Dong, Hong Sang-soo all among the world's very best, and several others (Im Sang-soo for instance) - not far behind... But beyond auteur cinema is a thriving pop cinema industry - and even the auteurs often work in popular genres, and have produced some of the biggest drawing films of the decade. (And pop cinema has produced some fine directors - Kim Jee-woon, for example.) Leaving aside my own personal preferences, that is, to me, the surest sign of a powerful national cinema - the ability to produce exciting popular cinema as well as art cinema. It's what marked American cinema during its highest periods - it's a characteristic of Japanese films through most of the 20th century, of Hong Kong in the 70s through the 90s, and so on. At the moment, I'm not sure any national cinema now does as good a job of playing both sides, art films and pop films, as South Korea...
So then: I hope to write more as the week goes along - but I think I'll start like with the Iranian blogathon a couple weeks ago, with a list. These films are, again, heavy on the auteurs, though I did try to spread it out among several of them... and Song Kang-ho, who's in 4 of them - and could have been in even more, since he's in a number of near misses as well. He is, I think, one of the great stars of the decade - possibly THE film star of the decade.... Even if I weren't inclined to see any Korean film that got an American release on principal, I would see any film he is in on principal.
1.) Secret Sunshine - Lee Chang-dong
A woman and her son move to her husband's home town after he is killed in a car accident. En route, she is rescued from car trouble by a Mr. Kim (the almost inevitable Song Kang-ho), a mechanic, who soon takes her under his wing. Helps her find a place to live, start up a piano school, etc. - keeps trying to romance her without much luck. She slowly integrates into the town; she is trying to reinvent herself, cutting off all ties with her family and inlaws - and almost starts to manage it when - something worse happens. So. There is a pharmacist in town who annoys her with religion - desperate now, she takes it - converts, zealously, and decides to make the grand gesture of forgiving the one who had harmed her most. But when she does, he says he too has found god, and god has forgiven him already.... She is understandably outraged. She replaces zealous evangelical christianity with self-destruction and vengeance, but.... It's an extraordinary film, rich and complicated and full. It swings from comedy to horror to despair to comedy again, turning on a dime, and committing itself completely to every mode. When it runs down, as it does, as she runs down, it turns to the basics, the camera turning down to the sun playing on the ground - one must find salvation in the earth... All through, it poses Song against Jeon Do-yeun (the woman) - as she breaks down, he waits - standing over her shoulder, in the background, half in focus, shot after shot - watching, waiting. This does tend to become symbolic - he's God: real God - he's waiting for her, but she has to save herself. He can't save her - he's singing karaoke to himself when she comes for help with her son; he gets mad when she makes a pass at him, while trying to insult him. But he's always there, watching and waiting, but not insisting. It works.
2) Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - Park Chan-wook
A deaf mute who works at a factory has a sister who is dying for lack of a kidney. He can't donate, but he can sell one of his own and buy one for her on the black market - or try - the black marketeers double cross him and he is left without money or kidney for his sister, and down one himself. Well - when a kidney becomes legally available, he has no money, but he (and his anarchist girlfriend) come up with a cunning plan - kidnap the boss's daughter. This almost works, even, until the sister discovers how they are getting her kidney. After that, no one gets out alive.... A film about guilty consciences, where everyone has good reasons, but do stupid, careless, selfish things - and are ruthlessly punished by someone else with a guilty conscience. Add to this politics - anti-capitalist, while mocking (but seeming to understand and half agree with) anarchists; add to that allusions to one of the greatest thrillers ever, High and Low. A rather plainer, more direct film than Park's later films - as well as harsher than his earlier films.
3) Memories of Murder - Bong Joon-ho
Korean policier set in 1986 in a village where women start turning up dead. The local police are don't get very far, they're hacks, and brutes who are more interested in torturing suspects into confessions than catching the killer. A professional from Seoul arrives, with bright ideas and attention to the evidence, and they try to investigate for real. Things move, but not always forward - they make progress, they fail, women keep getting killed, they work on suspects but can't prove anything (they might even be innocent), and the cops themselves change places, the Seoul detective turning brutal, the locals thinking about the evidence and the process - but in the end, none of them get anywhere.... It is a striking and remarkable films, though - witty and strange from the beginning (a little kid imitating the cop - Song again - investigating one of the murders), funny and weird and a bit political (the old military rule is crumbling - students and radicals are protesting, talking back to the cops - culminating in a brawl that pretty much destroys everything), and featuring first rate performances by all...
4) Mother - Bong Joon-ho
A girl is killed, head bashed in and left on a roof; a local kid, brain damaged, is arrested and pinned with the killing - he was drinking, he went home that way... His mother insists on his innocence, fighting the cops, hiring a lawyer, pamphleting the neighborhood, but nobody cares. But she manages to falsely accuse her son's no good pal - he starts to shake her down, but then decides to help her - together, they uncover evidence and piece together the story... Like Bong's other films, it is a masterful mixture of tension and wit - everything happens at an angle, high melodrama played against straight comedy. There are strange flashbacks and details, there are hallucinatory sets and giddy shots and odd misdirections. A great looking film - big, wide shots and tight closeups, blurry (but active) backgrounds, beautiful compositions, high comedy....
5) Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors - Hong Sang-soo
Like most of Hong's films, a love triangle - here, a gallery owner and a film director pursue a much younger girl. It is a very highly structured film - told twice, more or less in the same order, once roughly from the gallery owner's point of view, once more explicitly from the girl's. There are interesting variations between the two - some attributable to different perspectives or memories - some seem completely playful. Scenes are flipped around, dialogue is different - in one half a fork falls on the ground; in the other a spoon... It's a lovely, fascinating film - hard to pin down, but moving... Shot in black and white, quite lovely, though both the DVD and print I saw of it seemed to be in pretty bad shape - though not so much damaged as glitchy - I almost wonder if that's what it really looks like.... (I also just remembered that this film was the subject of a blog-a-thon of its own, back in 2007...)
6) Lies - Jang Sun-woo
A 38 year old sculptor and an 18 year old student meet and fuck, about that abruptly. They have their reasons, and get together again, but then he starts to draw her into his more exotic habits - he starts by spanking her, then moves on to whips and sticks and wires - things get harsh. She takes it,though - and then he takes it - but they are happy enough. But nothing lasts forever.... It's a very strange and radical film - the sex is real, the beatings are mostly real - while the filmmaking is very stylized. There are documentary moments, with the actors (in and out of character) talking to the camera, discussing the film; the artifice of the film is foregrounded, the constant assertion of the presence of the camera in the room with the actors - which comes to a head in a scene where the crew appears to comfort the girl after a terrible fight with another girl - or when someone off camera seems to start talking to the characters (the devil has no smell). All this does a couple things - at once reminding us that we are watching an art film; but also that what we are watching is really happening... it keeps the tension of the depiction of what we see and the act of depicting something present all the time... Well, I'm not going to pretend not to be a nerd about things like that - I love it...
7) The President's Last Bang - Im Sang-soo
The assassination of Park Chun-hee, told in a strange, dark comic style. A parade of nincompoops pass through the film - the president, his oafish bodyguard, the KCIA man with a bad liver and worse breath, various underlings, some competent, most not, various whores and singers and actresses looking for a break, unflappable waiters, drivers pressed into emergency service as assassins, cowardly generals, etc. It reaches a crisis point at the president's meal with 2 girls, an actress and a Japanese singer, the bodyguard (who isn't armed), an obsequious secretary, and the KCIA man - who halfway through stages a coup, apparently deciding to do it on the spot. Mayhem and screwups of all sorts follow.... It's a marvelous film - the style, ice cold, sharp as a knife satire - the absurdity of it all, the incompetence, everywhere. Played, though, against a number of characters whose competence or decency seems to be stranded by events, and who bring out a surprising depth of emotion.
8) Why has the Bodhi Darma Left for the East - Bae Yung Kyun
The first Korean film I ever saw... The title comes from a zen koan, the film is structured somewhat like a koan. It is slow and very beautiful, shot imaginatively and expressively - things constantly change, move, change significance. The story is very basic, and slippery - it works you into its rhythms, you fall into its patterns and it makes sense on its own levels. Though there is a plot, I suppose - a young monk, who leaves his obligations, seeks enlightenment, and in the end, decides to return to the world in order to learn to love it - told in an oblique way...
9) Thirst - Park Chan-wook
Vampire film combined with Zola, with all that ought to entail. Song Kang-ho, again, plays a priest who volunteers to be infected with a disease (the Emmanuel Virus, named for a Dr Emmanuel) for science - he dies, of course, coughing up blood through a flute, but comes back, whispering a prayer under the sheet. He goes home and gains a following who think he can heal - then meets an old friend, who thinks he has cancer. The friend invites him to his house for mahjong - he discovers that the girl he thought was the friend's sister was a foundling, now his wife - abused! miserable! But our hero gets a whiff of her blood, and - the sun burns him - but - the blood is the life... Soon he's drinking blood from a fat guy in a coma and flirting with the girl - she seduces him - he tells her what his disease is - she isn't quite as terrified as he'd like... in fact, everyone who finds out about him wants a bit of the action. Anyway - he and the girl act out Therese Raquin (and every other story where a wife gets a sap to help her kill her husband) and are duly consumed with guilt and paranoia - and sooner or later, he shares his disease with her - and she takes to it like a natural.... blood and gore and comedy follow, before a genuinely moving end. Like most of Park's films, morality shifts and blurs all over the place - the priest is guilt ridden and tries not to hurt people, unless he has to, and then he has a great ability not to stop things he wants to be true. The girl loves it, she is sensuous and wild. Park shoots the whole thing without ever quite committing - to a point of view, a moral position, a consistent tone - it's always funny, but has that consistent undercurrent of sadness in his work.
10) Woman on the Beach - Hong Sang-soo
Another triangle, and another diptych from Hong. Here, a film director and his friend go to the beach so the director can write - they take the friend's girlfriend with them. But she is not his girlfriend, she says (he is married) - soon enough, she and the director are lovers, though this has complications. They leave, but the director comes back and starts pursuing another girl, who he seems to think looks like the first one - then Moon-sook (her name) comes back, finds out about his affair, gets drunk and makes trouble. They hang around for a while, he hurts his leg, he writes his script, then leaves after a confrontation with Moon-sook (after she has one with the other woman) - he leaves, and she lets him go, and she and the other woman say goodbye. This is made in the full flower of Hong's style - the long takes, the little zooms to reframe, the arrangements of 2-3 people in shots, the conversations, the twists and turns of emotion and plot. Very well done - very much like Rohmer, like those early films, their emotional mazes, etc. It is hard, in fact, to pick one of Hong's films over any other, easier to talk about them in the mass - he is one of the most consistent filmmakers going, revisiting the same kinds of stories, in the same style, but endlessly reworking them, finding new nuances to them. They are lovely films, everyone one engaging from start to end...
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