You Know, I Learned Something Today

FILM HANSEL AND GRETEL DIRECTOR YIM PIL SUNG

‘What lies beneath the surface ...?’
Yim Pil-sung’s Hansel and Gretel (2007)

I recently saw Yim Pil-sung’s Hansel and Gretel with a packed daytime crowd at the Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival. The plot concerns father-to-be Eun-soo, who jack-knifes his car one morning on a remote stretch of country road and awakens later, mobile-less, in the thick of dense woodland. Yeong-hee emerges in the dead of night, an unsettlingly flirtatious presence — with ruby lips and round expectant eyes — and shepherds him back to her family cottage, the magical “Home of Happy Children”. She introduces her saccharine yet clearly anxious parents, in addition to her siblings: Man-bok her 13-year old brother, who is short-tempered and impulsive, and younger sister Jung-soon, who is the veritable household pet: adorable, needy and coddled by everyone. No surprise then that the cute darlings are holding their parents (who are in fact strangers) against their will and have instructed them to pose as a family unit. It transpires that Eun-soo has entered a world in which the fantasy of a parental authority is paramount to the childrens’ way of life.

Home of Happy Children: siblings Man-bok (Eun Won-jae), Jung-soon (Jin Ji-hee) and Yeong-hee (Shim Eun-kyung) in Hansel and Gretel (2007)

Hansel and Gretel is less a morality tale or critique of modern capitalism than a simple drama about abuse, revenge and willful self-delusion. As the only adult, Eun-soo is literally besieged by the primitive and sadistic impulses of a dysfunctional family which must perpetually overcompensate for an absence of adult authority figures. And the girl Yeong-hee, who has such trouble articulating herself in a manner that isn’t apparently solicitous, can only relate to others using language which she was forced to learn from her abuser. Indeed the story — which concerns the retreat of three once good but now very screwed up children into an immersive fantasy world that exists only in their damaged hearts — is potentially a profound and touching one.

Sadly, the film’s pastel-color style and asexual cartoon quality is hardly compelling. It could have been a fun repository for imaginary critters, subterranean arching passageways and other fairytale tropes — diegetically speaking this is, after all, not the adult Eun-soo’s film but rather the childrens’, for they (like Ofélia in Pan’s Labyrinth) conjure the world we see

Ultimately, the film overcomes the resistible call of its let love conquer all message once the three surviving children learn to turn their backs on Eun-soo and retreat into their world of self-imposed isolation but, like Tim Burton’s computer-generated production Alice in Wonderland (2010, USA), the film’s pastel-color style and asexual cartoon quality is hardly compelling. It could have been a fun repository for imaginary critters, subterranean arching passageways and other fairytale tropes — diegetically speaking this is, after all, not the adult Eun-soo’s film but rather the childrens’, for they (like Ofélia in Pan’s Labyrinth) conjure the world we see and they have the capacity alone to expand upon its universe — but disappointingly the film appears to draw most of its bunny-based imagery, of which Yim is peculiarly fond, from classic Western sources, chiefly Kubrick’s The Shining and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.

8 December, 2008