INTERVIEW DIRECTOR KIM HAN-MIN

Part I

Interview with Kim Han-min, director of War of the Arrows:
“It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film.”

“It was the one military practice, the one token of martial skill, which ever held its own among a people who for thousands of years have preferred silks, pictures, poems and music, the stately crane in the paddy fields and the knarled [sic] pine on the mountainside.”

—Historian J. L. Boots on Korean archery, from Korean Weapons and Armour
Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, December 1934

Having made it through to the semi-finals of the national championships, successful young target shooter Park Nam-joo is competing in a playoff against Olympic Gold medallist Yun Ok-hee. She can see the counter on the red timing clock ticking over fast. Her breathing is all wrong, so she tries to regain her rhythm. At full draw, arrow tethered and ready for release, the counter hits zero and she’s left staring in disbelief at the target . . . “She failed!” croak the announcers, pinpointing her rotten sense of timing in shootoffs. The tournament’s over for Park Nam-joo. Returning to her family, tear-stricken and breathing heavily, she presents her runners-up medal to a photograph of her missing thirteen year-old niece, a bright young thing who is lost and presumably drowned. Sobbing, pained, exhausted, the Park family unite behind Nam-joo in filial piety. “It’s bronze,” her brother says to the photograph, wiping aside his tears. “Bronze!” And then the weeping grandfather: “Your aunt brought you a . . .” his voice breaking, bone in his throat, “. . . a bronze medal.” Then follow hysterics and misery.

If it is widely known that archery is practically Korea’s national sport, it is also known that Korean coaches try not to do anything halfway. A New York Times article about the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008 gets right to the heart of it: “The South Korean women started Sunday by smashing the world record and then got what they really came to the Olympics to get, what they always come to get: the archery team gold.”

What they always come to get.

Park Hae-il, as master archer Nam-Yi, readies an arrow using a three finger under case grip in War of the Arrows

There is no reason why I should have spent time after my interview with director Kim Han-min thinking of this scene specifically. Set in the middle of the seventeenth century, when Chosŏn Korea was invaded by the Manchu for the second time in ten years, Kim’s propulsive, whiz-bang historical/action drama War of the Arrows has nothing to do with the national championships or target shooting in modern Korea. It instead condenses a savage and traumatic historical event into a punchy and poignant return-of-the-hero tale. But in its last few moments our conversation switched to the broader subject of Korean archery as tradition, and it is precisely because there was not enough time to get seriously into the thing that I left with this perspective.

Kim has said he considers the bow and arrow to be the vital element of his film. It is a pitch I hear first hand in interview — “I wanted to make a historical drama which introduced and focused on the arrow and the bow” — and again later at the press screening where he fields questions from the audience. I had planned originally to de-emphasise this aspect of the film for our discussion, feeling that if War of the Arrows should be viewed as anything then it shouldn’t be as, primarily, a “bow and arrow movie” (especially in light of the marketing push). But then Kim observes, with some pride, that like thousands of other children in South Korea he was taught archery in his junior years (archery is taught at elementary school, high-school and college level by designated coaches who spend between three and six months running drills); that the sound of an arrow striking its target left an indelible impression on him — and with that he cuts right through the one-dimensional note of the marketing message and has my attention.

This exciting contemporary form, he says, is directly rooted in a long and excellent tradition which extends back to Chosŏn Korea. His assertion that “the arrow and bow is one of the [few] iconic symbols that hasn’t been severed from history,” in fact, pinpoints the thinking behind, among others, Yun Ok-hee’s own public attempts to promote the historical legacy of Korean archery. Yun, whose F.I.T.A. world ranking has floated consistently between first and third place since 2006, argues that the achievements of Korean archers in Olympic and world championships is evidence of this legacy: “Our sensitive fingertips handed down from our ancestors and our spiritual strength and willingness to fight to the very end are our secrets.” Set in this context, then, Kim’s film might even be viewed as a tribute.

Director Kim Han-min at the London Korean Cultural Centre (photo by me)

We’re holding the interview in the library corner of the Korean Cultural Centre at a time when the film’s total ticket sales are 450,000 shy of Sunny (Sseoni, 2011), the friendships-and-terminal-illness tale from writer-director Kang Hyung-chul which has mushroomed beyond anything we might have expected and currently holds the top spot for biggest domestic draw of the year. Within the month, War of the Arrows will pass the 7.4 million admissions mark, moving it safely out of the commercial blockbusters zone but still short of the sort of numbers racked up by the disaster phenomenon Haeundae (aka., Tidal Wave, 2009) and the 2008 sleeper comedy Scandal Makers (aka., Speed Scandal, Gwasokseukaendeul). But the train doesn’t stop there. At this point, Kim and his sales team are skilfully carving out an international platform for the film that will take it from London to the States, where it’s set to play in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Dallas; to Canada where it’s confirmed in Toronto and Vancouver; and then back here for the festival stint where it opens the London Korean Film Festival in November.

Which is nice for Kim, and good for K.O.F.I.C., the state-supported organisation responsible for promoting Korean films abroad and supplying the majority of us in the west with information . . . But all of this has an effect on the realities of interviewing. With War of the Arrows imagery everywhere and PR staff politely hustling, Kim has the confidence and edge of a man who has turned a full-bore, 100-day long, multi-million dollar production into possibly the year’s single biggest attraction at the Korean multiplex. “The amount of pressure was immense,” admits the director. “I started filming in February this year and had to finish on June 9 for an August 10 release date.” While principal photography is usually shorter for Korean films — obviously this part of the production process was very much influenced by the unique aesthetic and technical demands, as well as economic factors, of the historical film; by contrast, typical productions can be turned around in well under twelve weeks — there is no question at all that War of the Arrows’ post-production period was alarmingly short, even with the benefits of Korea’s growing post-production services and industry. “It was an incredibly short period of time, it required very clear and succinct communication with a lot of different people. I received help from specialist members of staff and liaised with the special effects departments very closely. The pressure was huge, but I was very lucky to have met such good crew members this year — sometimes they came up with better ideas than me so this made things easier!” A Korea Times piece on War of the Arrows, published in August (‘Arrows aims for new horizons’), gives the impression that the film’s production budget was low; this is true of historical films produced in the globalised Hollywood system but not in the current Korean industry where lavish budgets on the scale of I Saw the Devil (Angmareul Boatda, 2010) are exceptionally rare. In 2010, the average production budget, excluding prints and advertising, was KW 1.42 billion (US$1.2 million); by contrast, Kim’s film, earmarked from the start as a big-budget historical production, cost KW 9 billion (US$8.5 million). I quote this information to Kim, primarily because it is worth getting confirmation on production budgets at every unusual opportunity but also because I want to test The Korea Times’ contention that a US$8-9 million budget should be restrictive at all in the current Korean film industry. Kim laughs. “There was nothing I couldn’t do with that money. If it was a bit more I could maybe have looked after the staff a bit better . . .”

Moon Chae-won as Ja-in, sister to Na-mi, on the day of her wedding

Kim seems to prefer writing and directing his own projects. Though he has worked with other screenwriters — on his short-film debut Sympathy (Yeonmin, 1998) and then again on his second feature, the occasionally daffy blackmail thriller Handphone (Haendeupon, 2009), written by Kim Mi-hyun — his self-authored output has performed more respectably at the box office and garnered local festival awards. To date he has written and directed the short films Sunflower Blues (1999) and Three Hungry Brothers (Galchiguidam, 2003), his feature debut Paradise Murdered, aka. Paradise 1986 (Geukrakdo Salinsageon, 2007), which made the top best selling films list in the year of its release, and of course War of the Arrows. “My first priority and main job is directing. It is a bit unfortunate that I can’t find a like-minded writer, I just end up doing the job myself . . . Strangely, the films where I’ve had another writer onboard, like Handphone, were not the ones that were commercially successful. I’ve been mulling that point over recently, to see what that’s about.”

Park Sol-mi as teacher Jang Gwi-nam — a role that earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 2007 Blue Dragon Film Awards — in Kim Han-min’s debut feature Paradise Murdered (Geukradko Salinsageon, 2007) Jeong Yi-gyu (Park Yong-woo) pesters entertainment agency rep Oh Seung-min (Eom Tae-woong) in Handphone (Haendeupon, 2009)

Paradise Murdered and Handphone were received as “serious” thriller mysteries, attracting a more sophisticated audience than your typical adolescent, though on reflection both films surprise with their dark comic register. Consider one early sequence in Paradise Murdered. The surviving residents on Geukrak Island have all assembled in an empty schoolroom to discuss the recent murders of two locals and the unexplained disappearance of a third, Deok-su. En passant, Kim for no apparent reason inserts a gaggle of vignettes which would not look out of place in a Daffy Duck cartoon: an elasticised killer in wetsuit, white gloves and a snorkel tossing a bright red body-bag into the ocean; in the next, the same man seen from overhead, this time tunnelling out a six-foot burial plot for the tied-up, not-yet-dead corpse itching for freedom nearby; and the punchline has a pair of (apparently) conjoined rocks sprouting from the blue sea, a spiralling arrow pointing down towards them and the accompanying caption: “Deok-su’s ass.” Gamely overturning the dramatic pace and structure of the schoolroom scene in this manner, Kim flits schizophrenically between, on the one hand, suspenseful half-sinister debate and, on the other, the tempestuous exertions of an anonymous killer with all the wit and grace of a Chuck Jones villain. On the subject of Paradise Murdered, I ask about this scene and if, given that the entire film must bear his stamp as a writer-director, he feels that any of this madcap zaniness channels his personal idiosyncrasies. After hearing the translation, he belts out the sort of laugh which is probably heard at the far end of the building and maybe in reception too. Settling back with a broad, mischievous grin, he replies simply: “Most definitely yes.” But as he is prone to do on the publicity circuit he launches immediately into a direct question of his own, pointing to a scene in his new film — in which our dazed hero Nam-Yi (Park Hae-il), having engaged his prospective brother-in-law (Kim Mu-yeol) in a drunken, sprawling tavern fight, is compelled to yield, and then vomits all over his opponent’s face — and asking if it does roughly the same trick.

Moments earlier Kim asked another pointed question, this time about the different weapon systems used in his film by the Ch’ing and Chosŏn dynasty armies, and the subtle variations within these systems. He evidently enjoys asking the questions. More than being civil or reserved in interview, Kim seems genuinely interested in finding out what you have to say to him in this short, sharp time slot; not for nothing does he want to understand how well the film — its nationalist themes and archetypes — plays with an international audience: this is, lest we forget, the most well-publicised Korean blockbuster of the year. It’s an instinct which shines later at the festival press launch, where he implores a hundred journalists, embassy staff, hotel and theatre personnel, event organisers and excitable young film geeks to bring any film-specific questions right up to him in person once the grim, for being so formal, business of the onstage Q & A is over. To this end, he succeeds in charming the audience, speaking with a humility and confidence that engages us all, but I wonder how far any of this goes in serving his contention that War of the Arrows is “a deep and meaningful film.”

1 November, 2011

(cont’d)
Part II

INTERVIEW DIRECTOR KIM HAN-MIN

Part II

Interview with Kim Han-min, director of War of the Arrows:
“It’s technically very difficult getting a tiger into a film”

Park Hae-il as the master archer Nam-Yi in War of the Arrows

Though little of this makes it into the final film, it is worth recalling the devastating impact of the Japanese invasions in the late sixteenth century. Intended to bring about the destabilisation of Ming China, this bitter war exposed the complacency of Chosŏn Korea, shocking the military leadership from its general malaise and arousing the ire of the elite classes (Confucianists and bureaucrats all) who demanded absolute immediate reform. Little changed, however, and the first Manchu invasion of 1627 exposed these weaknesses again. The second Manchu invasion of 1636-7 forced the Chosŏn state into a humiliating capitulation. It culminated finally in the establishment of tributary relations with the Ch’ing, thus ensuring Korean submission to China until remarkably well into the nineteenth century. Kim’s film draws on the almighty upheaval of this second invasion, and its interest, born of necessity, is in the spectacle not the story. In creating a resistance tale which turns on the promise of reunion between a brother (Nam-Yi) and sister (Ja-In, played by Moon Chae-won) separated by invasion, Kim shifts the narrative focus away from the Chosŏn state, its political structures and the collateral damage of war.

Despite this stripped-back, clipped-wing approach, his film touches on two key issues which make up for its curious love affair with the bow and arrow; both invite us to sympathise with its lead characters’ suffering on a personal as well as a political level. First, Ja-In and her fiancé are forced to make an impossible choice that damages irreparably their bond to the Korean nation-state. Second, the story of Nam-Yi, who is hell-bent on rescuing his sister from Prince Dorgon of the Ch’ing, negotiates the tension between ethnic difference and national identity.

Kim smiles when I broach the subject and he takes a moment. “Historically, Korea has frequently been invaded by the surrounding countries. At that point of suffering — where the people are oppressed and repressed — emerges a very determined spirit, a noble spirit. I wanted to create a simple story and drama, yet a powerful drama to convey this.” It is in this tension, this struggle between the oppressor and oppressed, the invader and prisoner-of-war, that War of the Arrows catches its most potent theme. The question that haunts Ja-In and other prisoners as they reach the Manchurian border — “Can we ever go back?” — reflects their deep-seated anxieties about the symbolic significance of crossing from one nation to the other. Here, border lines and identity are open questions. In one scene, as several hundred prisoners-of-war crawl along a hillside in the northern provinces, a high point-of-view shot shows the beauty of the wild and unprotected land they leave behind; treasures, as well as traditions, they are forced to abandon. In the film's closing stages the returning survivors, bloodied and exhausted, cross back into Korea not as heroes (who freed prisoners from servitude and almost certainly death), but as traitors, unprepared (and perhaps unfit) to die for their country. A coda claims there were no formal cases of repatriation.

Kim also stresses that many of his actors speak note-perfect Manchu, the official dynastic language, now endangered, of the Ch’ing which was seriously under threat as early as the eighteenth century. According to articles in China Daily, The New York Times and from Reuters a few dozen of the 10 million Manchu living in the north-eastern provinces and in Beijing today can speak the language fluently; Jin Yanshan, a delegate from Liaoning, explains it without any frills: “In my home village, the old people still use the odd word of Manchu, like for mother or father. That’s it. There is no environment for it.” Kim’s efforts to recover the language from the precious few primary schools and villages where it is still practised in north-east China lends some credibility to the claim that he is as much concerned with history and tradition as he is with arrows, gorge-jumping and Mexican stand-offs. Although little is made of the intercultural connection between Nam-Yi and his Manchurian arch rival, Jyu Shin-Ta (Ryoo Seung-yong), the merging of the two languages, Korean and Manchu, heightens the familial bond between the multilingual Nam-Yi and his sister (described as the “best archer in the Chosŏn dynasty” and “the beauty of the region” respectively in the English press book) with powerful reverberations. The film may verge towards generic convention here, but it draws attention to the demographic mixing of ethnic and social identities by expunging Nam-Yi and Ja-In’s “mysterious” mother from the narrative altogether. The subtext is as loud as the impact of one of Jyu Shin-Ta’s arrows.

Director Kim Han-min at the London Korean Cultural Centre (photo by me)

But in fulfilling the demand to make plot, genre and characterisation more transparent for new audiences, Kim admits to taking a step back and reducing to a minimum the things that originally interested him: this includes of course some of the nuances of traditional ground archery. Adds Kim on this point: “Unfortunately it slowed the rhythm of the film, so this element, this focus, had to be more succinct and simplified.” In its theatrical form, these matters are subordinate to the key melodramatic thrust of the film which deepens our understanding of Nam-Yi as an outsider: the film emphasises the unavoidable fact that, as the descendant of a national traitor, Nam-Yi too is considered with suspicion and contempt; also emphasised is a sense of personal failure on Nam-Yi’s part — his mission to rescue Ja-In from the Manchurian Prince becomes a sort of hysterical antidote, as well as an opportunity to both honour the memory of his father and fulfil his duty as Ja-In’s protector. Though Kim speaks earnestly about turning in a schematic, well-paced melodrama (with far greater narrative redundancy than either of his previous features), his concern for stating this point the right way is revealing when set against his obvious enthusiasm for both the historical period (a huge cinematic subject in its own right) and for the tactics of short- and long-range archery.

On a technical level also, Kim has good reason to feel dissatisfied with a key digital effects sequence. As the elite Niru troop led by Jyu Shin-Ta pursue our hero up a rocky mountainside and into a box canyon with seemingly nowhere to go, a wild tiger repels their attack, tearing ruthlessly into their number and permitting Nam-Yi’s escape. Though it is regrettable that the digital effects team, working to a tight post-production schedule, produced such a hollow series of rendered images in the finished film, the apparently risk-averse Dasepo Club and DCG Plus (production and investment management companies respectively) voiced concerns early on in production about the entire sequence, and tried holding Kim back from shooting it altogether. “That was a very contentious issue,” he admits. “It was technically very difficult because the funding companies and investors were against it. But for me as the director, the thought of not having the tiger appearing in this picture, on the mountain top, was just ridiculous.” Indeed, the whole set-piece allows Kim to extend thematic connections of importance to his commentary on traditional virtue and morality. As elsewhere in East Asia, most obviously China, the tiger is a symbol of virtue and righteousness; in Korean folk belief specifically, the tiger has supernatural attributes connecting it to the Mountain Spirit; and in rituals, paintings and other art objects, it is portrayed as a mountain god, a sacred guardian, to which the oppressed, needy and diseased do turn. In the film, the scene’s sting-in-the-tail ending succeeds in unnerving Jyu Shin-Ta and the surviving men in his troop: the tiger’s attack on the Niro suggests that their ghoulish fate is just. So the scene is of importance not for its computer-generated, Gladiator-style spectacle, but because of what the tiger is shown doing. “Some of our national characteristics are strongly associated with the symbol of the tiger,” says Kim. “It’s an animal the Korean people have a lot of national respect for. So I was very persistent and stubborn about it, that’s why [this sequence] was included.”

Nam-Yi engages the Niru in a game of cat and mouse in War of the Arrows

For a moment I observe the standee board to Kim’s left, a stylised publicity shot of the star, Park Hae-il, brandishing a bow and arrow which he aims in our direction. It reminds me of a delicately handled training sequence in which the self-taught Nam-Yi walks beyond the long-range target at which his sister had earlier been aiming to reveal, directly concealed behind it, the target at which he has actually been firing, festooned with dozens and dozens of practice arrows. Nam-Yi has quietly perfected the skill of bending arrows through the air around rocks, trees and, but of course, enemies. It is a bone fide crowd-pleaser, tricksy, sped-up and fun. “Don’t you think arrows are more interesting than guns and knives?” Kim asks, shortly before wrapping. They can be, I say: in the world of guns at least there is a tangible difference between the strategic sniper fire of a film like Enemy at the Gates (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 2001, USA/Ger./UK/Ire.) and the power-worshipping, meatheaded spectacle of a Stallone movie. Critics may suggest that War of the Arrows sits somewhere between the two in action terms, straddling the divide, but to its credit the film succeeds in creating a sense of entrapment that forces Nam-Yi to retaliate tactically; and at the height of the hero’s exhilarating revenge attacks on the Niro there’s no denying the thrill of watching a single CG-assisted arrow nailing an assailant cleanly behind his hostage . . . So this idea that Nam-Yi can bend an arrow through the air and take out someone in a single shot, is it possible? “I’m not going to tell you!” he says, and suddenly out comes that proud, freewheeling laugh again. “You will have to try it yourself.”

First place on the Honour Roll: director Kim Han-min. Warm thanks also to a jumble of people in the Korean Cultural Centre and the London Korean Film Festival Centre, including Paul Koren, and for her patience, Elizabeth from Margaret London. For doing her utmost to interpret my questions, big thanks and high praise to An Ji-yoon, resident translator at the LKFF. And thanking also Louise at Showbox for her help. This article was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

1 November, 2011

Part I

EVENT LONDON KOREAN FILM FESTIVAL 2011 GUIDE/PREVIEW VENUE THE MAY FAIR HOTEL

London Korean Film Festival 2011 guide and preview:
news from Mayfair, first impressions, and a salute to curatorial ambition

A warm September evening at the May Fair hotel. This is, apparently, a good place to stay if you need to know who and what is hip now in the fashion world, but more appropriately for us it is traditionally London W1’s luxury rest stop for overseas filmmakers in festival season. Around one hundred people have assembled for the press launch of the London Korean Film Festival 2011. Director Kim Han-min is in the green room, here to publicise his new film War Of The Arrows (hitherto Arrow: The Ultimate Weapon), which in addition to screening for us tonight is scheduled to open the festival formally in the first week of November; an image of its main protagonist, a sensational archer turned Chosun Dynasty-hero played by Park Hae-il, appears on standee boards everywhere. Our mediator is Sight & Sound magazine’s Roger Clarke and he’ll be chairing the Q&A session later on he says. But we are not quite ready for Arrows, which is our main business of the evening, so before Kim’s introduction and the warm hello which we always give Ambassador Choo Kyu Ho, whose seat in front of me I briefly stole earlier, the lights are dimmed for our first look at the 2011 festival trailer. A sort of cinephiliac montage and distillation of the playbill, it begins modestly then whips into a merry-go-round of arrows, round kicks, charging soldiers and a baton fight between schoolgirls which goes effortlessly awry (the bespectacled perpetrator having a bang-up time thwacking her friend on the head while all around them anti-government demonstrations kick off). On the evidence here, Kang Hyung-chul’s Sunny looks set to steal the show this November.

Han Ji-min as Han Gaek-joo / Lee Ah-yeong in Kim Seok-yoon’s Detective K (2011)

Consistently one of the most hospitable as well as representative showcases for any foreign cinema in the U.K., the L.K.F.F. (now in its sixth year) matches the current might of domestic genre cinema with offbeat projects more commonly associated with the arthouse. Familiarity with the festival isn’t necessary, but regulars will recognise the format: the big-screen opening gala, onstage Q & A session with prominent filmmakers, themed programmes presenting the latest film trends, the director retrospective, animation day, the continuation of the Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival, and the obligatorily high-profile closing gala. Such a formula has served the festival well for years, but in light of the ongoing work at the Barbican, traditionally the festival’s quieter docile home, its complexion has changed. In 2010 the festival began mining a new seam in central London, playing to the weird carnival excesses of Leicester Square on opening night, then invoking an older artistic heritage in the switch to the I.C.A. building located on the Mall. In particular the Apollo on Lower Regent Street — Piccadilly’s luxury digital cinema which uses new 4K CineAlta projection systems — galvanised the director’s retrospective and focused a multicoloured laserbeam on the whole show . . . And as many of us will this year be redirected into Haymarket for a round of new films, Korean cinema will once again be in the spotlight where I feel it belongs: far from the perimeter, digging the sounds and nightlife of a vibrant city. It was a good time to move the L.K.F.F. 2010-1 into the mouth of the West End.

Go Soo-hee, Hong Jin-hee, Yoo Ho-jeong and Lee Yeon-kyeong in Sunny (2011)

Seong Dong-il and Ryoo Seung-beom in Jo Jin-mo’s Suicide Forecast (2011)

Park Hae-il as master archer Nam-Yi in War of the Arrows (2011)

By now you may know that War Of The Arrows (Choijongbyeonggi Hwal, 2011), a proud action film of slick economy from the director of Paradise Murdered (Geukrakdo Salinsageon, 2006) and Handphone (2009), is the second highest grossing domestic film in Korea. In true Hollywood style, this big budget period piece opens the festival with a red-carpet screening and an onstage Q&A with its affable director. Although it’s not directly tied to the separate existence of the two Koreas (its hook is, rather, the second Manchu invasion of Korea in 1636), Kim wants international audiences to keep in mind the tensions between the D.P.R.K. and the South, particularly the strong resilience and spirit of modern South Koreans in the face of increasing militant action from the North. It’s a theme that readies us for one of the most engaging film strands on the bill in some years.

‘North & South,’ the dominant strand of 2011, brings together a selection of interesting cinematic responses to the phenomena of defection and border-crossing. The best of these deal with the harsh difficulties faced by North Korean settlers of cultural integration. In Park Jung-bum’s Journals of Musan (Musan ilgy, 2010) a North Korean settler toils under miserable conditions in a shantytown around Seoul while struggling to remake himself as a deserving citizen-subject. Jeon Kyu-hwan’s Dance Town (Danseu taun, 2010), a tale about a former professional table-tennis player’s successful defection (the third and final instalment in a trilogy based on urban alienation), brings to the fore the concept of gendered modernity and questions the stock representation of North Korean women purely and singularly as victims. In Poongsan (2011), director Juhn Jai-hong relates the current state of the modern nation’s ideological war with the North through the story of a high-priority defector and the Southern trafficker-cum-action hero commissioned to smuggle her out safely. And in Jang Hoon’s civil war film The Front Line (Gojijeon, 2011), which was selected by K.O.F.I.C. this year to be the official Korean entry for the 84th Academy Awards (and I imagine unwisely), the boundaries of ethnicity and nationality are once again overturned as North and South Korean forces fighting mercilessly over the same piece of land begin to lose their personal identities.

This year’s light comedy strand leads with the biggest domestic success of 2011, and possibly the darling of the festival, Sunny (Sseoni, 2011). Directed by Kang Hyung-chul, whose bright family-values comedy Scandal Makers (Gwasokseukaendeul, 2008) was a major crowd-pleaser two years ago, the film delves into the lives of seven middle-aged women who all attended the same girls high school in the eighties and there formed a gang nicknamed “Sunny.” The bonhomie is enhanced by Kim Sok-yun’s Detective K: Secret of Virtuous Widow (Joseon myungtamjung: Gakshituku ggotui biil, 2010), a daffy adventure romp and whodunit fusing Joseon dynasty conspiracy with rattle-brained slapstick; and there is dark comedy in Jo Jin-mo’s Suicide Forecast (Soosanghan Gogaekdeul, 2011), the picaresque tale of an insurance consultant who sells life policies to suicidal clients in the hope of finally nailing Employee of the Month.

Choi Min-sik as Kang Tae-shik and Ryoo Seung-beom as Yu Sang-hwan in Ryoo Seung-wan’s boxing drama Crying Fist (2004)

Ryoo Seung-wan — the first of two festival attendees returning to film after unexpected sabbaticals — is the subject of this year’s extended retrospective. The director of contemporary crime-action films, one boxing drama and a few unfortunate commercial misfires, Ryoo was obliged to make some interesting though stark choices following the poor revenues from the theatrical run of Dachimawa Lee (Aginiyeo Jioghaeng Geubhaengyeolchareul Tara, 2008). Frank in interview, as well as being refreshingly thoughtful about funding obstacles, the business and South Korea’s identity, Ryoo should lend an engaging personal touch to the retrospective as it’s confirmed he’ll be in attendance (like Jang Jin in 2010) for many of his film screenings. Our starting point appears to be No Blood No Tears (Pido Nunmuldo Eobshi, 2002), the first of Ryoo’s films to be backed by a studio though not the first in the director’s filmography. It’s about violence, opportunism and degradation in modern Korea: two downwardly mobile girls (a former safecracker-now-taxi-driver and an aspiring singer) steal a bag of money in a calculated move to escape their abusive relationships and dreary lives. Ryoo followed Arahan (Arahan jangpung daejakjeon, 2004), a mad melding of the superhero and martial arts genres, and Hey, Man! (2005), his second digital omnibus contribution, with Crying Fist (Joo-meok-ee oon-da, 2004). A less excitable film than its predecessors, Crying Fist unites Ryoo’s brother and long-time collaborator Seung-bum with fanboy favourite Choi Min-sik as two ruined men on a mission to become amateur boxing champions (with Choi fighting to win back his Rookie of the Year title after a fifteen year absence from the sport). The film was based on the true stories of Japanese businessman Hareruya Akira (see “Week in the Life: Hi, I’m Akira and I’ll be your human punchbag today,” The Independent, 1999) and “Korea’s Tyson” Seo-chol. Continuing the organised crime theme, Ryoo’s spin-kicking martial arts film The City Of Violence (Jjakpae, 2006) follows a detective and a reformed gangster (former high school buddies both, with Ryoo taking the role of the latter) from yo-yoing street fight to the guarded compound of their latest enemy, where the boys take on an entire fortressful of uniformed baddies and in the process hack the restaurant to sawdust. In 2008, Ryoo stepped away from his milieu of cops, felons and martial arts masters to reimagine his spy pastiche, Dachimawa Lee, originally conceived as a 35-minute omnibus short film and released digitally in 2000 (it was downloaded 1.5 million times). Drawing on the iconography of domestic 1970s spy films and Manchurian “Westerns” as well as Stateside TV like the Mission Impossible series, Lee (2008) is a bonkers retro parody about a legendary agent and his luckless helper-damsels fighting Japanese imperialists to retrieve a stolen Golden Buddha statuette.

Director Ryoo Seung-wan as Seok-hwan in his The City of Violence (2006)

Kong Hyo-jin as Keum Yeon-ja in Dachimawa Lee (2008)

Ryoo’s newest film, The Unjust (Budanggeorae, 2010), completes the retrospective. A twisting, looping puzzler which plays to Korean cynicism as well as paranoia about institutional corruption, The Unjust follows cutthroat policemen, businessmen and public prosecutors who plot against each other conspiratorially for personal gain then fight it out until the messy end.

Without question the most eagerly anticipated overseas visitor at the festival is self-taught filmmaker Kim Ki-duk. A filmmaker of great cultural and political significance today, Kim has overcome commercial changes in his home market by moving increasingly towards totally independent production. His new micro-budget film Arirang (2011), which closes the festival on the 17th November, is a beguiling self-portrait in which the possibly unfathomable director interacts with his more determinate self, Kim-as-private-personality if you can believe. Paying homage along the way to the international festivals which have given Kim so much vital critical acclaim, it uses the filmmaker’s wounded ego as well as personal memories — specifically of an oft-cited on-set accident which almost claimed the life of an actress working on Dream (Bi Mong, 2008) — as the springboard to track a somewhat fantasmatic recovery from what may or may not have been a nervous breakdown. There is no question, Kim Ki-duk’s presence at the festival is big news. And it’s precisely this quality of access to the most engaging filmmakers operating in Korea today that makes the still relatively youthful London Korean Film Festival a welcome and memorable cinematic showcase.

23 September, 2011

This article was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

FILM TREELESS MOUNTAIN DIRECTOR KIM SO-YONG

Kim So-yong’s Treeless Mountain (2008)

Synopsis: An elementary school in Seoul, the present. Six-year-old Jin spends her penultimate day at elementary school learning about time and playing with friends. Later that evening, she is chastised by her mother for failing to take Bin, her four–year-old sister, off the neighbours’ hands when she was supposed to. The next day, Jin’s contentment is broken when she returns to find removal men emptying the apartment. Her mother bundles the girls onto a bus bound for Hunghae and on arrival deposits them with their Aunt. When Jin is taken to one side and told that her mother must leave to search for their missing father, she is given a small piggybank together with a promise that when it is filled with pocket-money their mom will return ...

Opening with a throwaway line that serves as a grim foretelling of events to come (an elementary school teacher tells her young charges to go home and “have your mother teach you how time works”), Treeless Mountain is a sharply observed drama about the lies we tell children and the things that children do to cover up and defend against loss. Essentially a two-hander between seven-year old Kim Hee-yeon (in the role of elder sister Jin) and the even littler Kim Song-hee (who was five at the time of shooting), the film begins with the girls’ mother deciding she must go in search of their estranged father. In one of the film’s many painful sequences, she leaves her daughters in the care of their aunt, telling Jin (to whom she has entrusted a bright pink piggybank for safekeeping), “Each time you obey your aunt, she’ll give you a coin. Put it in here. By the time it gets full I’ll be back.” The girls attribute to the insentient “Piggy” both a nickname and a helper identity, asking it for help and masterminding new moneymaking schemes to fill it up more quickly. Over the course of the film, Jin transforms from a pampered but bright young thing, topping her classes at elementary level and evidently acing all of her friends when it comes to playground card games, to a stoic and resourceful child, still buoyant and bright, but ultimately deceived by a falsehood. The film sadly tests the rules of the childrens’ reality, but Jin finds her feet on the slopes, taking responsibility for her sister’s wellbeing and perhaps too for both of their futures.

Sisters Bin (Kim Song-hee) and Jin (Kim Hee-yeon) play in Kim So-yong’s Treeless Mountain (2008)

Treeless Mountain is set predominantly in the director’s former hometown of Hunghae, a sizeable rural borough north of Pohang (roughly 170 miles from Seoul) where she spent a good deal of her infancy living on her grandparents’ rice farm. (Kim’s mother divorced and emigrated to the States, leaving the young Kim and her sister in the care of their grandparents — though she would later follow her mother to America when she was twelve). Surprisingly (and admirably so in the present standard-issue hi-def climate), the film was shot on Super-16, an unwieldy, noisy format at the best of times and one that does not make the demanding task of recording 40 hours of footage in cramped conditions any easier (or cost effective). The result photographically is, nonetheless, wonderful. Respectful as well as inclusive, D.P. Anne Misawa covers the girls’ lively interactions without sentimentality and in as much detail as circumstances permit: we watch them watching, listening, crying and singing (“me ddoo gi, me ddoo gi, me-me-me-me-me ddoo gi”), sleeping and eating, yawning and procrastinating, grappling with big door handles, fumbling with blocky crayons — everything is seen from the girls’ viewpoint. This approach comes into its own when the film relocates to wintry farmland deep in the Hunghae countryside; in one shot, the camera watches at a certain remove as Bin then Jin tentatively approach their new grandmother for food; in another, Bin taps a window relentlessly until Jin pops into frame to tap the other side (“Peep-peep-peep”). This closeness to the girls is underscored by the film’s soundtrack, which carries not a single note of music (though Asobi Seksu’s score over the end credits is sugary enough to be gorgeous). It looks instead to the natural sounds of the countryside, to the girls’ footfalls around the house, and most effectively of all to the sounds of their breathing: at rest and at play.

Importantly for a film focusing on character, the indie aesthetic is enriched by some fine supporting performances. Kim Mi-hyang is commanding as the potentially alienating Big Aunt, a blustering, disgruntled alcoholic whose modest self-made image took a severe knock when she sold off her failing business. Lee Soo-ah has less screen time in the role of Mrs Lee, the girls’ mother, but her tender performance hints at the gulf which exists between her maternal duty and her suppressed personal desire. Elsewhere, Kim’s non-professional actors have a naturalistic charm and confidence that reinforces her quasi-social-realist approach. She is aided most ably in this regard by Park Boon-tak, a Hunghae local and farm labourer who was cast just two days before the grandmother’s scenes were scheduled to be shot, and Kim Mi-jung, the mild-mannered neighbour (credited as “Pretty Lady”) whose real son the girls grow to like and play with.

Inevitably, the film’s main strength lies in the appealing screen presences of the leads. If Kim Hee-yeon sticks with film then the work she does here bodes well for the future. Her performance is an admixture of pain, fascination, glee and compassion, the distress in some of her scenes at times uncomfortably raw. When in one scene a new play-friend charitably hands Jin a sticker to play with she graciously declines it, quietly excuses herself, then takes her sister home; it’s a touching moment, one in which the girl becomes acutely aware that she is more fortunate than the boy, but also that she cannot yet share in the delight of a son indulged so lovingly by his mother. Remarkably, Hee-yeon manages to convey all of this in a simple look. It is also to Kim’s great credit that the transformation of Jin from an amusingly carefree if slightly tardy primary-school student into a sharp-eyed, kind-hearted young girl is kept modestly restrained, and yet a single production still of Jin in school uniform, emblazoned across the D.V.D. menu screen which the film returns us to promptly after the end credits, underscores the extent of this transformation. It’s easy to imagine a contemporary animation making a heroine of Jin in the final act, but here the director’s approach is subtly even-handed, calmly settling Jin into a new life without ever dispelling her aching loneliness. Accordingly, the look she exchanges with an excited Bin towards the end, as their grandmother prepares food at their side, is one of the most satisfying moments in Treeless Mountain — not for nothing does it come as some relief to us when she feels distracted enough to smile again. For her part Song-hee — in addition to producing some truly priceless expressions in her role as Bin (Misawa’s camera regularly finds her staring dimly at some offscreen player, a hint in her eye that she is indeed suffering some sort of fool here) — shows remarkable poise in many of her one-on-one interactions. A scene in which the young mite objects to the others’ maltreatment of some grasshoppers may involve no acting or even instruction, but such is her confidence in front of the lens that she’s a treat to watch. And unsurprisingly, the director lavishes her with attention.

Not suffering fools: Bin headscratching Little entrepreneurs: Jin and Bin head off to catch grasshoppers

As for the central themes of absence, personal agency and responsibility, the film is harsh but honest. Kim reveals the nature of certain relationships only gradually and accepts that the girls’ problems cannot be easily resolved by the introduction of new owners. In one of the film’s many Hunghae-based street scenes, as a local boy loiters in a side-street text messaging, Jin asks permission to telephone her mum’s old number in Seoul. Checking it out instead for himself, the reply comes: “That number is disconnected.” In a world governed by adults it seems that even in this small task Jin is helpless — she is denied the dignity of learning the knowledge privately for herself, and must take a stranger at his word publicly in front of Bin; quietly she moves on. Kim achieves an extraordinary level of pathos with this approach. There’s no great moment of insurrection against Big Aunt, for instance, just the forceful pronouncement issued by the girls endlessly and behind closed doors that they are hungry.

Unlike Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai, 2004, Japan), an earlier portrait of abandoned siblings struggling for a life in Tokyo (to which this film has I think been unfairly compared), there’s no usefully sentimentalising against-all-odds trajectory here, no jeopardy plot to threaten the girls’ lives. Jin’s quiet realisation that she must stay put for the benefit of Bin is compelling enough. And though class mobility is undoubtedly an issue (one which tangles with our natural parenting instinct as viewers), the film is admirably non-partisan, neither idealising finally working-class family life or surreptitiously passing judgement on it. It isn’t an easy work, as many viewers who wish they could influence the on-screen events will undoubtedly find, but it is a real pleasure: sensitive and heart-rending, rich in pathos, and offering a potent glimpse of the ties that bind two resilient young girls together.

Disc: Soda Pictures’ U.K. release comes with a fine audio commentary from director Kim So-yong and husband and producer Bradley Rust Gray. Both shed light on some of the more obscure (salt punishment) or objectionable (grilling insects alive) customs that are culturally accepted practice in South Korea, but they also throw in some lighter stuff, noting for instance the terse attitude of some of the locals who witnessed the Big Aunt scenes shot in the market.

The extras include a cute-as-buttons chat with the two girls, as they reminisce with Kim about the shoot and (but of course!!) the grasshopper song. As Kim explains in the Q&A featurette (an after-show spot with an audience at the New York Film Forum), the girls were given very rudimentary instructions and guidelines prior to principal photography, and once the real business of shooting on a daily basis began the screenplay was treated with a substantial degree of flexibility. The Region 1 D.V.D. release, which contains all the above, goes one step further with a modest selection of deleted scenes and outtakes — a small contribution admittedly, but one which would have rounded out the contextual material nicely on our own highly recommendable Region 2 release.

19 July, 2011

This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

FILM 71 INTO THE FIRE DIRECTOR LEE JAE-HAN

71 Into the Fire (2010)
‘The day that courage came of age’

Synopsis: Young Deok, 1950. The North Korean People’s Army is on the verge of overwhelming the South. Drafted as a student soldier in the 3rd Infantry Division, Oh Jang-beom survives an attack on the town and flees without personally firing a shot. While regiments are diverted to the Nakdong River, a major defence barrier shielding the cities of Daegu and Pusan from invading forces, Jang-beom is left behind in Pohang with seventy untrained student soldiers. Demoralised and shell-shocked, they make their last stand against an advancing heavy artillery force, led by the ruthless Park Moo-rang . . .

“Lead them with heart; if your sincerity gets through they will all follow.”

So says the grizzled veteran Captain Kang (Kim Seung-woo) to his reluctant student charge in a pivotal sequence in 71 Into the Fire, Lee Jae-han’s lavish dramatisation of the siege at Pohang Girls’ Middle School in the opening stages of the Korean War. It’s advice we expect the film’s makers to also honour. One of the challenges in launching a combat film on this scale is not the staging of practical effects to engender the illusion of combat conditions, but the creation of plausible human characters. Think of Denzel Washington’s Private Tripp struggling to find redemption with his own regiment (and surrogate family) towards the end of Edward Zwick’s masterful Glory (1989, U.S.), or Tom Hanks’ simple backward glances to ensure that his tearful breakdown midway through Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998, U.S.) remains a private moment. The former example is perhaps the more apt, for Washington’s interaction and open conflict with the inexperienced young men in his own unit lends the film its terrible and finally upsetting momentum; but the Spielberg

example is equally forceful, the harrowing impact on Hanks’ character of the shock of war eloquently communicated through small gestures and silences. Both films, to borrow the commendable sentiment of 71 Into the Fire, lead us the audience with sincerity.

Regarded in South Korea as a defiant and patriotic stand against communism by the nations’ youth (the fallen soldiers are commemorated in the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul), the siege at Pohang probably won’t be familiar to western audiences: an ad hoc regiment of seventy-one student soldiers fended off an eleven-hour assault by several regiments of the North Korean People’s Army, heroically stalling their advance with dwindling munitions, no military support and barely any combat experience. Though it was just one incident in an expansive build up to the Battle of Pusan Perimeter (which involved the British land army and United States Air, Army and Navy forces), the Pohang siege deserves and in some respects demands attention, both as a tale of spectacular war heroism and as a profound symbol of personal sacrifice. To date, director Lee Jae-han (known internationally as John H. Lee) has produced a mixed bag of short film projects and music videos, making the crossover to feature film production with two high-gloss Korean melodramas. In 2004, he delivered the unabashedly romantic fading-lover yarn A Moment to Remember, followed in 2009 by the missed-opportunities desire-as-memory melodrama Sayonara Itsuka. For this, his third genre piece, Lee sticks with melodrama but demonstrates an adolescent understanding of the ambiguities and emotional suffering of war.

Opening with a slow-motion shot that tracks through devastated streets in the war-torn Young Deok region and filmed in obligatorily Rowellesque tones, Lee’s highly fanciful combat picture owes more to the output of global commercials companies such as The Institute and R.S.A. Films than it does to domestic productions like Brotherhood (Taegukgi, Kang Je-gyu, 2004) or the pre-war The Taebaek Mountains (Taebaek Sanmaek, Im Kwon-taek, 1994). As befits his roots as a director primarily of music videos, Lee makes a determined effort to use every grad filter on the globe, instilling proceedings with the gloss of an antiquated Tony Scott film and going out of his way to homage the 360 degree wrap-around shot which Michael Bay personally killed off over fifteen years ago. The effects-laden battle in Young Deok, for instance, which is for the most part covered using fluid steadicam (and dressed up with exploding fireballs which send already dead men flying about like projectile dolls), gradually gives way to saturated panoramic views of the countryside, and endless lines of flags connoting mindless conformity are set against darkening but otherwise lovingly photographed skies. So content is Lee with the cleverness of his design that potentially wrenching moments fall flat and whole story threads are lost. Choi Seung-hyeon’s (a.k.a., T.O.P.) purse-lipped student captain Jang-beom and Kwon Sang-woo’s captious gang leader Gap-jo (as written by Laurents and Sondheim evidently) come to blows on the eve of war, but their Disneyfied high-school rivalry never takes; Park Jin-hee’s sullen nurse drifts into Jang-beom’s orbit when he shows up in hospital, but any serendipitous connection between the pair is forgotten, later to be replaced by shimmering, angelic images of his mother (Kim Seong-ryeong in a thankless cameo); indeed, the letters Jang-beom intends for his mother have no real payoff here; only Cha Seung-won comes close to carrying the film — his unapologetically sinister turn as a commander of the People’s Army a welcome antidote to the designer-sulk styled into much of Choi’s performance — yet when he inexplicably shows mercy to his student opponents, expecting compliance in return, all the signs indicate that the struggling screenwriters have given up and are padding the narrative.

Saving grace: commander Park Moo-rang (Cha Seung-won) in Lee Jae-han’s 71 Into The Fire (2010)

With the bulk of the action so shamelessly validated on Bruckheimerian terms, it’s tempting to accept this all as wanton adolescent tosh, but significantly the effort is made to commemorate the real conflict on which the film is based. Executive producer Chung Tae-won was keen to maintain a level of historical veracity and reportedly intervened as pro bono writer once it became clear that Lee himself (being “from a different generation”) had little grasp of the war he was fetishising. Despite Chung’s involvement, the film fails to give us an accurate sense of what the real event must have been like and avoids serious criticism in any way. In one striking example, the detonation of a bridge over the Nakdong river calls to mind the atrocities at Waegwan and Tuksong-dong (according to A.P. writers, whose articles were published originally in the Korea Herald, U.S. forces blasted the bridges in both locations on August 3rd 1950 killing hundreds of South Korean refugees as they attempted to cross), but forgoing any serious look at real or allegorical events Lee keeps his sobbing refugee women and children at a distance and instead directs Kang walking calmly away from a Transformers-size explosion. Meanwhile, the depictions of South Korean nationalists as spiritual victors and North Korean communists as faceless cannon fodder is at best troublesome, at worst asinine. We’re meant to infer from the machine-gunning of one South Korean student soldier, adorned in white and elegantly cut down as he charges headlong into an ambush, that war only punishes the virtuous and the innocent. From this we anticipate that our placid hero will question the masochistic damage of the war, or re-examine his own critical stance towards a North Korea which sends young men just like himself repeatedly into battle, but there’s a distinct unwillingness here to explore even simple emotional truths. The South Korean students share the same language as their aggressors and in some instances the same characteristics (here, mothers are central to the fatherless boys’ lives on both sides of the divide), but Lee takes so much pleasure in pitting teens and their high-tech weaponry against villains that even these melancholic admissions are lost. With scant regard for message films like J.S.A. (Park Chan-wook, 2000) and Secret Reunion (Jang Hoon, 2010), Lee has grisly fun mowing down wave upon wave of communist baddies. Whatever the intentions of its makers (it was released in Korea prior to June 25th, the formal date which in 2010 marked the 60th anniversary of the People’s Army launching its attack along the 38th Parallel), 71 Into the Fire is a throwback to the ignominious days of the 1980s. Though this may be a minor film for the director (who goes on to update John Woo’s legendary The Killer) and your archetypal mess-around for Korean teens and western dilettantes, it never makes good on its promise, or its sentiment, and lowers the standard for Korean blockbusters. More importantly than even this, it makes things worse for those filmmakers in Korea who choose not to operate on Hollywood’s terms.

Disc: For its part, Cine-Asia (D.V.D. distributor of the Showbox Media Group) have turned out a handsome two-disc edition here. No artwork arrived with the review disc but the menu design seems consistent with the advertising in Korea, and navigation isn’t hampered at all by the characteristically jittery effects worked into the menu architecture (a tremor rocks the toolbar whenever there’s an offscreen explosion). Thankfully, Pohang survivors Kim Man-gyu and Son Joo-hyung, whose personal testimonies are only barely glimpsed over the film’s credits, are given a voice in the voxpop interview “Student Soldier Trainees From the Korean War” (conducted in the grounds of the real Pohang middle school no less). It’s fascinating to hear both Kim’s reasons for volunteering (he was just 17) and his memory of the familial conflict this inevitably provoked (the film avoids any such moral equivocation), but alas the interview is a short affair, and lacking their detailed input in a studious documentary format it’s difficult to get an idea of how the siege may have played out that day. The Cine-Asia special production “Men of Valour, Personal Reflections on the Korean War” is an affectionate portmanteau short of unusual interest, presenting the accounts of five servicemen who joined the war effort: Byong Yu, Chang Young Won, Solomon J. Jamerson, Andrew Beavers, and Seiji Koshimizu. The subtitles are fine (and in some featurettes even a bit sneaky).

By comparison, the conventional point-and-shoot featurettes (“Into the Fire Making of Documentary,” “Behind the Scenes,” “Pre-Production” and “Production Design”) provide less insight and character than most audiences deserve. For fine arts people the “Poster Making of” capsule looks intriguing on paper, but the featurette begins and ends with the on-set publicity shoot (you won’t see what third-party designers do with those images, for instance, once they’ve been outsourced). Meanwhile, H.K. cinema expert Bey Logan and H.K.-based film producer Mike Leeder’s commentary intersperses personal anecdotes with production notes and your usual ho-hum drippy platitudes, the kind of extra for existent fans only.

11 March, 2011

This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

FILM SOUNDTRACK A BITTERSWEET LIFE COMPOSERS JANG YOUNG-KYU, DALPALAN

Film music and Kim Jee-woon:
A Bittersweet Life (2005) original soundtrack

The significance of music in the highly iconographic films of Kim Jee-woon is seldom touched on but worth consideration. The use of contemporary radio hits in The Quiet Family, The Foul King and The Good, The Bad, The Weird, and importantly atypical orchestration in A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life and again The Good, The Bad, The Weird speaks volumes for the director’s approach. In his debut film The Quiet Family (1998), Kim plays fast and loose with American popular culture and representational conventions. The exuberant soundtrack intersperses retro Long Island band The Stray Cats and Latin-inflected hip hop with The Partridge Family ditty “I Think I Love You” and Memphis soul/rock band The Box Tops; this wonderfully antiquated vision of recycled Americana is further refined by the repetition in several hokey grave-digging and father-on-the-toilet sequences of Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire,” the bubbling, tumbling rock tune which Martin Scorsese integrated so well into the final Stones/Harrison rock melange of Goodfellas (1990, U.S.). While his warm-hearted follow-up The Foul King (2000) is positively barren alongside his debut in musical terms, it marked Kim’s first collaboration with Jang

Young-kyu, whose minimalist electronic score crosses back and forth between easygoing vignettes and scrappily merry interludes (at times creeping in an idiophone for good measure, and a Morricone riff in the denouement).

For A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), Kim collaborated with the prolific composer Lee Byung-woo, in whose trusty musical care he originally bestowed his Three segment Memories (2002). (Lee has since scored such whopping genre titles as The Red Shoes, The Host, Voice of a Murderer, Hansel & Gretel, Mother and Haeundae.) The result was a profound and unsettling score, eschewing the sort of shrieking, Hermannian variations so regularly used in horror cinema for an extraordinary series of nostalgic cues. Culminating in the perfect “Lullaby,” Lee’s melodies and themes are often at odds with the piercing tone of the film, contrasting the pain of memory and desire with the paranoid sensibilities and Lynchian distortion of a Badalamenti cue. For the positively bonkers The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008), a score so indiscriminate and unshackled that it genrifies for the film’s rollicking setpiece Nina Simone’s touching “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” Kim collaborated again with Jang Young-kyu and new arrival Dalpalan. For their efforts both artists were nominated in the Composers category at the 3rd Asian Film Awards (they lost out, not unjustly, to Joe Hisaishi). Before this, however, Jang and Dalpalan worked together on Kim’s revenge thriller A Bittersweet Life (2005), producing an excellent score which deserves closer inspection.

Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life (2005) was scored by Jang Young-kyu and Dalpalan, featuring Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki

The musicians were joined importantly by Japanese pianist Kuramoto Yuhki, who recorded the film’s critical music cue entitled “Romance.” In addition, the composers pay homage to the late classical Spanish guitarist Francisco Tarrega, whose “Etude in E Minor” becomes the signature tune of (and in key respects typifies) the album. What emerges is an unusually jazzy and highly individualistic score which does a fine job of encapsulating the different themes of the film. These include our hero Sun-woo’s loyalty to Kang, the romantic melody for Hee-soo (the girl he shadows), the very culture of femininity which she embodies and which is still unique to Sun-woo, the besieging of Kang by “friendly” enemies, the slapstick fun to be had with knuckleheads Myung-gu and Mikhail, the vengeance theme which pushes the confrontation with Kang in the hotel’s Sky Lounge, and lastly, but of course, Sun-woo’s relationship with his own reflection and image, a motif which the director endows here with great significance. In its simplicity, for example, “Follow” transforms the initial spark of wonder that takes hold of Sun-woo into an unobtrusively cool, tinkling arrangement, the purposeful rhythm of it repeating again as our hero drives into the city late at night, the erotic undertone of the theme surfacing towards the close as he gazes down upon Hee-soo in a busy night-club flirting with her lover on the dance-floor. The “Romance” cue is based on the source music to which Hee-soo later plays cello accompaniment, and though the motif is never once repeated on the album it finds corresponding value nonetheless in familiar themes like “Irreversible Time,” its reprise “(Quartet) Irreversible Time” and in the wry sadness of “Fairness.” With the exception of Tarrega’s “Etude in E Minor,” perhaps the most recognisable cue is “My Sad Night,” which marks the formal introduction on the album of classical guitar and folk elements. A loose and fanciful arrangement, the cue catches the specifically European influences of the film.

Jang and Dalpalan then provide variations on established themes. For “Escape” they produce a strange synthesised sound which builds to a slower, serious and other-worldly take on the call-to-arms cue “Sky Lounge,” while the more threatening (for being so subtle) “Red Lounge” pulls away from the melody of “Escape” (its close cousin), finally reprising the leitmotif of the album on piano for a telling shift in the fadeout. “A Bittersweet Life II” brings appropriately a sense of small-scale intimacy and heritage to the underworlds of crime bosses Kang and Baek; and though it’s listed after “A Bittersweet Life II” as track number ten on the album (and understandably so), the reprise, entitled “A Bittersweet Life,” appears first in the film over a magnificent scene in which Sun-woo decides that his only course of action is to take bloody revenge against Kang.

Kim used a range of popular songs in his debut The Quiet Family (1998)

Lee Byung-woo composed a nostalgic score for A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

The most successful track on the album is of course “Sky Lounge,” the film’s introductory music cue. Since vanity is the key theme here, virtually every frame in this sequence is elegantly composed and the grooming impeccable. But for pure swagger and propulsive energy the sequence is indebted to the music: from the eponymous Sky Lounge of the title, where Sun-woo savours one final taste of that exquisite dessert on his table, to the lower levels of the hotel where patrons cross its unblemished marble floors, from the thumping club room where drunken men encumber their young mistresses shepherding them away from harm, to an exclusive member’s suite where Sun-woo has to turf out a trio of petty gangsters — the cue (and the scene) is all about ego and hubris. It rounds out a robust and thoughtful arrangement of eloquent and exciting compositions, and as soundtracks go A Bittersweet Life is a classic of modern Korean cinema.

10 March, 2011

This piece was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

FILM THE UNINVITED DIRECTOR LEE SU-YEON

‘There is more to this world than is safe to know’:
Lee Su-yeon’s The Uninvited (2003)

Synopsis: Uijeongbu, the present. Interior decorator Kang Jung-won begins the long journey home on the Seoul subway. As he sleeps, a single mother and her two daughters board, seating themselves nearby. At the last stop, he wakes to find the girls are dead and their mother missing, but in his panic does nothing; the train drifts away into the night. Safely home, he chats briefly with his fiancée, Hee-Eun, who in his absence has installed a showpiece dining table. She insists that it will be a locus for the family despite appearances: “it’s for each person to sit and talk at as if an actor onstage.” The next evening, when Jung-won is alone in the apartment, the two girls appear to him, slumped at the table . . .

There is a scene midway through The Uninvited, Lee Su-yeon’s cheerless but distinguished portrait of life in modern industrial Korea, that is as chilling and unexpected as it is elegant. A young woman, Yeon, is curled tightly on the sofa in her comfortable high-rise apartment. An incessant whine on the soundtrack shifts register, pulling from nowhere the memory of a crying child; then Yeon intones softly in voice-over: “My mother told me that you shouldn’t keep cats as pets because they take revenge: ‘Unlike other animals, cats have souls.’ But I don’t believe that. I just don’t like their cries.” Moving to the balcony where she stops to admire the rain, Lee’s camera finds a bleak, concrete landscape. Yeon reaches out her hand; sunlight appears through the cloud; and a body falls from above. In an impossible twist of fate the eyelines of both the falling woman and Yeon cross, and Lee’s camera goes in close, matching their reactions in identical shots. When the spell is broken (and it happens quickly and with economy), both women fall out of frame together. This sublime sequence, in a sense the trompe l’oeil of this her debut film, is one example of the often graceful sometimes obvious invention of Lee’s directorial style, and it goes some way to substantiating her preoccupation here with vision, imagination, and with the nature of “experience.”

Using unusual angles (one monologue begins with the seemingly wayward camera focused on the ceiling), some long floor-hugging tracking shots and uncanny digital composites, Lee’s finely nuanced staging and fluid photography necessarily lifts the tone. In this sense, she is also well served by the many residential complexes that have radically transformed the Seoul metro area, including Seoul-dependent wards such as Ilsan. Designed to be self-contained, these “new town” projects feature prominently in the Korean cinematic landscape, either as small builds or as fully autonomous, residential-commercial constructions. Films such as Kim Jee-woon’s Memories (which later shared a D.V.D. release with The Uninvited on the Korean issued The Horror Film Collection Vol. 1), Han Jae-rim’s The Show Must Go On (2007), and Kim So-yong’s Treeless Mountain (2008) make the most of the limitless lines and orderly quality of new town space. For its part, The Uninvited draws attention to itself by scaling architecture and finding alternative perspectives; owing an unremarkable debt to the stylistic mannerisms of Hitchcock (circa-Psycho), the film is arguably most successful when the camera is passing through open windows and gliding down building fronts.

Lee uses these residential builds, variously haunted by death and by dying, to comment more purposefully on the fates of her characters. When we’re first introduced, Jung-won (Park Shin-yang), the affluent, middle-class protagonist of Lee’s story, is caged in a different kind of tower on Seoul’s Line 7 subway, a journey which literally takes him to the end-of-the-line. Though we follow him for most of the film — at work, in the jeep running errands, huddled over blueprints at home — Jung-won remains a particularly sketchy protagonist. He is a timid pooch, this is clear, favouring the traditional family home with his religious father and sister, and genuinely looking flummoxed whenever hot-headed fiancée Hee-Eun springs new ideas on him. He takes a knock to the head one day in the workplace and the shock is enough to keep him second-guessing the origins of his own supernatural “visions”; yet it seems fair to say, based on the prologue alone, that his general misfortune has something to do with spiritual impurity and his ambivalence towards the family religion. In contrast to her fiancé, the materialistic Hee-Eun (Yoo Seon) bounces through the plot hounding her betrothed about wedding invitations and unsuccessfully trying to snap him into action. The mismatch is well emphasised by the variation in the performers’ acting styles, with Park playing the remorseful pup to Yoo Seon’s au courant tigress.

It is possible to glean from Yeon’s subtle reaction a sense of the ignominy that Korean society imputed on women of her position, a point which the film underscores as literally every one of her friends and acquaintances grow to disbelieve her

Jeon Ji-hyun (her screen name later changed to Jun Gianna) takes the other lead role as Yeon. A narcoleptic, and now grieving young mother, her only child was thrown from an apartment balcony in a fit of despair by depressed friend Jung-sook (Kim Yeo-jin). The symptoms of her narcolepsy are the one constant in the film: the dreamy hallucinations, the incidents of cataplexy that floor her without warning, and, naturally, the drowsy crawl of her shell-shocked delivery (even simple conversation is an imposition). The signs suggest that Jung-won himself shares with Yeon a similar if less chronic form of the disorder, but the film defers to a more supernatural mode as Yeon assumes a prophetic role in the narrative. In recovery from a second sleep attack, she explains that her late mother was in fact a shaman. Though Lee doesn’t define their relationship clearly enough, it is possible to glean from Yeon’s subtle reaction a sense of the ignominy that Korean society imputed on women of her position, a point which the film underscores as literally every one of her friends and acquaintances grow to disbelieve her. Just how her psychic visions fit into this (largely unexplored) domain of religious practice — a folk religion remember in Korean history — is similarly left unclear (there’s never any suggestion, for instance, that she is dealing with gods, or that spirits call upon her to conjure visions). Yet by leaving out so much of her semireligious backstory, Lee pares away the social comment.

It’s a small shame because the effort has been made here to touch on the effects of socioreligious changes in modern Korea. For one, Lee strikes an effective balance with her secondary Christian characters. Jung-woon’s father, Kang Jae-sung (Jeong Wook), has settled in Ilsan where (for the first time in his life) he has built his own Christian church. A pastor and single-parent, he now finds it impossible to work up much enthusiasm to continue ministering — and perhaps one reason for this is that he fears the stigma of personal failure (he staves off an unfolding economic nightmare by tending day and night to a small number of growing devotees). His general guardedness in the company of his daughter, the person to whom he is presumably closest, indicates that this time he may well have overextended himself. Actor Jeong Wook’s finely pitched performance is often characterised by distraction and sombre introspection; even with the devotion of his congregation, it seems Jae-Sung is unsure about the church’s role in local life. His daughter Young-Suh (Kang Gi-hwa), on the other hand, is bright and perhaps more brittle. She manages the new converts as administrator pro tempore and beams with personal satisfaction at the church’s growth in membership — at one point she is seen liaising with women who have travelled from Mokdong (a flourishing province just south of the Han river) and we sense in that broad smile her intense pride in the moment.

Yeon (Jeon Ji-hyun) surveys her concrete neighbourhood in The Uninvited (2003)

While the film observes both characters in a church environment, the scope is limited to their everyday lives behind the scenes; there’s nothing here resembling, for instance, the explicitly theological nature of Secret Sunshine (2007), Lee Chang-dong’s brilliant but punishing melodrama which takes to task the unashamedly materialistic slogan of modern-day Evangelism. By contrast, Lee’s view on Christianity as a now firmly established religion within Korea, indeed her feelings on the so-called Christian “success story” (specifically Protestantism), remains opaque. Again, it is a shame because once we learn of Yeon’s shamanistic heritage Jung-won’s Christian identity takes on a greater edge. Lacking this perspective, a few of her secondary characters feel a bit syrupy. When Hee-Eun witnesses a congregation scatter for their cars in a sudden downpour she uses the moment to convince Jung-won of the rightness of her own faith; it is a smug and obsequious scene that provides a sentimental counterpoint to two earlier exchanges, one in which Hee-Eun borrows Jung-won’s only umbrella, and another in which she begins to suspect Jung-won’s infidelity. Lee seems so compelled to hold on to this moment of poetic reflection that the finer point of the scene (that Hee-Eun prays for the conviction to end their relationship rather than for forgiveness or understanding) is nearly lost.

Yeon describes her narcolepsy to Jung-woon (Park Shin-yang)

Since one assumption of the film is that peoples’ lives can be saved if only someone else will listen, the characters’ happiness rests largely on their ability to communicate; secondary characters make war needlessly upon themselves and others, while the more emotionally complex and introspective Yeon and Jung-won, destined it seems to suffer unbearably grim lives outside society, show little resistance. Ultimately it’s impossible to feel much on this (perhaps preordained) downward spiral when miscommunication and unwarranted conclusions predominate. Any suggestion, for example, of a sexual bond with Yeon would be just about unthinkable for Jung-won given her psychological volatility and her emotional dependency, yet their respective spouses (Park Moon-sub, played here by Park Won-sang, and Hee-Eun) seem to think the pair are going at it like some Bergmanian couple in A Lesson in Love. Still, with assured cinematography, some potent themes and, particularly, its thoughtful stab at rethinking cinematic perspective, The Uninvited is an exceptional calling card. After a quick glance, however, at Lee’s filmography — a range of shorts, including La (1998), The Goggles (2000), which is included in the Korea Short Film Collection: Episode 1 (1998), Twenty Questions on the digital shorts omnibus Twentidentity (2004), and the 21 minute short The Rabbit (2008) which was produced for the 10th Women’s Film Festival in Seoul — you’re left wondering if she will return to feature production any time soon.

Disc: A good transfer but, quite unusually for a Tartan release this late in the game, no extras. They do exist in the form of interviews, music featurettes and production notes on the Korean special edition, but alas we haven’t earned them yet. Some sleeve notes would have been welcome but as it is, the film looks splendid and thankfully the D.T.S. showcases its often damned impressive sound design.

This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

24 February, 2011

FILM R-POINT DIRECTOR KONG SU-CHANG

‘The point of no return’
Kong Su-chang’s R-Point (2004)

Synopsis: Vietnam, 1972. Private Kim and Lieutenant Choi, a distinguished officer who was awarded the Choong Moo for service in defence of his country, are on R & R. They take up with some hookers in Nha Trang, but in the night Kim is murdered. Choi finds and executes the assassin, a girl, point blank. Back at camp, Choi is brought before Lieutenant Colonel Han who agrees to forget the incident if he leads a platoon into R-Point — a rural area, now designated hostile — to find missing soldiers, presumed K.I.A. Choi acquiesces. In R-Point, the platoon encounter their first insurgent: a peasant, not unlike the girl at Nha Trang, who seems to be fighting all alone in the forest. After a brief firefight, they leave her in a pillbox, ostensibly to rot, but not long after the girl reappears to them again in the night . . .

R-Point (which U.K. distributor Palisades Tartan has seen fit to rebrand this year with the new title Ghosts of War) finds a deliberate balance early on between light and dark, empathy and wickedness, virtue and evil. Its broad range of characters provide variations on these themes; at some point, all of the soldiers caught in R-Point confess either to living a life of deceit in which they have wronged their loved ones, or a cruel and violent life determined by their honed indifference to the “enemy”. It’s some time before we learn who is truly guilty (or, to borrow pre-war language used at the time to describe the French cause in Indochina, “impure”) and who is not, but the maxim “Those who have blood on their hands will not return”, conveyed to the soldiers in the form of an ancestral warning that seems to pervert Confucian philosophy, seems relevant to all. Ostensibly a down and dirty cautionary tale in the tropical hell of Vietnam, the film charts the repercussions of these many and various indiscretions, as one by one the hapless soldiers are targeted by a host of judgmental apparitions, and one by one they each take their chances.

Thematically, R-Point is more ambitious than this. For one, director Kong Su-chang doesn’t address the war directly. His film instead assumes audience foreknowledge of North and South Korean participation in Vietnam and perhaps too, though less expected, the cumulative benefits to the South of this participation (in the form of loans, subsidies and preferential trade arrangements with the United States). The specifics aren’t of importance in the film, but the historical arrangement itself, forged between President Park Chung-hee and the Johnson and Nixon administrations respectively, is far from irrelevant. According to Time (1999), the largest single source of foreign exchange for Korea in this period came in the form of war-induced revenues (U.S. defence-related expenditures, U.S. government grants, exports and production for U.S. consumption); the success of Korea’s economic development program therefore hangs heavy over proceedings. To the film’s credit, the viewer is always aware of the likely consequences of this participation, and as the many allusions to separated families,

divided armies, and struggles for reunification particularly make clear, the infusion of foreign capital into the South at such a dramatic rate inevitably impacted its relations with the North.

To those already primed for an anti-Vietnam War statement then, or for any critique of Korea’s support for American military intervention (Iraq included), the film does at least play well: the soldiers wait anxiously for their orders to return home after the mission, though in what condition they expect to find their country under the authoritarian leadership of its dictator remains unclear (it is appropriate that Su-chang sets his film in the year 1972). In this respect, Korea’s very participation in the war, which the film sees negatively, seems to underlie the economic recovery of the specific period — Su-chang’s implied message being that Korea, like the soldiers in his film, must in some way acknowledge its own guilt.

The director is also inspired (as one might expect of a script which places so much emphasis on borders and territory) by the merging of old cultures. R-Point’s setting is an isolated island (which we’re led to believe was of some strategic importance to colonialists) and this evokes the passing of several distinct phases in Vietnamese history: the nation’s split from imperial China in the 10th century, its colonisation by the French in the late 19th, its struggle for autonomy and self-rule during the French-Indochinese War, and the American Vietnam war, viewed itself to be a lost cause, and hence “passing,” even in 1972. The film is most effective when tinkering with these cultural stresses and inventing massacres. Kim Byung-chul’s Cho, an educated mortician’s son, tells the group as he reads from a stone marker that the Chinese executed hundreds of Vietnamese in the area, then dumped them in a lake, terrestrialised it, and erected a Buddhist temple to bring harmony to the site; later in the film a harmless interloper relates another story, this time an act of near-genocide committed by an unknown enemy. The latter tale is relayed by an American marine, the victims he describes are French colonialists; indeed the American himself guards a nasty secret, prohibiting Choi’s men from entering the second floor of their headquarters and snooping around the rooms where a lot of his platoon’s hardware is stored. So, while there is an inevitable loss of depth in any Vietnam film that neglects the Vietnamese experience directly (the identity of the ghost that haunts Choi so persistently is up for debate — is she Viet Cong, is she even Vietnamese — frustrating assertions that Su-chang has feminised the native experience at all), it becomes plain that R-Point is happier gesturing towards these cultural dichotomies. We quickly build an impression, then, of R-Point as some kind of slavish purgatory.

Director Kong Su-chang cut his teeth co-writing the Vietnam movie White Badge (1992), If It Snows On Christmas (1998), the Korean adaptation The Ring Virus (1999) and Tell Me Something (1999), the third highest grossing domestic film of 1999

R-Point as slavish purgatory: Lieutenant Choi (Kam Woo-seong) in Kong Su-chang’s R-Point (2004)

In terms of visual spectacle, Su-chang makes splendid use of an intimidating landscape (location shooting exclusively in Kampuchea, Southern Cambodia) and on occasion he provides the unexpected: a reconnaissance mission in which all but one of the platoon vanish in the undergrowth, never to resurface (the scene elegantly held in long take from the remaining soldier’s vantage); or a plantation filling with white headstones as Choi, the man caught in the middle, grasps finally the implications of his mission. After a promising start, though, the film does catch in a familiar groove. The infamous Bokor Hill Station (now Palace Hotel) is an incredible four-storey building from rooftop to entrance, its scorched outer walls red with lichen, the entire complex in reality decimated throughout by mortar shells, by gunfire, by looters of the Khmer Rouge, yet in accordance with Su-chang’s preferences, and needless to say with the eye of his cinematographer Seok Hyeong-jing, the palace is only ever substantially used at night. The “atmospheric” reveal early in the film is extravagant waste (the site cannot be seen for mist), and from then on Bokor barely appears in full light again. In another example, Su-chang aims to convey a spiritual presence: shifting visual register whenever the ghostly apparition appears, his first-person shots are hokey adornments detracting from subtle transitions (the camera rising portentously from the reeds to a solitary light above) or an actor’s expression.

Choi and Sergeant Jin Chang-rok (Son Byung-ho) hope that rescue will come soon

On this note, the performances are generally strong. Alone in Love (Han Ji-seung, 2006) star Kam Woo-sung underplays the charismatic Choi, a fearless and competitive fighter who merely awaits the inevitable return of the girl he killed lawlessly in Nha Trang. Son Byung-ho succeeds in creating great menace as Jin Chang-rok, the largely dispassionate growling sergeant who wants to turn the place into a bristling death camp. As their temperamental young charges (split between a grudging respect for Jin and enthusiasm for Choi) the aforementioned Kim Byung-chul as the nebbish Cho Byung-hoon, Oh Tae-kyung as sixteen year-old Jang Young-soo and Park Won-sang as the older, surly, good-natured Mah (aka, Sergeant “Cook”) supply rounded and sensitive performances, enough to offer a glimpse that is into their pre-war lifestyles before the blood falls out of the sky.

The incredible Bokor Hill Station, used here as the setting for an abandoned colonial French plantation

It was probably, therefore, a mistake to introduce across the board ghost story conventions into an intense psychological drama — the film suffers for this. An unnecessary plot-point — initiated by the arrival of some American squaddies who cryptically just check in to see if the lights are still on — the idea that an evil spirit, like a curse spiral, is disseminated through people, while obviously supported by the mythologies of Asian cultures, feels like a vain gesture, a conceit which this budget production sadly cannot do justice. Had Su-chang allowed his characters’ increasingly suicidal behaviour to stem from the confusion and suffering caused by war — if Choi, Cho and Jin had inched closer to the “darker side” of humanity as it is described in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, U.S.A.) by undergoing a natural process of initiation — his film may have had more of an impact. But as a useful primer on why Korean horror of the early 00s, and more broadly East Asian ghost stories, are often so complex and engaging, R-Point is pretty much required viewing and ranks as one of the smartest Korean thrillers of 2004.

Disc: Little improvement on Tartan’s original Asia Extreme release (in fact, the opposite is the case, as Justin Bowyer’s sleeve notes are absent). The rebranding is no problem, but some godawful package design by Tartan (the original still of Bokor is excised, replaced with something more palatable to Western eyes) will confuse any viewer on the look out now for a wooden barn (there really is no excuse for this and fans will notice). Otherwise, an acceptable not expert transfer, Dolby Digital 5.1, D.T.S. (which pays dividends in some outstanding scenes), comprehensible subtitles, the usual prerequisites are here.

The film carries a commentary with director Kong, producer Choi Kang-hyuk, and location supervisor Kim Wan-shik. The two anecdotal featurettes “1972 Vietnam” and “Special Effects” are quite self-effacing, but the key elements of principal photography and post can be found in “Mission R-Point” and “Broken Radio”, the latter an amusing overview of the Foley artist’s responsibilities at work, twinned with a glimpse of the final scene in various stages of the mix: pre-effects, pre-score, etc. The feature commentary is surprisingly candid. You suspect the director would have been satisfied if audiences responded to his film as allegory, but on the evidence here he seems content with the more literal readings that members of the crew return to him. One interesting aside early on about the lighting in a key scene gives some genuine insight into the first-time director’s working partnership with his cinematographer (a repeat of this in the Hollywood system would have been downright inexcusable and the D.P. fired). Any commentary in which the speaker drops the line “and the moths were really obnoxious,” and the director sneers at his own product placement, is sweet in my book.

This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

4 February, 2011