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 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

FILM 252: SIGNAL OF LIFE DIRECTOR MIZUTA NOBUO

252: Signal of Life

Synopsis: A biblical tidal wave strikes Tokyo. In the aftermath, Shizuma leads a rescue squad from the city Fire Department to Shimbashi Station, now an area of devastated wasteland. Shocked to learn that his younger brother Yuji and seven year-old niece are trapped underground, Shizuma mobilises a specialist rescue squad to track down their position. While Yuji brings strong leadership to the lucky survivors who collect around him, a series of aftershocks bury some of their number under the rubble, further jeopardising the rescue mission. Those left unscathed fight exhaustion to communicate an S.O.S. to their rescuers: a code 2-5-2, the signal of life.

The disaster film is familiar territory for Japanese audiences. From Shirô Moritani’s Japan Sinks (Nippon Chinbotsu, 1973) and Mt. Hakkoda (Hakkodasan, 1977) to more recent apocalyptic fare such as Shinji Higuchi’s Japan Sinks remake (Nihon Chinbotsu, 2006) and Takehisa Zeze’s Pandemic (Kansen Retto, 2009), tales of earthquakes and catastrophic tidal waves hitting Japan emphasise an unsettling reality which the Japanese deal with on a weekly basis. This the disaster movie duly relates in pointed references to the circum-Pacific belt, the most geographically active zone on the planet across which the Japanese archipelago is distributed. Low intensity earth tremors, earthquakes, volcanic activity and typhoons are so frequent on the islands that the citizenry tend to take things in their stride. In this, Japanese cinema certainly isn’t alone. A diverse range of disaster-related films are emerging across East and Southeast Asia, including Aditya Assarat’s post-tsunami drama Wonderful Town (2007, Thailand), Toranong Srichua’s 2022: Tsunami (2009, Thailand), Je-kyoon Yoon’s event movie Haeundae (2009, South Korea) and Xiaogang Feng’s Aftershock (2010, China), but as coarse (or genuinely sobering) as these films can be, not one boasts the idyllic topography of Japan, or the dazzling opulence and expansive imagination of a modernist city such as Tokyo.

Made in the period after the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake, when plans to improve the quake-proofing of residential and public buildings were still being drawn, 252: Signal of Life is something of a public relations exercise, a semi-educational but wholly impassioned melodrama conceived to spotlight the necessity of advanced rescue teams and to raise the profile of projects such as the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. Using under- and over-cranked photography, digital enhancement, full-CGI shots and a fluid simulator to render photorealistic 3D waves, the film reads, surprisingly in summary, like a catalogue of spectacular attractions: it features an enormous tidal wave that looms over Tokyo Bay and takes out both the Rainbow Bridge and the Fuji TV building, a deadly hailstorm over the Ginza Yon-chome crossing which defaces familiar landmarks the Wako and San-ai buildings, the flooding and collapse of Shimbashi subway station, a super typhoon grand enough in scale to cover the archipelago, rescue operations played out on the same grimy streets, and a multiplex-friendly eye-of-the-storm sequence that clears the winds and torrential rain long enough for panoramic views of a now waterlogged Tokyo. Nothing, however, quite survives comparison with Higuchi’s Japan Sinks or the Korean Haeundae. The main location of the film, for instance, is neither Daiba, where tantalisingly the round observation deck of the Fuji building is displaced into the Bay, nor even Shiba Park where the iconic Tokyo Tower is seen in context standing defiant against the typhoon; it is, rather, the largely subterranean Shimbashi station, a set befitting of a 12-certificate film which cannot match the open-air carnage of larger-scale big-budget productions. Like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Centre (2006, USA), 252: Signal of Life is a more intimate record of the specifics of the day. Set-pieces in and around the station create an alarming authenticity and so convey something of the nightmare endured by drowning citizens as seen from a variety of “subjective” perspectives.

Kim Sumin (Minji) and Yuji Shinohara (Hideaki Itô) brave the floods in Mizuta Nobuo’s 252: Signal of Life (2008, Japan)

The resourceful hero of this tale is Yuji Shinohara (played with token efficiency by star Hideaki Itô). Yuji is an ex-sergeant of the Tokyo Fire Department who has cooked up an existence as a bad car salesman in the hope of keeping his sympathetic wife Yumi (Sachiko Sakurai) and deaf mute daughter Shiori (Ayane Omori) safe at home. When the flood clears and the family awaken, bruised and bloodied, only Yumi has made it out unscathed, leaving both husband and daughter trapped below ground. Confined to a disused subway station where they endeavour to signal their position using the 2-5-2 rescue code, the two are painstakingly helped by a trainee med. student (Takayuki Yamada), a small-time entrepreneur and president of the lowly Hyotanyama Engineering firm (Yûichi Kimura) and the largely out of commission Korean babe Kim Sumin (model turned K-pop star Minji, whose teen-ditty plays out over the credits). Above ground, Yuji’s older brother Shizuma (Masaaki Uchino), beset by memories of a failed operation, tests the patience of his increasingly strained crew (here representing the 8th Division of the Tokyo Fire Department) by resisting more hazardous rescue attempts, while Saki Umino (the evidently popular Yu Kashii), embodying the spirit of the National Meteorological Agency, predicts the chain of events which lead inevitably to catastrophe and fathoms one last rescue plan.

It is, then, a faithful tale of human resolve—its classic patriarchal message issued in no uncertain terms. Every character is saddled with his or her own tale of personal ruin, scripted to accentuate the long curve of their rehabilitation. The water filtration device “Mr. Bubbles,” a prototype designed by the hapless president of Hyotanyama Engineering is a case in point. Here, we see the downtrodden entrepreneur (Kimura in the role of Keisuke Fujii) pinning his last hopes on the commercial prospects of (of all things) a fish-tank filter, only for its highly secretive components to be stripped by his fellow survivors and used in a lifesaving blood transfusion—the success of which rekindles, but of course, Fujii’s mojo. Indeed, the film cares so much about the interior lives of the supporting cast, and the Shinohara brothers particularly, that when the storm eventually hits we’re left in no doubt about character motives, the importance of family ties, or the cyclical course of the narrative.

The film doesn’t belong to either brother necessarily, nor to much of the support cast, but instead to little Shiori, the seven year-old tyke who clings to her safety whistle with both paws and wrinkles her nose at daddy throughout every reprieve. As such, child actress Ayane Omori (who was eight years old at the time) bears the full weight of the most demanding scenes and the effect is extraordinarily forceful. Throughout the key Shimbashi setpiece, Shiori becomes separated from her mum and braves the station collapse alone, gluing herself to a ticket barrier for protection while Mizuta’s camera goes in close to scrutinise the extent of her disorientation. Late in the picture, Shiori is involved again in a tearful requiem that ends with a miraculous shift in tenor, a volte-face which subsumes—but cannot match for sheer feeling—the dying echo of the young girl’s agonising lament. While there’s no doubt that both scenes are unnecessarily protracted they are moving, and not without some merit as testimony to the trauma inflicted on innocents in such circumstances. Given that writer Yoichi Komori was inspired by the rescue in the 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake of a two year-old boy, Yuta Minagawa (coupled with the fact that the Tokyo Fire Department’s 8th Division were singularly responsible for his rescue), it is no surprise that so many of Shiori’s scenes are either so charming or forceful.

Disc: The film itself presents well, though audio is only two-channel Dolby stereo. While the Japanese editions come with interviews, making-of featurettes and a television special, this no-frills D.V.D. released in the U.K. by anime specialist M.V.M. Entertainment comes unadorned. Given that the film was made with the assistance of both the Tokyo Fire Department (members of the 8th Division) and the Japan Meteorological Agency a few “new” bases could well have been covered here. Granted, the brace of extras accompanying its Japanese cousin appear insubstantial, but the inclusion of context setting extras for British audiences would have been welcome. Artwork does at least reflect adequately the film’s chief concern with grumpy men of conviction.

This review was originally published by New Korean Cinema.

4 January, 2011

FILM 127 HOURS DIRECTOR DANNY BOYLE

Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010)
‘Every Second Counts’

“I’m a big believer that we are all bound together,” begins Danny Boyle, his tentative response to an audience question at last night’s Q & A at the B.F.I. Southbank. “Not in a hippie way, but it’s why we live in cities, why we don’t go and live in monkish isolation, and I believe those forces … connect and protect us all.” In the humble auditorium of N.F.T.1, the reverence generally accorded to Boyle as one of the finest British filmmakers of the last quarter century held firm. His latest project, 127 Hours, reworks canyoneer Aron Ralston’s world famous story of self-rescue in the Utah desert with a spin that points up not just the director’s enthusiasm for playing with form and style, but his own personal alacrity. I’ve seen Boyle a couple of times at these events, and in each he has suited the occasion, flattening out any prudish British reserve which hangs over in his audience after a screening, and with confidence involving one and all in the general conversation. Joined by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy and producer Christian Colson, he discussed 127 Hours’ strong social and to a lesser degree political themes, his collaboration with Indian musician A. R. Rahman, and tantalisingly his belief that camera operation as a skill is more critical than lighting in the service of meaning. Typically for Boyle, whereas cinematographic lighting (akin to a symbolic act) produces one effect in the filmgoer, the camera’s function is to probe, and to question, and to respond with an actor; in fashioning a cinema that is “obsessive” and so wedded to human experience almost in terms of physical proximity he aims to capture some of the mechanisms of thought and perhaps the spontaneity of feeling.

His film, opening in Aron’s apartment but set almost exclusively thereafter in the dreaded Canyonlands National Park, begins with a slideshow of images. Marathon runners baking in the sun, a packed thousand-seater stadium, crowded escalators, and commuters filing onto already teeming subways; the film keeps at hand these and other unbearable public scenarios as references for civilisation and humanity, civilisation as a comfortably remote army of bodies, the throng which we all struggle to get out from under. Meanwhile, in a foreshadowing of what’s to come the protagonist hastily fills his water bottle at the kitchen sink while Free Blood sing “Never Hear Surf Music Again” on the soundtrack. So begins Danny Boyle’s biographical misadventure, which lays bare the extent of Aron Ralston’s five-day ordeal in the isolated Blue John canyon, starved, dehydrated, and pinned to the wall by an immovable 800lb boulder. As the weekend passes, Aron’s many escape attempts fail, he aborts one amputation, and his psychological condition worsens. Using a digital camera, he films his deterioration in a series of daily recordings which become increasingly apologetic. Heartbroken and his supplies depleted, Aron finally accepts his fate. On his fifth day, suffering from an intense fever as well as frequent prophetic hallucinations, he amputates his arm below the elbow in a surgical operation which lasts a little under an hour. Weakened from the stresses of his ordeal, he fashions a makeshift sling for his arm, crawls out of the canyon, rappels down a 60-foot wall, and hikes five miles through the desert until he's spotted. In the company of three fellow hikers he issues a personal plea for help, and is flown by helicopter to Allen Memorial Hospital.

By Boyle’s own frank admission, James Franco’s Aron is “a bit of a tosser.” He finds bliss in silence and emptiness, goes out of his way in fact to engage with it, then runs roughshod over the Canyonlands terrain by cycle and on foot, brain and heart we presume dulled to the aesthetic pleasures both of freedom and adventure; his brain is instead caught up in the sensory overload of physical adventure and (so the diegesis infers) the patterns of musical experience stirred by the pounding in his earphones. The setting is wonderful, the light above all incredible, but its enchantments, though clearly once within his comprehension, seem secondary to the pursuits that amuse/awaken him; he may well have fled the city but operates still on its highly reflexive level, organising data, scheduling his runs, substituting city noise for mp3s. The division of the screen into a split-panel frame spells out this message (after enough repetition of this technique the multi-purpose frame assumes the characteristics of a digital interface, like a screen displaying only open web browsers, each one recycling and streaming relevant information for an over-consumptive mind); but it also distorts the horizontal photographic image, it thins out the landscape, coercing our eye into tracing something that is, for a while, idiosyncratic and behavioural.

With this Boyle illuminates a point: frivolity, mischief, arrogance, self-interest are pure character. That arrogance is an American speciality particularly is a little unhelpful and old-fashioned as a viewpoint, but it is one that Boyle has certainly considered and probably welcomes in any commentary. His personal suggestion that Aron’s story is quintessentially American, and Aron the quintessential American, is on the other hand a right and an earnest point but one that’s hard to warm to. Boyle sees in Aron’s story an allegory for U.S. foreign policy, and his thesis is that the film highlights the danger of a global superpower turning its back on collaboration to enforce more fiercely a policy of bourgeois individualism/egotism. His comment at the previous evening’s Q & A that “It’s only when America embraces the whole world, when it sees outside [its own borders] that it’s a magnificent country—as it is, as it can be,” sounds like a well rehearsed line, and although the linking of his argument to the current “showdown” in the U.S. between the Republicans, backed by Tea Party drones, and the Democrats amused both the panel and audience, the point was left respectfully hanging. That the film works so well is due largely to the resourcefulness of Aron himself and an almost inscrutable performance from Franco. This is a hero (Boyle calls him a “superhero” in a nod to the press attention which Aron’s story garnered internationally) who can fashion a tourniquet from a hydration pack and rig his ropes and climbing gear to winch a boulder, but who has no idea how punishing and difficult life already is without either a support network, or (because he is lucky enough) some family, to look out for him.

As Aron, sporting the same blue cap, crimson T-shirt and silver earphones familiar from the canyoneer’s own photographs, James Franco gives a real sense of how this man’s independence and confidence in himself is suddenly shot by the embarrassment of his mistake, the look of stranded relief in his eyes rarely betraying full despair in his most intimate scenes—only loss, of pride and of self-image. This is an excellent performance. Whenever scenes call for a personal address to camera (and there are many) the DeNiro-esque veneer (present in that supercilious stare) slips away, and a real sense of shared amusement with his (imagined) audience shines through. It just seems a pity Boyle’s film can’t adopt a more conciliatory, and hence settled, tone. Accepting that audience empathy with Aron’s predicament is very much a given from the outset, Beaufoy’s script (co-written with the director) leads to an appreciation of a banal “epiphany,” which authorises the self-amputation, via a collection of memory fragments: sentimental (and I felt unnecessary) distractions which overcompensate for the fixed setting and the story’s swing towards existentialism.

Thus, the film becomes a skein of phantasms and illusions, memories and visions, a cat’s cradle almost for the seemingly endless games played on common reality by hallucination as Aron’s health deteriorates further. This descent into fantasy, illusion and delusion seems entirely consistent with the Boyle oeuvre; the real-time horror of Aron’s flash-flood fantasy, for instance, a pivotal sequence conjuring memories of an ex lover brought on by his sheer thirst for water, recalls the agony of Renton’s detoxification scene in Trainspotting (1996, UK), the tracing of Rana’s fingers over Aron’s skin as they lay in bed together just as powerful as the encroaching baby that looms over Renton’s deathbed. But whereas that film’s fantasy sequences take us to the savage depths of Renton’s subconscious, as do Richard’s hyperactive videogame hallucinations in The Beach (2000, USA/UK), in this Aron’s flights of fancy are allied to the things he envisages in a state of calm, reflection, detachment, etc.; they are closer in style and tone therefore to the closing dazzling moments of Sunshine (2007, UK/USA)—the single moment in fact prior to the unimaginable solar event, which that film selects (to quote Lessing in his Laocoön: an Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) for “immutable permanence from art.” For a long time I held in my memory a lasting image of this sequence which was unlike anything I’ve seen since on repeat viewings of the film; unrealised onscreen, but acted on, extended, and completed in memory, it resembled the fleeting moment as described by Lessing. Like many works of contemporary Hollywood which offer a glimpse of what it must be like to move, at least photographically, closer towards the mind (and hence to our acts of memory), the visions and “episodes”-cum-epiphanies of 127 Hours are strictly formal by comparison, comprising that is of slightly obvious common experiences (remembering a past event) shared via the traditional language of cinema. Though well observed and offering I imagine for some powerful emotional identification with Aron at his (spiritually) strongest point, the film’s recourse to warm, fluffy images offers disappointingly little support for Boyle’s stated aim which is to unlearn the laws and ideas associated with classical cinema by frequently testing genre models. He captures I think the timelessness of memory well, the abrupt and transient appearance of visions equally so—but in truth these comments and others like it are pleasantries which help us to move beyond or simply overlook the political challenge which Boyle has set himself. So I’m reminded of a passage from The Alchemy of the Eye, quoting Gilbert-Lecomte: “the Himalayas can appear in the stone of a ring, a train can turn around a man’s head, a posse in the Far West and the swell of the sea occur on a sleeper’s pillow … a drama is played out on a blackened fingernail.”

7 January, 2011

FILM I SAW THE DEVIL DIRECTOR KIM JEE WOON

Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (2010)
‘Battle not with monsters’

Noteworthy for being the first feature in which South Korean director Kim Jee-woon has no formal writing credit (and less so for the number of cuts — seven — which were made to appease the Korea Media Rating Board, a sensationalist story which is publicised anywhere the film plays internationally), I Saw the Devil is an undeniably engaging thriller, thanks in no small part to the slapstick mannerisms of lead actor Choi Min-sik and the streetwise populism of megastar Lee Byeong-heon. The film’s formidable pairing of internationally renowned stars, its relatively high profile crew including Lee Mo-gae (who also shot this year’s Secret Reunion, in addition to Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters and The Good The Bad and The Weird) and Nam Na-young (who has edited mainstream works like Castaway on the Moon, Insadong Scandal, and The Doll Master), its spotless production values and big budget (the reported $6 million is extraordinary for a horror thriller) immediately suggest a multi-purpose event movie, a highly marketable package which its makers hope will capitalise on international territories and help rekindle industry fortunes in light of a poor 2009.

But if I Saw the Devil is indeed intended as a blockbuster then it’s a curious one with a far from expansive audience. The casting of Lee in the lead role of Kim Soo-hyeon is the only concession to a female demographic, while the presence of content that showcases violence, nudity, bloody gore, cannibalism and dismemberment is likely to appeal to a predominantly male adult audience (the film’s 18+ rating, which prohibits teenagers, severely limits its prospects at the box-office). Even in Korea, where it was distributed by Showbox, the marketing aestheticised the bloody conflict between the two stars, pairing them off in tight smoky close-ups, and barely noting the presence of other cast members. Crucially, I Saw the Devil premiered this August in Korea one week after its biggest rival, Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man From Nowhere, and it has not measured at all well since in aesthetic, critical or financial terms — this despite the reappearance of its major star (Choi Min-sik) after a five year screen absence.

Motivated by a need to punish the man who murdered his fiancée and then desecrated her body,
Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee Byeong-heon) embarks on a ruthless campaign of vigilantism which transforms him ultimately into the object of his own obsessive rage

I Saw the Devil opens with the discovery by the roadside of a stranded car and a vicious assault on its sole occupant, Joo-yeon (Oh San-ha). Her assailant, Kyeong-cheol (Choi), snatches her body from the scene and returns her to his lair where she is summarily executed, dismembered and the body parts deposited by a culvert shortly thereafter. However, it turns out that Joo-yeon’s fiancé Kim Soo-hyeon (Lee) is a highly skilled and well-regarded federal agent; with the Chief’s unspoken blessing, Soo-hyeon vows to hunt down the culprit and seek violent revenge against him. Thus his reason for tracking Kyeong-cheol is already a spurious one: convinced that Joo-yeon’s execution was itself a meaningless and predatory act, he requires neither an explanation nor necessarily a confession from the man responsible; he instead administers his own punishment, matching brute force with brute force. When Soo-hyeon finally overcomes his prey in the film’s key setpiece (a much publicised night sequence shot in a series of greenhouses), he tags Kyeong-cheol with a sensor, breaks one of his hands, and then leaves him in his own burial plot, ostensibly to die but in truth to recover. It is only after he has fully regained his composure and been tempted to assault another that Soo-hyeon next intervenes, a decision, partly judicious, which endows his vengeance-driven acts of violence with a peculiar moral quality.

On this very theme, Park Hoon-jung’s script plays fast and loose with an assortment of morally superior and inferior characters. On the one hand are those innocents who are overpowered by unimaginable evil, like Soo-hyeon and Joo-yeon, who are in many ways the contented couple happy with their lot before Kyeong-cheol tears them apart; in addition, there are Soo-hyeon’s father-in-law, ex-Squad Chief Jang (Jeon Gook-hwan), and his sister-in-law Se-yeon (Kim Yoon-seo), both virtuous people who implore him not to take revenge and risk throwing the family further into turmoil; and Han Song-I (Yoon Chae-yeong), a nurse working in the practice of the old doctor (Kim Jae-geon) who treats Kyeong-cheol after his first showdown with Soo-yeon. Fleshing out the pathological element of the film are the first two suspects on Soo hyeon’s hit list, Jjang-goo (Yoon Byeong-hee) and the unnamed cyclist (Kil Geum-seong); two taxi burglars (Lee Seol-goo and Jeong Mi-nam) who opportunistically prey on hitchhikers in the night; Kyeong-cheol’s old buddy Tae-joo (Choi Moo-seong), a cannibal whose pathology is never really explained (though he fits the cinematic tradition of the now obsolete slaughterhouse worker); and Tae-joo’s insane accomplice Se-jeong (Kim In-seo). As this short list demonstrates, I Saw the Devil is acute in presenting a range of virtues and vices for a distinct range of character types, not individuals. This places added pressure on actor Lee Byeong-heon who must work doubly hard to convey his character’s transformation from devastated victim to haunted perpetrator through several key exchanges with his animalistic adversary. For his part, Choi seems to be in his element (though no way near his best), trumping Robert De Niro’s sweaty Max Cady from Cape Fear (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1991) with a technically brilliant performance which sees him meting out remorseless forms of punishment in one scene and in the next tumbling from his car like a startled Foghorn Leghorn.

Since Choi’s Kyeong-cheol is classified as irredeemably psychotic from the outset, tension in the picture can only and does ultimately stem from those vengeful cinematic moments which appear to codify Soo-hyeon, the “good” man in this equation, as psychotic — at least in the tradition of these typically “Korean” / Shakespearean serial-killer films. It therefore follows a line of thrillers, procedurals and horrors — Nowhere to Hide (dir. Lee Myung-se, 1999), Park’s Vengeance trilogy (2002/2003/ 2005), A Bittersweet Life (dir. Kim Jee-woon, 2005), A Bloody Aria (dir. Won Shin-yeon, 2006), Beautiful Sunday (dir. Jin Kwang-gyo, 2007), The Chaser (dir. Na Hong-jin, 2008), The Man From Nowhere, even an icy drama like Yang Ik-joon’s sterling Breathless (2009) — which both renounce traditional distinctions of good and evil, and debunk the myth that violence can be in any way constructive or personally rewarding. As portrayed in this movie, vengeance distorts and disorients the hero ethically; I suspect it is not necessarily the monster that Soo-hyeon fears becoming, but that other state of being: isolated and widowed; heart-broken and alone. Soo-hyeon will fully crave the attention again of his soul-mate long after the credits have rolled and Kyeong-cheol’s body found, but Joo-yeon will never answer him, his faith in prayer will diminish year upon year, and so too his sense of purpose. What interests me about this film, then, is that the desire which drives Soo-hyeon to sadism and brutality does not destroy him — this experience, this course of action, while indescribably harrowing, lacking any semblance of a cathartic resolution, and almost certainly tarnishing the man forever, is in some way necessary.

It therefore detracts from the well-acknowledged pattern of the films noted above by shifting the emphasis away from salvation, and in a sense vengeance itself as an abstract concept, onto two core ideas instead: mechanical ritual, and mutual identification. In order for Soo-hyeon to truly experience and release grief he must revert to a truer nature. The film, therefore, taps into the mechanical act of the ritual itself to make its point: vengeance, in this context, can serve a purpose; rather than free Soo-hyeon from grief, it frees him to grieve. The memorable climactic shot in which Lee’s Soo-hyeon is seen wandering aimlessly in Kyeong-cheol’s neighbourhood utterly consumed by unbearable sorrow is an interesting one. Has the terrible nature of his obsession at last hit home? Or does he despair for his own salvation? I trust that neither concern matters to him; he grieves for Joo-yeon. The only other vengeance film to touch on a similar theme is the truly harrowing masterpiece, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a film which ultimately has more to say on the reality and pain of grief than anything on offer here.

14 November, 2010

FILM THE SOCIAL NETWORK DIRECTOR DAVID FINCHER

‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making
a few enemies’: The Social Network (2010)

The Social Network follows two politically irrelevant but interesting civil lawsuits: in the first, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Chief Executive, defends an ownership dispute filed on behalf of the Winklevoss twins (Tyler and Cameron) and Divya Narendra; in the second, breach of contract, partnership and fiduciary duty claims are brought against Zuckerberg by Eduardo Saverin: best friend, company co-founder and principal investor. The film turns to both early on, after a gripping introductory segment that encompasses Zuckerberg’s dorm, Kirkland House, the Phoenix Club and the entire nine House system of Harvard College. In this sequence Zuckerberg, dejected because his girlfriend unceremoniously dumped him at a Boston bar in the Fall of 2003, attempts to validate his existence by taking revenge: first by venting his anger explicitly at Erica online, then by inventing a viral website that ruthlessly objectifies Harvard’s women and becomes an instant hit with Harvard’s men.

Zuckerberg is reprimanded by the Ad Board but earns the respect of three Harvard students (the Harvard Connection team of Narendra and the Winklevosses) who are in the market for either a prodigy, or a programmer, or both. Accepting their pitch for an online community site, Zuckerberg agrees to help (which may or may not entail creating their code), ditches that idea, rents a server, expands the original programming and algorithms which he devised to run his Facemash viral, ditches the Harvard Connection, single-handedly codes a centralised community site for Harvarders, registers the name with his web provider, and launches the site in its original incarnation as TheFacebook.com in the first week of February 2004 — his investor Eduardo in tow. The arrival further down the line of Sean Parker, the here thoroughly carnivorous co-founder of Napster to whom the film eventually gravitates in the cheery milieu of Palo Alto, gives Zuckerberg a taste of what it is that he should aim for — the chance to build in the Valley a company with the power to enhance connectivity and revolutionise the popularity of the internet on a global scale.

Piranha Club: Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg)
in David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010)

In Zodiac, director David Fincher’s enthusiasm for illuminating the historical record with a Pakulaian eye was compelling: his interest seemed to be primarily in the collation and synopsising of materials/people/testimony/imagery/theory, and in the clashing of historical methodologies. The Director’s Cut DVD edition, now a favorite in my household, established an authorial directness and stylistic tone that is very familiar in The Social Network . . . but this latest film is less enjoyable than Zodiac. As the subject of Jesse Eisenberg’s astonishing portraiture, Zuckerberg emerges here in ghastly shape: he is at once a brilliant ambition, a marvel at computer-science with an astonishing directness and clarity in his thinking, but at the same time an impressionable blackguard, vindictive, sociopathic and fiercely opportunistic. The introductory scene with Zuckerberg’s then current girlfriend, the fictional Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), is perfection. Sorkin’s dialogue — thoroughly self-indulgent and at times magnificent — presumes a character that is inexperienced with women and very obviously conflicted about one woman; he swoops and dives to unpick Erica’s sentences, bitterly trying to determine their meaning, but he is clearly lost in a distorted world of his own. The crisis of confidence that Eisenberg projects at the end of the scene hints at the character’s self-loathing, but it also sets in motion the Facemash viral episode, a savage Revenge of the Nerds sequence which makes for very uncomfortable viewing. On the other side of the casting spectrum, Justin Timberlake seems to thrive as the playboy with a certain vulnerability, and Andrew Garfield makes a likeable though helpless Eduardo, the obvious objection being that the latter doesn’t quite pull off the budding businessman hell-bent on putting his specialist knowledge (hence, the meteorology/oil distribution thing) and acumen to use, although his charm, resolve and eventual disquiet all feel precisely on-point. Mara, as already noted, is tip-top, likewise Armie Hammer, whose marvellous interplay with his imaginary self and body-double (Josh Pence) provide the Winklevosses with a memorable Addams Family flair. The film’s other women — Brenda Song as the group’s trophy plaything and Rashida Jones’ junior lawyer Marylin Delpy — are less well portrayed, their wild and cyclical (respectively) trajectories magnified in this particular edit.

The film is enriched by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ synthetic score, but more than this the inclusion over the final credits of The Beatles’ original Baby You’re a Rich Man, which suspended the film on a floating high in my memory as I dashed off abruptly to catch the L.F.F. screening of Miike Takashi’s 13 Assassins (2010), inspired further for me a sense of kinship with the director or with the writer or whosoever shortlisted this, one of the band’s most enjoyable in my opinion, for approval.

Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) in the film’s showcase opening scene

Sorkin’s characters (the hateful neurotic and innocent charmer, the opportunistic girlfriend and humiliated ex-girlfriend, the vainglorious entrepreneur) seem altogether less aggressive and excitable than when they appeared in previous incarnations (A Few Good Men, Malice, The American President and Charlie Wilson’s War, visceral works looking for visceral responses in their audience), yet the archetypal character trajectories weaken the overall accomplishment. Could Sorkin find no way in which to foster a more critical examination of the company’s progress? The traditional argument is that general audiences neither desire nor expect to see a film with a high (near-documentary) level of factual accuracy or character complexity. My argument is familiar but sincere: we still have the eye and the heart for mainstream works that overcome cinematic and story rhetoric, for works that do so in favour of less traditional representational forms. That Sorkin’s tale, Fincher’s film, is ultimately a conventional drama with stereotypical ciphers bugs me. On occasion I fell to wondering, as clearly as Lawrence Lessig evidently, if Aaron Sorkin knows how to write about the internet, or the route Facebook took to an equitable future. Is he himself fully integrated into a broadband online environment? The film pays no more attention to Facebook usage than it does to preparing audiences for the sudden manic turn of Brenda Song’s Christy Lee (and seriously: where the heck did that character switch come from??). Given the calibre of interview Sorkin has been providing on the publicity circuit — for the internet he shows not the slightest respect — it seems he does not care. The suggestion that the inventor of a social networking site with 500 million users plus is the loneliest soul on earth fulfils a screenwriter’s need for a sort of classical symmetry in narrative.

Brenda Song as Christy Lee

So there is something of an artistic mismatch, which saddens me as I value highly Fincher’s approach to filmmaking. The dominant register is Fincher’s own, his table-level eye documenting things coolly and without surreal invention, but the film’s story, arcs, and meaning are vintage Sorkin: gratuitous and sleazy, like artefacts on Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull.

Yet I like it, and I’m encouraged that I want to and will see it again shortly. What Sorkin’s Zuckerberg makes of Facebook in the final outcome is most clear in the film’s grim parting image. In the scene that frames it, Zuckerberg cuts a solitary figure, the key accidental billionaire of Ben Mezrich’s title left to tend to his affairs alone in a high-ceilinged, low lit and virtually soundless office space. There, he intermittently taps refresh on his laptop having sent a friend request out into the ether. It lasts only a minute (give or take), but it is like experiencing, again, perfection. In all this, there is the sense that he has found a way of communicating without harming those around him — the internet has given a home to Mark Zuckerberg.

24 October, 2010