Korean cinema diary: Rough Cut, For Enternal Hearts, Barking Dogs Never Bite

Hun Jang’s Rough Cut (영화는 영화다) exemplifies what I’ve come to think of as a specifically Korean subgenre: the gangster movie about a gangster movie. Gangsterism must have become an astonishingly common film subject over there — and, if my small sample tells me anything, it has — to spin off so meta and yet so viable a species. This one doesn’t quite rise to the level of Ha Yu’s A Dirty Carnival, the last Korean gangster movie about a gangster movie that I watched; it plays more in league with Dong-hun Choi’s straighter-up The Big Swindle.

A troubled gangster-movie star keeps accidentally beating up his co-stars, which forces him to recruit an actual gangster to play opposite him. This opens up three different layers of reality: the film, the film within the film, and the “real life” making of the film. I had high hopes for these maneuvers, but they stop short of the cleverness I expected. Wikipedia helpfully catalogs them: “Choreographed fights become ‘real’ and a ‘real’ fight turns out to be planned but is however ‘real’,” “the actual movie script for Rough Cut is shown being read and held several times by rehearsing characters and crew within the film,” etc. Positively Godardian! Yet Rough Cut burns a bit too much of its energy on slickness to really embody that spirit. True, its $1.5 million budget amounts to little more than bigtime studios spend on canapés, but this material needs a $15,000 movie — er, a 16.2 million won movie — shot on the streets. That, or it needs a deep revision that makes it into a more savage satire of the Korean Hollywood’s bankably glossy gangsterism — but then it would have to compete with A Dirty Carnival.


Qu-duk Hwang’s For Eternal Hearts (별빛 속으로) comes as a member of another specifically Korean subgenre, one I have an entirely tougher time pinning down, though I can tell you that they contain a lot of ghosts without quite turning into horror shows and flashbacks to important historical periods without quite turning into historical dramas. And you know what this particular example reminded me of? A Haruki Murakami novel. Specifically, it reminded me of Norwegian Wood, in that both that book's protagonist and this film’s protagonist flash back to their collegiate years in an era of student protest. Yet both protagonists have infinitely less interest in revolt than they do in the alienated, impulsive, and/or dead girls who repeatedly cross their paths. Murakami’s Toru Watanabe majors in drama, but the lead dude here studies German literature — and actually studies — so you get to hear a lot of Koreans speaking German. I don’t know about you, but my life doesn’t offer that every day.

One major difference between For Eternal Hearts and Norwegian Wood: whereas Japan’s student protests, like those in Europe and the States, went down in the late sixties, Korea had theirs in the late seventies and eighties. Meaning that Korea’s “Baby Boomer” generation, with all the attendant cultural force, now enjoys the same fortysomething prime ours did a quarter-century ago. Hence all the references to main characters’ relatively recent street fighting years even in pictures as blockbusting as Joon-ho Bong’s The Host. Too young to tire of American Boomers when they really dominated things, I look forward to tiring of Korean Boomers any year now. I await even more eagerly a rough-and-ready, pre-disillusioned Korean Generation X and the Slacker-y, Clerks-y films they must surely produce.


Speaking of Joon-ho Bong, you know what I appreciate that he violates? The cinematic sacrosanctity of dogs. A rarely spoken law seems to dictate that, in most countries, to allow any dog to come to lasting harm will, at a stroke, alienate your entire audience. In Barking Dogs Never Bite (플란다스의 개), Bong has a lonely security guard who habitually kidnaps dogs and turns them into stew in his improvised kitchen, a shambling homeless wanderer who would do the same if he had the means, and a junior academic who dispatches a couple of pups — pitching one straight off a roof — out of sheer frustration at his inability to land tenure without bribery. He also throws in the would-be professor’s wife, who for a while comes off as a total man-eating drone (and who, in seemingly the ultimate act of betrayal, buys one of those fragile-looking accessory dogs), and a small-time vigilante who goes into action mode by cinching tight her bright yellow hoodie.

When I watch an established filmmaker’s early movies and enjoy them, I usually enjoy them for, as I tend to put it, how much “cool stuff” they contain. For whatever reason, the most interestingly ambitious directors tend to break out of the gate with projects build out of a variety of disparate, separately amusing and/or impressive components. Bong gets bits of ridiculousness from all over the apartment complex around which the film revolves: the staff’s lore of “Boiler Kim” who haunts the basement; the stern but powerless matron who obsesses over her endlessly barking pet; the nearby gift shop, depressingly packed with chintz. He loads this stuff into a blandly realistic urban setting but occasionally uses it for brief flights into preposterous subjectivity, as when Ms. Yellow Hoodie makes a mad dash to save another endangered little dog, she sees on the rooftops around her crowd after crowd of cheerer-on-ers all clad in, yes, yellow hoodies.

But no, I don’t wish dogs ill. Sacrosanctity, on the other hand...

Comments

[Madelaine]

"Barking Dogs Never Bite" is funny because it balances absurdist humor (the cheering crowd in yellow hoodies) with banal reality (the girl's one moment of triumph is edited out of the evening news). There's also an emotional core that makes you wince every time a dog is harmed even though this happens a lot through the course of the movie. There's a sort of delicate touch that a lot of auteur directors are missing in their early films; all of the characters are sympathetic rather than mere satirized types - although he gets some mileage out of this too.

[Wilmayxi042]

I like the movie a lot, started watching it despite its no ENG sub. Wish I could understand korean. Thanks for the upload anyway, a great movie.