Korean cinema diary: Dream, Epitaph, A Dirty Carnival

Dream is the latest film by Ki-duk Kim, one of the very few Korean filmmakers with a high international profile. I think of him as one of those foreign directors who gains an “art house” (lord, how I loathe that term) reputation without being terribly innovative. (You know, that might even be the pre-requisite for such a reputation.) That’s not to say his movies are bland; I actually quite admire the ones I’ve seen. Even though Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is one the Korean films with which non-Korean-cinephiles are most familiar — the others being Chan-wook Park’s Oldboy and Joon-ho Bong’s The Host — it’s got an impeccable aesthetic sense. The same thing almost goes for 3-Iron, though it’s not as well-known.

I could say the guy’s about look and feel, not form; I have yet to see a particularly interesting structure from him. Dream doesn’t break the pattern. It’s as if A Nightmare on Elm Street met the old body-switch movies of that era met an especially bleak Hanks-Ryan rom-com. When Jin, the male lead, falls asleep, Ran, the female lead involuntarily acts out his dreams. (One semi-fascinating point about these two is that Ran speaks only Korean and Jin speaks only Japanese, which are definitely not mutually intelligible languages, yet they communicate with seeming fluency to one another.) The first time this happens, Jin dreams about crashing a car. Soon, the cops are knocking on Ran’s door, and she sleepily protests that of course she wasn’t just driving around — while her wrecked car sits parked right below.

Jin and Ran figure they can sleep in shifts, but for some reason this doesn’t work out. There are a few truly ugly sequences when Jin desperately resorts to just keeping himself awake by any means necessarily: taping his eyelids open, slashing himself with a razor blade, etc. Here is a situation that cannot end well. Kim does execute it reasonably well, but ultimately I call it a minor entry in his body of 15 (!) films. It’s pretty much all about the aesthetics this time around, and while some of the choices there work — I liked the dissonant Takemitsu-style score — most feel strangely restrained.


Sik and Beom-sik Jung’s Epitaph is further proof that genre stuff is only engaging when it comes from another culture. I guess you might call it, what, a historical horror movie? It’s mostly set in the Japan-occupied Korea of 1942, and even that’s one big flashback from framing scenes set in 1979. That might be why, despite running under 100 minutes, it feels sprawling. It also seems to implement most of the horror devices ever invented: ghosts, serial killing, freaky kids, chattering zombies, possession, identity swapping, body gruesomeness, medical gruesomeness, mechanical gruesomeness. My personal favorite is the apparition, in silhouette, of a hunchbacked old woman carrying a baby. When the baby turns its head, you can tell it doesn’t have a face.

But it’s a big jumble of individually effective horrific moments. Don’t even bother getting the throughline straight; even if it does untangle, that isn’t the point. This, I’ll declare from my limited research, is the “K-horror” modus operandi. It’s still far, far superior to what even the finest scary movies North America are doing right now, which seems to have devolved into a game of budget torture one-upsmanship. I’d sooner sit through even the dopiest, messiest, most melodramatic Korean shriekfest (which Epitaph really isn’t) than any one of the Saw sequels.


If the K-gangster film hasn’t matched the K-horror film’s popularity, it’s not for lack of quality. It might be because foreign audiences aren’t as familiar with the Korean mob scene as they are with, say, the Japanese Yakuza. (To the extent that they’re familiar with the Yakuza, which isn’t much of an extent at all. Sydney Pollack’s movie was pretty cool, though.) It’s a little slick for my tastes, but Ha Yu’s A Dirty Carnival would make a respectable ambassador for the genre.

As in Dong-hun Choi’s The Big Swindle, the outlaw characters’ best laid plans are complicated and ultimately ruined by the outlaw’s inherent untrustworthiness. A well-dressed but impoverished 29-year-old thug named Byung-du is at the center of this, trying to climb the greasy pole steadily enough to support his kid sister and sick mom. This involves killing a troublesome accountant, participating in truly epic street battles, acting as a gangsterism consultant on an elementary school buddy’s Tarantinoesque movie project, spilling a few too many beans to said buddy, becoming a target of one’s own brethren, having to decide whether to slay friends or “family” just to stay alive himself, etc.

I’ve read that Yu began his career as a poet, only later turning to film. This strikes me as unusual enough that I’m now thinking back and trying to identify the possibly “poetic” qualities of A Dirty Carnival. This is a doomed exercise, but I do think you find most of the picture’s value where it deviates from the norms of gangster filmmaking. It strikes a surprisingly adept balance between the glorification of gangsters and the self-conscious, excessive de-glorification of same. Byung-du tries his best to be slick and noble, but his awkward edges remain on display. He’s got a few decidedly ass-kicking moves, but the fights he gets involved in are filthy, chaotic scrums. This gets more impressive the more you think about how many movies get it (at the very least) not quite right.

As in almost every Korean film I’ve seen, there’s humor alongside the heightened drama. It ends with perhaps the finest single example of simultaneous sadness, optimism, nihilism, and laugh-out-loud ridiculousness I’ve seen, with the boss at the top of the gang’s org chart singing the Alan Parsons Project’s “Old and Wise” at the karaoke bar.

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