Colin Marshall

Korean cinema diary: Milky Way Liberation Front, The Show Must Go On, I Saw the Devil

I look back and find Seong-ho Yoon’s Milky Way Liberation Front (은하해방전선) far too goofy to have stuck in my brain except in individually hilarious fragments. Don’t take that as a disrecommendation. It has a story “about” a young filmmaker enduring script problems, lady problems, and, ultimately, speech problems — something thrusts total aphasia on him, so he has to have friend act as his ventriloquist — but don’t worry about it. I remember the experience as an explosion of colors, languages (at least Korean and Japanese, which, studying both, I found helpful), on-screen text of various sorts, movies and television shows within the film, and countless moments of teenage awkwardness. Despite my often saying that the second time you watch a movie is really the first time (since you don’t get distracted by following the plot) I imagine my second time watching this will feel like the actual first time.

Jae-rim Han’s The Show Must Go On (우아한 세계) stars Kang-ho Song, known for playing chunky dudes who usually don’t know what they’re doing but, in the heat of the moment, summon their own kind of competence. Think of the bumbling dad in The Host, the freewheeling detective in Memories of Murder, or the boisterous North Korean sergeant in Joint Security Area. The man’s also worked for Chan-wook Park, Sangsoo Hong, and Chang-dong Lee, making him one of Korea’s biggest actors. Here, he takes on the role of one of those Korean gangsters who juggles his problems at “work” with trouble at home, much like the lead of A Dirty Carnival. His son’s off studying in Canada, his daughter wishes he’d die, and his wife keeps an ever-more-worrying tally of his various injuries. He longs only to buy a “Western-style” McMansion and move his family in, but elaborate internecine plots to kill him complicate his dream’s realization. The picture gets mileage out of the contrast between his domestic struggles and the expensive-looking knife fights and car chases that separate them, if perhaps a little too much.

Setting a revenge-minded secret agent off after the serial killer who dismembered his wife, Ji-woon Kim’s I Saw the Devil (악마를 보았다) at first seems to go in the direction of one of those “avenger turns worse than the killer” movies, and maybe it actually does, but it feels a cut above that. The whole “Korea, land of EXTREME ASIAN MOVIES” comes, I would assume, from the popularity of movies like this and Oldboy and such. Most of the material wouldn’t seem out of place in a standard Western slasher piece: the serial killer goes around smashing women he spots at bus stops and whatnot, then sawing them apart back at his lair for his cannibal friend; the secret agent follows the killer around, repeatedly maiming him, letting doctors patch him up, and then maiming him again. But Kim goes into a great deal more visual detail than the Saws of the world, which still tend to work with implication, would lead you to expect. What weakness the film suffers from, it shares to varying degrees with much else in Korean cinema: despite approaching ideas worth going deep into — the killer’s supposed unscareability and convictions about everyone’s craziness but his, the secret agent’s slow crumble in the face of his own monstrosity — it stops just short, preferring to deal in expensive-looking camera moves instead.

Korean cinema diary: The Unforgiven, Poetry, Welcome to Dongmakgol

Korean men have to put in two years in the military by law, so I usually ask the ones I meet if they’ve done theirs yet. Since they’re usually in the States on a university deferment, most of them haven’t, and none of them seem to look forward to it. When I ask if everybody hates it, they usually shrug and ask something along the lines of, “Who could ever like it?” Jong-bin Yun’s The Unforgiven (용서받지 못한 자) expresses more or less the same sentiment. With maximum endurance, the film seems to say, you can hope for little more out of your stint in the Korean military than not having to shine too many of your commanding officer’s boots, not getting beaten up by him too harshly, and not having him grab your wang too often. It follows one young fellow, just enlisted, who finds himself answering to two slightly higher-ranking guys: a friendly old school buddy and a fat, pointlessly demanding thug. This bodes ill for his already unstable psyche.

Yoon shot the movie, his student thesis, with admirable daring. I’ve heard he banged together a screenplay about “military friendship” or somesuch claptrap and presented it to the powers that be, who then granted him permission to shoot in actual barracks. Then he just shot the spectacle of grimness he’d meant to all along. The whole film has this spirit of roughness, which I’d actually like more of in Korean cinema, many of whose most aesthetically impressive pieces still have a misplaced desire for slickness, a desire to “look like a movie.” The Unforgiven looks like only itself — and, for that matter, feels like itself. I’ve seen a bunch of Korean movies that approach the edges of questions about how much you have to deny to fall in line with society, but this one stares straight at them. I’ve undoubtedly missed about a thousand nuances of this by not having grown up in Korea, but hey.

Chang-dong Lee, who directed Secret Sunshine, has a new picture out. I’d resigned myself to having to make an L.A. trip to see it, but — shockingly — it’s playing in Santa Barbara! Just like Secret Sunshine, Poetry (시) builds, out of some of the most melodramatic elements imaginable, something far too clearheaded to call melodrama. Lee’s last last project featured a widow who moves to a small town only to have her son get kidnapped, and this one features Mi-ja, a 66-year-old grandmother struggling to learn poetry while beset with (a) the Viagra-driven advances of the stroke victim for whom she works as a caretaker, (b) a sullen grandson — the son of her absent daughter — accused of membership in the local rape gang, and (c) Alzheimer’s disease.

I don’t know if you’d quite call this “stunt casting,” but Lee wrote the role of Mi-ja for Jeong-hee Yoon, an actress with a ludicrously large filmography between the years 1967 and 1994, somehow managing to draw her out of a 16-year self-imposed exile from acting in Paris. I always like to see an artist make a bold comeback, even when I’m totally unfamiliar with the career to which the artist has ostensibly returned. But wait, there’s more: in the role of Mi-ja’s poetry teacher, Lee cast the real-life famed poet Yong-taek Kim, and in the role of Mi-ja’s employer, Lee cast Hee-ra Kim, another former young idol and an actual stroke survivor to boot, albeit a less damaged one than his character. The movie’s interaction with reality through the lives of its players and its setting deep in the grime-and-tchotchke-class made me appreciate its less realistic — or at least less straightforward — moments, like the final minutes’ simultaneous reveal of Mi-ja’s poem and the girl her grandson and his coterie evidently drove to suicide.

If you’ve ever wanted to watch a live-action Hayao Miyazaki movie, Kwang-hyun Pak’s Welcome to Dongmakgol (웰컴투 동막골) comes as close as anything. I didn’t make this connection from frame one, but add its thematic clash between technology (specifically, iconic midcentury military technology) and the “natural” world to its layers of subtly physics-flouting effects to its Joe Hisaishi score that at first sounds too constant and on-the-nose in a John Williams-y way to be a Joe Hisaishi score to Pak’s identification of Miyazaki as his “number one inspiration,” and you can’t avoid certain conclusions. For me, the real Miyazaki moment came when a group of characters have an extended fight an implacable boar — an abstract ripple of fur, almost — in slow motion.

This happens in 1950, during the Korean War. Three soldiers from the South stumble into the hidden, idyllic village of Dongmakgol just as three soldiers from the North stumble into it from the other side. The six proceed to give each other the stink eye, ready to kill at the first false move, while the villagers wonder what their guns do and whether their grenades are potatoes. The ice between the military men starts to break, Joint Security Area-style, when a stray grenade blows up a hut full of corn, providing the film’s first of several surreal passages when a hail of popcorn falls after the explosion. An American airman complicates things by crash-landing near Dongmakgol, bringing the U.S. military’s wrath of god down on the area in a somewhat implausibly high-impact search of him. For all the deliberate weirdness Pak puts in — and I like those choices more the more I think about them — the film feels most askew when the Americans show up. The western actors’ accents sound fine — a lot of Asian films just throw European randoms onscreen and call it good — but couldn’t they have at least suggested revisions to lines like “You’re driving my patience thin!” or, before launching a group of paratroopers, “May the lord be with you”?

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...

Korean cinema diary: My Dear Enemy, My Friend and His Wife, Secret Sunshine

If you’re curious about what a Korean Woody Allen film would be like, Yoon-ki Lee’s My Dear Enemy makes a fine case study. I say this because it’s a human-scale comedy of relationships that’s nevertheless curiously expensive-looking. It also has a jazz score — more of a jazz score than I’ve ever heard in an East Asian movie, anyway — composed by a Korean, but recorded by American players in Massachusetts. These may sound like the ingredients of one big mismatch, and maybe they are, but at least the feel is distinctive.

The jauntily shifty Byung-woon, a hoodie-and-sportcoat-clad layabout who’s also quite hardworking in his layabout’s way, gets an unwelcome visit from Hee-soo, his frowning ex-girlfriend. She’s come to collect an outstanding loan of 3.5 million won — only like $3000, but still — and, by some miracle of intuition, knows she’ll find her debtor at the racetrack. In the morning. Byung-woon assures her he can rustle up the money if, though not in so many words, she just drives him around all day while he hits up a series of random acquaintances and other old girlfriends for a few thousand won here, a few thousand won there.

This is all the plot the movie offers, and almost more than it needs. It’s one of the more effectively minimalist stories I’ve seen in recent cinema, revealing apparent volumes about its co-protagonists while we watch what is ostensibly little more than Byong-woon performing dozens of small variations on his carefree, ingratiating persona. Meanwhile, Hee-soo performs dozens of small variations on her furrowed brow as she meets countless hitherto unknown players in her former lover’s life. Better than the revelations themselves is the fact that they really aren’t revelations; each fact that surfaces floats on a raft of new questions. We never find out exactly what went sour between Byung-woon and Hee-soo, other than the money thing, and the specifics of the latter’s relationships with all his microlenders remain intriguingly occluded. As they should.

I instinctively want to see a tale like thus told on the cheap, maybe with stolen 16mm footage on unsuspecting public streets or in one long take on standard-definition video. Alas, Lee went with what I would consider a high gloss, peppering the film with bothersomely expensive-looking shots. This isn’t much of a complaint in the scheme of things, but a form-substance mismatch is a form-substance mismatch, however slight.


I recently asked a Korean film critic what I consider the prime question of that nation’s cinema: how on Earth do Korean filmmakers pull off so much melodrama so unobjectionably? Answers have always varied, but one common response is that melodrama is so deeply ingrained in Korean culture that, by now, they can actually execute it with some degree of subtlety and respect for the audience. I’ve always found these two elements lacking in the Anglophone variety, and even nearby in East Asia the situation is bad: Japanese melodrama, for instance, is so maudlin and false that it surely must stand at the brink of official recognition as a national embarrassment.

While it’s unclear if Dong-il Shin’s My Friend and His Wife qualifies as melodramatic by Korean standards, its story looks positively soap-operatic to Western eyes. It’s got a dead baby in the first act, a hellish conflagration in the last, an act of penitential suicide to finish it off, and the running theme of friendship’s honor tested by some of the most harrowing circumstances imaginable. I’m beginning to sense that this might be the predominant theme of modern Korean narrative: once forged, and no matter how abused or neglected, the bond of friendship — as well as all its attendant balance sheet — is escapable only in death, and maybe not even then. (The associated edict of “bros before hos” also seems important.)

As much as I enjoy watching Korean movies, I rarely feel like any individual one gives me a whole lot of insight into Korean society or culture. But this one emphasized one quality in particular to me: when Korean dudes are tight, they’re tight. This might be a mandatory-military-service-country kind of thing, and indeed, Jae-moon and Ye-joon, the buds in question here, met during their two years in the ranks. Jae-moon becomes an entrepreneurial fried-chicken cook (which is a thing you can be in Korea) with a pregnant wife, while Ye-joon becomes a lonely stockbroker. But this class and lifestyle divergence don’t mean nothin’; one comes immediately whenever the other calls, even if it means putting hold important tasks like, uh, sex. Glorious third-trimester sex.

Lee proceeds to put this friendship to the test and then some, but my strongest reaction wasn’t so much to the ensuing near-Greek moral struggle as it was to the relationship itself. None of the young male products of middle-class America I know really even have friends; not friends like this. They might have had their circle of dawgs in childhood and adolescence, but sooner or later they get siphoned off by girlfriends and wives and then descend into private hells of isolation where nothing can possibly satisfy except the next unsatisfying woman to come around the bend. Jae-moon and especially Ye-joon don’t wind up in a much happier place, but at least they didn’t just drift there.


And if we’re speaking of both melodrama and dead children, we must speak of Chang-dong Lee’s Secret Sunshine. Lee has lately been acknowledged as the master of this stripe of emotionally heightened 21st-century Korean film, which even a quick read of the plot synopses of his filmography suggests is true: “Starts with the suicide of the protagonist and uses reverse chronology to depict some of the key events of the past 20 years of his life that led to his death.” “A suburban woman in her 60s begins to grow an interest for poetry while struggling with Alzheimer's disease and her irresponsible grandson.” “The difficult romance between a mildly mentally disabled man who was just released from jail after a two and a half year sentence for involuntary manslaughter and a woman with severe cerebral palsy.”

This, his best-known picture, has more to do with the struggle for acceptance into closed societies, the one-upsmanship of repentance, and the tacky excesses of Korean christian groups. For a while, I was sure this was going to be another (and thus an inferior) version of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi, presenting us as it does with a widow who moves to a small town, young son in tow. But where Kore-eda’s widow finds an imperfect renewal in her life-reboot, Lee’s finds that she’s only just entered her world of hurt.

From what I’ve read, Lee is something of a Kubrickian taskmaster on the set, barking difficult, unclear order to his actors over and over and over again until they’re actually overcome by the despair he’s bent on capturing. To be sure, the story puts young Shin-ae through a wringer of almost implausible pressure, and if you want to make that credible — so says one directorial school, anyway — you’ve got to apply some of that pressure yourself, in real life. To the extent that the film is about Shin-ae’s suffering, I have to admit that Lee nailed it, but it seems to me that the most interesting parts lie elsewhere, sometimes partially obscured.

Bottoming out about two-thirds of the way through, Shin-ae caves in to her pharmacist’s insistence that she join the local Christian prayer group. There she undergoes a sudden conversion, which appears surprisingly stable until she’s comes up against the tricky issue of forgiveness. All ready for that flood of virtuous feeling that can only come from turning the other cheek to those who have done you wrong, she finds that the one who’s done her wrong has, himself, converted — and claims to have already gotten word of his being forgiven, straight from the Man Upstairs. Hence the short turnaround time between Shin-ae’s first religious epiphany and first religious crisis.

I’ve long been fascinated by the hold Christianity has taken in Korea. From the outside, the country can at times look like one big megachurch, but, as I recall, only about 30 percent of the population actively subscribes to the teachings of Jesus and Company. That figure doesn’t sound like much, but it’s bewilderingly high by East Asian standards. Parts of Secret Sunshine seem to offer a commentary on this along the lines of “easy come, easy go,” but I’d be hard pressed to draw out an overall judgment on the religion. The group that draws Shin-ae in — or welcomes her in, if you see it that way — comes off more than a little loony, expressing their zeal through that distinctively unconvincing aesthetic, hollow plastic-y grandeur. Yet Shin-ae’s newfound beliefs really do appear to part her clouds. Until they don’t, that is. Lee refuses to resolve her issues with faith, fate, and fatality, which is only good filmmaking, since they’re inherently irresolvable. But I suppose that’s what religion dines out on.

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.

Korean cinema diary: The Big Swindle, One Fine Spring Day, Bunt

The heist movie had its latest American peak in the early 2000s, and I can’t say I miss it during its valleys. Even a filmmaker as creative as Steven Soderbergh has trouble pulling them off (as it were): the less said about the garish, fetishistic Ocean’s series the better, and even the critically appreciated Out of Sight, which I watched recently with friends, ultimately succumbs to its genre’s standard syndrome. Heist movies are so plot heavy that they almost always devolve, half two two-thirds of the way through, into a laborious grind through the implications of the domino lines meticulously set up before.

Dong-hun Choi’s The Big Swindle — previously known by a superior title, The Reconstruction of the Crime — is a Korean heist movie. Unlike Je-gyu Kang’s Shiri, which exists only to demonstrate that Korea can make a Bruce Willis movie too, this film is more than a proof of concept. But only just: you’ve still got the frayed-edged gang of posturing thugs, summoned by a middle-aged leader of pure sangfroid, assembled to pull One Last Big Score. Naturally, just as an honest person can’t trust a miscreant, a pack of miscreants can’t trust each other, so the planned big swindle devolves into a farrago of internecine mini-swindles.

What makes this worthwhile are the surprisingly interesting cinematic techniques used to unite — almost concealed between — the car chases and preparation montages. The one I’ll remember best, and probably rip off, is the way Choi jumps chronologically back and forth by cutting between two shots at different times, and sometimes in different places, of the exact same composition. You’ll probably just have to watch to understand what I mean.

When I learned that Jin-ho Hur (also romanized as “Jin-ho Heo”) is known as “Korea’s Ozu”, I was all, sign me up. Any heir to Ozu Yasujirō’s cinematic legacy is a friend of mine, especially if they’re from a country that produces most of today’s innovative movies. I’m watching all these Korean films on DVDs officially disseminated by the Korean Film Council, and I’ve noticed that their box copy can be disarmingly honest and self-deprecating: Hur’s One Fine Spring Day, it says, “is a gorgeous and yet somewhat abstract sort of a film, that will bore some viewers and captivate others.” Maybe so, but wow, I’d never expect to read that on the inner cover.

Maybe it’s sacrilege to type this, but the movie actually improves upon Ozu in certain ways. For all his strengths, I don’t think Ozu cared about sound. I mean, he made sure you could hear Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu speak clearly over beds of innocuous string music and such, but his work doesn’t really treat sound as an art form. One Fine Spring Day does, both in its production and in its content. It’s about a young sound engineer who falls in and then out of love with an equally young radio producer who hires him to make field recordings for her show, and it seems to pay as much attention to sound as its protagonist. (Are Korea’s radio shows really this much more interesting than the States’? One of the girl’s programs, Nature and People, showcases field recordings illustrating the relationship between same. The other’s purpose is less clear, though it involves conversation with music critics. Also, beware: music critics will steal your ladies.)

Hur also injects the Ozu form with a certain dose of Korean melodrama, without which I imagine no Korean movie can succeed at home. This would normally be a strike against, since the sharp, subtle reserve of Ozu’s films is one of their qualities I enjoy most. Yet Hur is part of a generation of Korean filmmakers that has taken the maudlin weepiness inherited from their forebears and turned it to better, tempered, more aestheticized ends. A third difference from Ozu is the substitution of Korean humor for Japanese humor, which are distinct but equally goofy sensibilities. Drunk and ready to plead with his distant girlfriend, the sound recordist falls to his knees, asks “Do you want to see something funny?”, then performs some sort of Three Stooges Move where he repeatedly slaps his own face and comes up looking kind a sort of chipmunk. For some reason, I laughed.

Movies about disadvantaged kids who nevertheless scrappily save the day are already pretty thick on the ground in the U.S., but Kyu-tae Park’s Bunt is sufficiently different from those that I wasn’t too irked by it. The most obvious distinction is that its promotional details make it very, very clear that little Dong-gu, its protagonist, has an IQ of 60. Precisely. He can’t do anything but go to school and pour water for his classmates, but man, is he happy doing it. He made me realize that my own childhood dislike of school must have stemmed entirely from the fact that teachers expected things from me. Had they expected nothing, like they do of Dong-gu, I’d probably have smilingly sprinted all the way there every morning too.

Dong-gu’s dad is a real Job: runs a none-too-successful fried chicken restaurant, gets freeloaded off of by his drunken buddy, wife apparently died on him, landlord’s selling his home/workplace of 20 years, has a son with an IQ of 60. One of the most striking things that distinguishes Bunt from an American family-movie equivalent is that, at his most desperate point, the guy actually tries to commit suicide by inducing cancer — taking up smoking, deliberately burning his food — for the insurance payout. (The problems with this scheme suggest that the tree isn’t all that far from the apple.) If you’re trying to commit insurance fraud by, I guess that’s the one method they’d never suspect.

Oh, and Dong-gu escapes expulsion by joining the baseball team first as a waterboy, then as a player. The only way he can make contact with the ball is to bunt it, which his class partner, whose weak heard also makes him a social outcast, laboriously teaches him. There is a lot of slow motion in the parts where he scores the deciding point in the climactic baseball game. Like, a real lot.

Korean cinema diary: Magicians; M; My Mother, the Mermaid

Some cinephiles argue that certain countries produced the best movies of certain decades. You might hear about America or Germany dominating the seventies, the former with its rich, gritty stories of urban decay, sinister conspiracy, and post-sixties malaise, the latter with early-career powerhouse auteurs like Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I would argue that, despite or because of its economic disintegration, Japan owned the nineties by dint of only Takeshi Kitano's Hana-bi and Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maborosi — maybe my two favorite films of all time. France and Italy, the twin cradles of so many modern film sensibilities, certainly dominated the fifties and sixties. (Alas, flames so bright burn out quickly and decisively.) I don't know which country ruled the cinematic eighties. Poland?

It's too early to say from which land hailed the best filmmakers of the 2000s, but forced to gamble, I'd put my money on Korea. If you're a casual filmgoer, you might suspect something's going on there, cinematically speaking, but you might not realize how much. Chan-wook Park's disturb-'em-up "Vengeance Trilogy" of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and the very well-known Oldboy seems to have made a resonant worldwide impact. Such freak-centric projects as Joon-ho Bong's Memories of Murder and The Host have also picked up currency outside Cinéastistan.

Those movies are all pretty solid — I've left aside the competent but essentially Hollywood-imitative stuff, like Je-gyu Kang's Shiri — but if they make up 100 percent of what you know about Korean cinema, you might think it's all about the shock, the spectacle, and the transgression. That so many of the Korean films an Anglophone might easily come by are filtered through Tartan's "Asia Extreme" DVD series doesn't help. I myself discovered that Korea wasn't just a land of bravado (but often artful) unsubtlety more or less by accident.

UCSB's library, for some reason, maintains an outsized stock of Korean movies on DVD. Many of these are sent in yearly shipments by the Korean Film Council, in an evident effort to get the word out about what they call "the varied colors of Korean cinema." The word's reached me, anyway. Through these releases, I've found some new favorite films and filmmakers, most notably Sangsoo Hong, who makes what I can only sort of describe as "experimental romantic dark comedies." My favorites of his are Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Turning Gate, and Night and Day. They exemplify what I've only slowly realized I like about Korean movies: they don't care what filmmaking traditions dictate. They especially don't care about how they dictate that individual pictures can't contain every possible human emotion.

Hong's and other choice selections of Korean film — Ki-young Kim's complex, haunting, and slightly self-parodic Iodo (now available on YouTube!) being a particular standout — tell me there must be a wealth of inspiration and enjoyment to be found in that country's cinema, whether of the 21st century or before. So I'll go about it systematically, progressing physically across the library's stacks — right-to-left and then down, specifically — and watching it all.

* * *
Il-gon Song's Magicians is one unbroken eighty-ish-minute shot. To be more precise, it's one unbroken eighty-ish-minute shot preceded by another, (probably) separate shot that introduces the ghost of the title rock band's dead guitarist. You now have an idea of the risks this movie takes. Song takes it even further by not telling the story in an unbroken eighty-ish-minute time frame: it hops around to various times and places within a three-year span, all without one cut. In so doing, the film uses a variety of devices that aren't quite cinematic nor quite theatrical. The camera roves around from "set" to "set," but through tricks of framing pulls off illusions that would look stupid attempted on a stage. Flashing back to said guitarist's suicide, for instance, the camera closes in on her "balcony," which at first is clearly built on the ground. But then you can't see the ground, and the lights and sounds of what's meant to be the street below fire up. When she falls, she falls right out of frame; in an actual play, the actress would've then had to crawl off the stage or something.

The premise could have given disastrously free reign to Korea's double-edged penchant for melodrama, but it just avoids that. When the three surviving Magicians meet at the bassist's remote mountain tavern on the anniversary of the guitarist's fatal spill, they get to reminiscing about the good old days. (My favorite sub-sequence has two of the guys popping in a demo tape they recorded in the high school in the 1980s: "That was with the first recordable Walkman, the red one?" "Yeah, my dad brought it over from Japan!") An apostate monk turns up to retrieve the snowboarding gear he'd stashed at the bar three years ago, giving the Magicians both a semi-religious official to perform their friend's memorial and an audience to listen to their new song. The song itself, recorded by the band Loveholic and a little reminiscent of Sarah MacLachlan's "Adia", gets catchier the more I hear it. The film it caps is the same: the more I think about what it does — and, more importantly, how it does it — the more I admire it.

As impressed as I was with Myung-se Lee's M in the moment, I now find that most of it hasn't stuck. I've read that Lee's aim is to do things with cinema that only cinema can do. I'd say that's the best possible goal in the medium, but this time it seems to have resulted in an experience that only really exists while you're watching it. I remain unsure what went on in the movie — not that I consider that a bad thing — but it has something to do with a bestselling novelist ashamed of his hackitude, alienated from his fiancée, and pursued by one of those fans who just doesn't give up. Lee throws so much striking imagery, unconventional turns, and funny exchanges — borderline hilarious ones, in come cases — up on the canvas that his film strikes me as too personal to dislike. I'd certainly watch and enjoy it again. I just suspect contents so loopy and a veneer so slick don't quite go together. (Is this also what people are saying about Christopher Nolan these days? I've kind of lost track of him.)

The laziest way to frame Heung-shik Park's My Mother, the Mermaid is as a Korean Back to the Future, since both movies' young protagonists pay a supernatural visit to their own parents' youth. Except it's got no Delorean. Strike one. And no Crispin Glover. Strike two. But it doesn't waste time (as it were) dicking around with the usual suite of chronological paradoxes, so all is forgiven. In search of her terminally ill dad who suddenly goes missing, the lead girl visits the island village where he and her mom first met. I guess she stumbles through a rip in the space-time continuum on route, because when she gets there she happens almost immediately on her mom as a teenager.

What's kind of neat and not obvious at first is that the same actress plays both daughter and young mother. The contrast between the exuberant, tight-braided, illiterate diver of the past and the coarse, ever-spitting middle-aged woman of the present is so stark that it's hard to believe. Surely the time-traveling daughter's eyes are open to whatever information she can get about how one could possibly have turned into the other. The movie doesn't fully explain the transformation, no doubt for the best, since the process by with cheerful girls become bossy, blockish women must be a closely guarded Korean state secret.

This particular mom, who's wound up working at a spa as a "rubber," is what's sometimes called an ajuma. Let's turn to Mike's Epic Adventure in Korea for clarification:

They are easy to spot since 95% of them sport short permed hair and visors. The unfunny fact is that many of them have horrendous public transportation manners. You may be the most polite boy ever and would certainly hand over your sitting rights for an elderly lady, but ajumas do not consider this. They scuttle at high velocity, with a low centre of gravity, and an immutable tenacity. Plus, given Confucian priority of respect to age, they exercise all of their privileges while shoving you with both hands out of their way. All the while without so much as a hint of regret. Even if you're not vying for the same seat as them, they have been known to body check you if you're along their beeline. And they can be quite strong. Do not be surprised if you spot an ajuma wheeling a GIGANTIC pull-cart brimming with it's startling load.

I'd forgive anyone unfamiliar with works of Korean culture for finding this former mermaid, now an uncouth, ultra-boisterous carton of hair-trigger rage and resentment armed with a carved-in frown and a wardrobe seemingly out of the Wal-Mart clearance bin, to be an implausible caricature. The more I hear about her type, the more faithfully I realize she's drawn from life. Korean cinema shows me that at least Koreans have a sense of humor about these unpleasant real-life characters they harbor. I'd like to make a compilation of the recurring awful people found in these movies: blowhard dad, whiny track-suited kid, drunken braggart, obnoxious buddy, hyper-impulsive emotion-controlled girl, ajuma. I would call it Koreans at Their Finest.

It is an apple; I like apples

As a kid, I assumed both music and foreign languages to be insurmountably difficult and thus avoided any pursuit requiring the slightest facility with either. Other than low self-esteem, I can't imagine why I thought this, although I did burn an inordinate calorie count defending my shaky reputation as "the smart kid" by avoiding anything I might not pull off perfectly the first time. No prizes for guessing what two things now reside, struggle-prolongingly, among my top ten interests.

My ceaseless back-and-forth with the understanding and creation of music is gnarly enough to have already filled 2500 words of an incomplete post so horrifically tangled upon itself that it may never see the light of day. Things only clarified when I realized that music and languages might be two sides of the same coin, at least for me: after all, music is just another "language," right? It has its own regional dialects, its own grammar, its own degrees of formality. Without fluency in music or language, one certainly ends up hitting quite a lot of "bum notes."

A couple summers back, I decided I might learn how to read Korean. People hear that and react like I'd decided to build a twine ball the size of a car or fill a 55-gallon drum with nail clippings. I would submit that no interesting pursuit lacks an element of futility, but I did hold several legitimate reasons:

1. Who could deny that Asia is, at the moment, the world region producing the most fascinating culture? An Orientalist such as myself would argue that this has actually obtained for almost a century¹, but now seems universally recognized that the bureaucratic museums that are London, Paris, etc. have had their day. The Tokyos, the Seouls and the Bangkoks of the world have taken up the slack and then some.
   
   In previous generations, Japan was the country to watch. And to be sure, Japan still puts out better things and ideas than most, but in East Asia, I put my money on Korea as the place to beat. My entrée into this was Korean cinema which in the 2000s was almost suspiciously strong. (Especially the films of Sangsoo Hong.) I soon started imagining how much more I could get out of the country's movies if I could understand, like, every twelfth word. (In the rest of Asia, it's apparently all about Thailand, but Thailand is all about Apichatpong.)
    
2. As a linguistic challenge, it's comparable to the thirteen-and-change-hour flight to New Zealand. There are harder flights to be taken — Australia to Europe seems particularly hellacious — and harder languages to learn — Magyar — but the vast majority are easier. If I've done it, so much else is rendered, comparatively, cake. Freshening up my high school Spanish will be as nothing next to it.
   
   Also note the usual stuff about badly-needed brain workouts. Nothing else I do in life seems to stretch me in the same directions as desperately trying to comprehend languages of which I barely possess any understanding. Perhaps if I were a computer programmer I'd be satisfied, but I jumped those tracks in childhood.
    
3. If I ever happen to become one of those guys so eccentric that his native culture effectively ostracizes him and he must flee to another — I can assure you that these things happen — at least Korean women appear to be East Asia's best-looking. (Yes, I realize Korea's hyperinflated nationalism is creepily racial and I shouldn't stoke the flames, but journalistic integrity, etc.)
    
4. Pure perversity. If I were to take this all the way, I'd study Old Norse or something, but Korean is novelty enough for now.

Despite the relative obscurity of English-speaking Korean-learners — cf. the sprawling legion of American students of Japanese alone — I've managed to dig up surprisingly useful resources in the tubes. Let's Speak Korean, a show on Korea's English-language Arirang TV, is both just what it sounds like and has been uploaded to YouTube in quantity. I prefer the older, clunkier series with the ambiguously English-accented Chakhee Ahn (creepy fan video here) and the goofy Michael Chan to the newer, slicker iterations, but your mileage may vary.

I've also tried a variety of books on the language, which vary wildly in quality. Though quote old, Fred Lukoff's Introductory Course in Korean books break down sentences in a way I find uncommonly helpful. Naturally, I didn't expect any of this solo study to result in an ability to actually speak Korean — for that, it's sink/swim immersion or nothin' — but I enjoyed it on a purely intellectual level. The next logical step was to enroll in an actual Korean language class so as to accomplish some valuable public failing. Alas, the aforementioned obscurity finally bit me in the @$$; it didn't meet its 20-student quorum and was canceled for the year, leaving me in the lurch and with a distinct lack of sail wind to boot.

I sat it out for while before deciding that I'd rather not let what I'd learned thus far go completely to seed as I awaited the next school year. So here I am, starting once again from square one — as I do with after every lacuna, no matter how brief, in language study — but this time on the straightforwardly-domained LearnKorean.com. If nothing else, this keep-starting-over approach has given me a damn solid foundation in the basics. And every time, I discover some vital "new" basic I should have known before. There's something to be said for this method.

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¹ I agree with what Momus said in our interview: Said was wrong. It's not bad to be Orientalist; it's just bad to be mean and Orientalist.

Four films by Sangsoo Hong

Sangsoo Hong¹, the latest addition to my stable of most favored filmmakers, had an eight-film retrospective at LACMA over the last two weekends. I considered it an imperitave — nay, my duty — to attend. Or at least to attend one of the weekends — hey, repeatedly renting cars can get pricey! — which served up four pictures, three of which aren't available on North American DVD.

Besides providing an opportunity to test and slightly bolster my understanding of the Korean language, the screenings gave me what amounted to a shot of pure cinematic narcotic. I knew, going in, that it'd be the good stuff, but eight hours of unadulterated, theatrically-viewed Hong helped me gain some understanding of what, specifically, I like about the man's work.

First and foremost is his visual aesthetic, which usually comes down to "keep it simple." He tends to compose scenes in single shots, two or three in bolder moments. It wasn't until I closely watched a few filmmakers do this (Béla Tarr being another notable practitioner) that I realized just how irritating, consciously or subconsciously, I find the constant cutting that goes on in most movies. When I watch one of Hong's trios of drunken, red-faced Koreans sitting around a table and venting their semi-coherent frustrations, I'm actually seeing it — the setup, the performances, the pacing, the build — rather than seeing it chopped into fifty different bits originally shot over a week's time.

Second is his structuralism. By this I don't mean alignment with any intellectual fads, but a tendency to work out his projects' structures first and go from there. Other filmmakers might slap together an ad hoc structure to acommodate a story; Hong builds story around, or into, structure. As he's often quoted as saying, "People tell me that I make films about reality. They're wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up."

Subpoint: it must be said that I also appreciate his process-orientation. During the Q&A that finished the screenings, he described his adherence to his method of commencing photography with only a treatment in hand, spending exactly one hour each morning of the shoot composing the day's dialogue. I've started to believe that effectively imposing structures, processes and procetures on oneself to work within speeds the creative process. Can Hong's having racked up nine films in thirteen years be a coincidence?

Third is his willingness to probe restrained thematic territory from many angles. Hong's territory, as he's thus far staked it out, would seem comically limited: modern-day Korean creative types in their 20s and 30s smoke, drink, fall gracelessly into bed and brew half-assed solutions to their problems both pedestrian and existential. As dry a well as this sounds, he's gone to it nine times now and always come back with something fresh, intriguing, funny and pretty damn genreless. Outline his films and they sound just like what you'd call "romantic comedies," but their dozens of sharp angles would never, no matter the force, fit into that peghole. In many ways, I regard Hong's filmography as one big movie, each separate release its own distinctive chapter.

In Hong's second film, 1998's The Power of Kangwon Province, Jisook, a college student, and Sang-kwon, a married professor call their affair quits and both embark, separately and unbeknownst to one another, on head-clearing mini-vacations to the scenic northerly province of Kangwon. The film tells their geographically overlapping tales in parallel — first Jisook's, then Sang-kwon's — with a few interesting (and mostly non-contrived) points of connection.

From what I've read, this movie firmly established Hong's prevaling style: one-shot scenes, retreats into nature and distant towns, soused gatherings around tables piled with empty soju bottles and the most unromanticized sex scenes ever. (I haven't seen his first picture, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, but I hear it's not half as developed.) Lots of Hong fans ("Hongheads"?) call Kangwon Province their favorite, and while it's clearly a strong entry, I admit to having trouble rank-ordering his work. But it's definitely in the running.

2002's Turning Gate, Hong's fourth film (the third being Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors), also sits on my personal top tier. It earns most of that status by virtue of its humor alone. In response to several intractable personal dilemmas, protagonist and frustrated actor Gyung-soo repeatedly trots out the semi-meaningless phrase "I know it's hard being human, but let's not turn into monsters, okay?", parting words with which his previous (and hardly less pathetic) director shooed him away. A flighty dancer with whom Gyung-soo briefly grows enamored performs a strange compressed routine of the world's dance styles. A bunch of people pile into a van for a day trip, only to immediately slam a girl's fingers in the door; everything, from the industrious beginning to the clumsy, halting abrupt end, plays out in one high-angle wide shot. "How do you like my moves?" Gyung-soo keeps demanding throughout one of Hong's trademark unsexy sex scenes.

Hong uses a symmetric, repetitive structure here, emphasizing Gyung-soo's tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again in whatever arena he happens to enter. Hongheads will recognize this as the predominant trait of the oeuvre's males: they're stubborn, buffoonish, uncommunicative, impulsive. But they also try their damndest to snatch at the closest source of dignity. Gyung-soo tries, he really does, but he can never quite become the person others want him to be, whether those others be his audiences, his directors or the two women he fumblingly romances.

(Jeff Reichert in Reverse Shot once compared Turning Gate to Garden State. I haven't seen the latter film, though plenty of friends have told me I wouldn't like it.)

Even Hongheads appear to regard 2005's Tale of Cinema, Hong's sixth movie (number five being the oft- and unfairly maligned Woman is the Future of Man), as difficult to properly judge. A lesser blogger than I would write "spoilers ahead," I suppose, but here goes: the film pulls a switcheroo at the halfway point, revealing the melodrama onscreen to be a short film within the larger, "real" film. This is welcome, since the inner movie ends with its sorrow-filled teen protagonist rushing to a rooftop shouting "Mother! Mother! Mother!"

The screening turns out to be one in a series honoring its director, who's hospitalized and maybe on his deathbed. Or maybe not. In attendance is Yeong-shil, the actress who portrayed the chaste love interest/unsuccessful suicide pact member in the film-within-the-film, and Tong-su, an old (and less successful) film school buddy of the director's. Tong-su grows fixated on both the movie and its lead actress, approaching her until they both end up in one of Hong's unsexy sexes. (The best of them, for my money, though I'm not quite sure why.) Complications ensue.

From frame one, it's clear something's up. To take the most startling quality, the cinematography's full of zooms! Hong seriously breaks loose with the lens lever, and while the result doesn't look "better" than the static shots of Tale's predecessors — "zoom is crappy" remains my aesthetic position — the change of look and feel fascinates. Also contributing to that is the use of way more music cues than usual. At this point, a Honghead-in-training would be well used to hearing a melody at the very beginning and the very end — maybe. These bells and whistles aren't just the tropes of the short film, either; they continue through all the action.

The relative terms "simple," "fun" and "light" might — and have been used to — accurately describe the picture, but it also seems to have disappointed more than a few diehard Hongheads. I suspect there's more complexity behind its brief, sub-90m length and constant goofiness than meets the eye, but I'd also recommend it as an introductory, gateway doseage of Hong's work. That is, I would if it were available on domestic DVD.

As yet Hong's ninth and most recent release, 2008's Night and Day (which was proceeded by 2006's Woman on the Beach also happens to be his most ambitious. Not that you'd know it by Hong's own introduction: "This film is quite long, two hours and 25 minutes," he muttered before the screening. "I hope you find something good in it."

After getting busted smoking pot with a bunch of foreign exchange students, fortyish painter Seong-nam flees to France, far from the reach of Korea's harsh drug laws. Flopping down in a well-known Korean-owned boarding house, the bumbling non-Francophone wanders the city, spends the last of his money and falls in with three fellow artists, women, though even the plaigarist among them produces a lot more than Seong-nam does. Each night he tearfully phones his wife back in Seoul, where it's day. (Geddit?)

Like most Hong men, Seong-nam's full-bore bullshitting can't quite stand up to the harsh glare of the womenfolk. Here, it's for some reason even more hilarious than usual, possibly thanks to the transportation to a foreign land that renders him even more ineffectual and uncomprehending than he would've been in Korea. Not that he escapes the homeland's concerns entirely: he totally freaks, for example, after happening upon a North Korean student at a party, almost instantaneously demanding to know his opinion of the Great Leader and Eternal President. "I just met a North Korean!" he exclaims to himself. "What do I do? Should I tell the consulate?" He later squares matters by his usual method: arm-wrestling.

My immediate impression of Night and Day is that it simply has a lot more stuff than its antecedents. Hong is correct, predictably, that it runs two hours, 25 minutes, but his hope that I find "something" good in it proved too humble. The film's diaristic style — it depicts a small-to-medium scrap of each of Seong-nam's many days in Paris — creates, bit by discrete bit, a sketch of a displaced, disoriented life. It doesn't hurt that the device affords opportunity for as many laughs as Turning Gate. I'll never stop chuckling at the cut straight from Seong-nam's deer-in-the-headlights stare at one of his ladyfriends' demands to know his definition of art to the next day's title card. And what have I learned above all else about Sangsoo Hong's cinema? It's hilarious when people cry their eyes out. No greater master of the comedic weep shall ever live.

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¹ Up to this point in my effort to grasp Korean language and culture, I've assumed that every romanized Korean name consists of two syllables separated by a hyphen. Apparently it's a matter of choice, as Hong is known to prefer "Sangsoo" to "Sang-soo". As for the non-Asian name order, that's my own quirk; when I speak and write in the Anglosphere deliberately putting Asian surnames first, I feel like the vaguely slimy weenie who, presented a fork at a Chinese restaurant, irritatedly demands chopsticks.

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Sang-soo Hong, 2000)

Stylus magazine once ran a profile of Sang-soo Hong, which opens as follows:

As a burgeoning filmgoer, I once idealized the perfect film as a completed jigsaw puzzle, where every piece fit, ripe for savoring. But there was a turning point where looseness became a virtue, rigidity became a vice, and holistic perfection was an oxymoron. Suddenly, it was possible to imagine a L’age D’or without its faux-documentary facade, an Eraserhead without gurgling chickens, a Mouchette without bumper cars, meaning without any sign of joy. There is a reluctant moment akin to pubescence in auteurist cinephilia, when every glance, every word, every color becomes a conscious choice, rather than an inevitable constituent. This is why the term “auteur theory” has always struck me as overly hesitant: how can the fruit of quantifiable decision-making be theoretical?

The author's experience mirrors my own, and our dual appreciations of Hong probably spring from a similar root. Nothing in his movies feels accidental, or at least nothing in them feels as if it was included accidentally. From what I understand, Hong is actually a skilled cultivator and user of accident — reputedly getting his actors drunk both in advance of and during shoots may have something to do with this — and he presents the fruits of his accidents only after meticulous selection and arrangement.

Not that I want to front like one of those process-not-product wonks — after all, if you don't have the product, the process doesn't mean dick — but I'm enamored of Sang-soo Hong's processes. I'm obviously into the products as well, as you'd gather from even a casual browsing of this journal's recent posts, but the more I learn about the way he works, the more I admire it. What initially grabbed me was his unsual attention toward structure. A refreshingly direct quote of his is often refrenced: "People tell me that I make films about reality. They're wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up." Structure seems an underused starting point for cinema, although it might be argued that it's actually the most common starting point in that screenwriters' first order of business is often to stick themselves with the old three-act stricture, as it were. While it's served certain recent films, especially Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop, quite well, I wonder if it's not high time to give the three-act a semi-dignified retirement. Hong actively works to bring this about.

Another element of the Hong method that I hold in increasingly high esteem is his insistence on shooting in sequence. Pen-ek Ratanaruang did the same in Last Life in the Universe, to astonishingly effective results. In both director's films, this appears to be another way to harness chance: when the actors and the other creators know that what's previously happened on the set is also what's previously happened on film, they can more confidently improvise and allow unscripted developments to evolve into essential components, allowing the whole project to more easily change for the better. In an interview with Cinema Scope, Hong describes incorporating into the work his responses to the locations and actors:

If I chose a different actress or actor, I might have come up with a different ending. I have some of the details, and then I shoot this person, and my response to this person and what she gives me makes up the next day’s storyline. One important factor contributing to that particular ending is who she is in real life. If you have too much conceptualization, the options in terms of where you get details are restrained, because of this strong outline. Of course we need some kind of outline, but I really like to pick up details from other places beyond the main dramatic points. For me, those dramatic points are not the centre. It’s up to you how you connect them. The details come from an unusual place and make a pattern, but patterns don’t necessarily have a symbolic meaning. That’s not my intention. My job is just to make a complex pattern so people can feel something that is alive. I can think of a person [points at a woman] — let’s say you and I met her and after two hours you can talk about her this way and I can talk about her that way. Because she is a living being, we can say different things about her. That’s as far as I want to go, rather than telling you what to feel.

Were I to write a short manifesto laying out the nature of excellence in modern film, I could hardly do better than that.

By virtue of its own distinctive structure, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors takes events presumably shot in sequence and shuffles them into a nonlinear chronology from two individual perspectives. Of these, the main event is the deflowering of screenwriter and titular virgin Soo-jung by wealthy-ish rake Jae-hoon. Hong chops the coupling itself and the leadup to it into fourteen chapters, or seven from Soo-jung's perspective and seven from Jae-hoon's. The latter has more of a rom-com feel, if cinema stylized so unlike a rom-com can be deemed rom-commy at all. The former is imbued with more of what I would call a claustrophobic ominousness.

This sounds, I realize, a bit like the makings of one of those tiresome he said/she said affairs: "Hey guys, women think like this, but men think like this!" Despite his avowed thematic interest in memory and this subject matter's easy suitability for storytelling via unreliable memories, Hong eschews such obvious techniques. Soo-jung and Jae-hoon's perspectives depict, for the most part, the same events; much dialogue is echoed between the halves. The movie expresses variety of perception much more subtly, with light, blocking and camera placement; the differences lie in what's revealed. Any and all incongruities are conveyed purely cinematically. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors is a film that could never be a book. And it certainly ain't no jigsaw puzzle, that's for damn sure.