Month: November 2019

Drowsy City (Thanh Pho Ngu Gat)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TAALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

This is a spectacularly dirty movie. It’s unlike anything else you have seen before. The creative sentience is entirely palpable. There’s plenty of clucking, cackling, plucking and ruffling feathers. And it isn’t just chickens that suffer. Human beings are subjected to the very same type of abuse as our edible friends.

The plot is deceptively simple. Tao works at as a chicken slaughterer in the heart of a bustling city, presumably either Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh. His relationship to the birds is ambiguous and dysfunctional. They are his closest companions, but he’s also prepared to butcher them in the most horrific ways at any given minute. One day, he peeks on three gangsters dwelling in an abandoned building with a prostitute. He gets discovered, and the three criminals turn him into some sort of jester and slave. He’s forced to emulate chickens in order to entertain them, He also has to feed them. But Tao has a cunning plan, and soon tables could be turned. The hunter could get captured by the game.

Drowsy City is guaranteed to ruffle feathers amongst animals lovers. The butchering of chickens is extremely graphic. They are boiled alive, defeathered and beheaded in front of our very eyes. When talking about Weekend (1967), French provocateur Jean-Luc Godard said that he opted to show a real pig being killed simply simply because it was acceptable to show animals being murdered in cinema (unlike human beings). Dung Luong Dinh is clearly aware of this contradiction, and uses this controversial device to his advantage.

But it isn’t just animals who suffer. The Vietnamese director mercilessly exposes the frailties and vulnerabilities of us human beings. Chickens are merely a proxy. We too get burned by boiling water. We too can get killed by a slaughtering knife. We don’t even have feathers to protect us. Our skin is directly exposed. In the titular drowsy city, both chickens and human being are caged, trapped and tethered. These creatures understand the inevitability of death. Our relationship to each other isn’t more humane than our bond to birds. We are prepared to humiliate, torture and kill each other.

Water is a recurring theme. It is is fluid and ambiguous. It washes away the blood and the feathers on the ground, but it also serves to boil and to drown. Tao takes pleasure in a sitting in a tiny tub filled with water, or to lie down outside allowing a tropical storm to pour over him and soak his clothes. It’s a purification ritual. He’s preparing himself for something much bigger.

Aesthetically, this is fascinating endeavour. Camera angles are slanted, buildings derelict, cracked walls dirty with mould and faded paint, the floor covered with blood. Extremely high drone shots remind us of our anonymity and urban solitude. The city is teeming with action, and yet we are blithely oblivious to what our neighbours are up to. Our indifference towards our fellow human beings isn’t dissimilar to our bond to the chicken on our dinner plate. Everyone is prey.

Drowsy City just saw its world premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It’s showing in Competition.

Marionette (Marioneta)

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

The young and handsome Ernesto (Rafael Ernesto Hernandez) is a Cuban actor seeking work in Mexico City. He is very famous back home, he claims. However, he is unable to find a job and start a new career in this highly competitive city of 22 million inhabitants, mostly due to his distinctive talk. He needs to put up a Mexican accent in order to impress his auditioners and land a much-desired prominent role.

Ernesto comes across the same beggar twice while travelling on a metro train. The also young and beautiful woman (Fatima Molina) tells commuters that she suffered a major accident, which left her unable to work, prompting them to spare significant amounts of change. She dons a scar and crutches. Ernesto notices, however, that her performance is inconsistent: the first time she pretended that her leg was hurt, while the second time it was her arm that she couldn’t move. He challenges the elusive stranger, only to be kidnapped by two gangsters who were watching over the female.

He soon finds out that the woman is called Belen and she works for a greedy capo called David Torrico. His criminal labour consists of training professional beggars. A group of perfectly healthy people are taught how to look ill and vulnerable. And this is where Ernesto’s skills come in handy. He quickly becomes a very effective teacher, adored by his very unusual pupils. The lessons consist of various clever ruses, from the perfect facial expression to embracing the sick character in full splendour.

Belen and Erenesto predictably develop a romantic connection, but their relationship is as toxic and dangerous as the criminal trade of David Torrico. Plus, Belen and her boss have some dirty secrets in store, and they could compromise Ernesto’s integrity. Ernesto suspects that there’s something rotten after a young woman – one of the con artists – is run over by a car. He believes that David murdered her because she was disloyal to the group.

All in all, Marionette is a tribute to the art of acting. It’s an interesting premise, with plenty of flamboyant and peculiar characters. But it also feels a somewhat unnatural and contrived. The acting classes lack vigour and wit. They come across as too puerile. The romance isn’t entirely convincing, either. There’s very little spark. It is a film that purports to play with language and format, but ultimately falls the the traps it set out to avoid. It’s simply trite and formulaic.

Marionette is showing in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. DMovies have been invited to the event as special guests.

Harriet

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a celebration of the life of Araminta Ross, a slave in Dorchester County. She escaped her enslavement and adopted her freedom name “Harriet Tubman”, becoming the most celebrated conductor (guide, saviour) of slaves on the Underground Railroad across the Mason Dixon Line. She conducted about 70 individuals to freedom. She was the first woman commander to lead an armed assault in the American Civil War and later settled in New York State, devoting herself to the cause of female voting rights and her religious beliefs. This is a story that needs to be told – especially to white people.

The role of Harriet is carried off with an all-consuming passion by Cynthia Erivo, who keeps herself firmly in the centre of the film. The movie refers to the historical aspects of Harriet’s life . When she was young, she was accidentally hit by a two-pound metal weight on the head thrown by a slave owner at another slave, who was trying to escape. This left her with blinding headaches and strange visions. They formed part of her lively relationship with God. The visions gave her strength and even, sometimes, God’s instructions.

She and slaves she is conducting are rushing towards a river. To cross the river the slaves can gain their freedom but many of them can’t swim. The slave owners are coming up fast behind with their guns and dogs. What are they to do? Harriet falls down in a swoon. “She’s talking to God,” explains one of the leaders. She comes out of her faint. She stands up, “Ok. This way – to the left!” and off they go to freedom. This may perplex many with modern sensibilities, but this is how she worked.

The visions, as depicted in black and white in the film, are themselves instructive, illustrating the terrible, casual cruelties of slavery, the forcible separation of families, spouses dragged away from each other, children snatched out of their mothers’ arms to be sold off elsewhere. If you look at the original photographs taken of Harriet Tubman towards the end of her life, you can see she was a woman who did not allow anyone to treat her badly She suffered and her story needs to be told to Caucasians. This is black and feminist history gone mainstream. Hollywood has repaid a debt that has been long outstanding since Birth of a Nation (DW Griffith, 1915) and Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939).

Harriet – which was directed by black female director, Kasi Lemmons – is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 22nd. On VoD in April.

Gipsy Queen

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE THE THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

In this Austro-German production, 30-year-old Ali (Alina Serban) has to fend for herself in a hostile Hamburg with her two young children, after being evicted from her home in Romania by her father (presumably upon becoming an unmarried mother). She works as a cleaner in successive jobs, until one day she ends up in collecting gasses in the iconic nightclub Ritze.

The Ritze has a boxing ring in the basement. One day, Ali quietly practises with a punching bag while being observed by the club manager Tanne (played by German film veteran Tobias Moretti). Hamburg has an extensive underground boxing subculture. We learn that Ali used to train with her now estranged father as a child. She was taught to “fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee”. The nominative determinism speaks for itself: Ali shares her name with the greatest boxer of all time. Tanne invites her to get back into the ring, and she hesitantly agrees. Gradually, fighting becomes a powerful venting outlet for the hapless young woman. She becomes extremely successful, and begins to make a living out of boxing.

Meanwhile, Ali grapples with various issues at home. Her family has to share an apartment with a young German woman, and she does not have the means to rent a place for herself. Her daughter Esmeralda is doing poorly at school, and her mother constantly demands that she studies more. Ali’s parenting skills aren’t sterling, and she often comes across as aggressive and dysfunctional. The relationship between mother and daughter thus begins to collapse.

Alina Serban is extremely powerful in her debut performance. She is petite yet never fragile. Her latent rage is extremely palpable. The laconic character communicates very proficiently with her pearly eyes and powerful fists. She has to fight many physical as well as metaphorical battles: against her rival on the ring, against a racist society that constantly exploits and looks down on her (while offering limited opportunities for social ascension), against her family at home, and – perhaps more significantly – against her internalised anger and frustration. Ali has anger management issues, and she needs to ensure that no one gets hurt along her journey.

Upon learning that her father has passed away, she begins to communicate and make amends with him in her dreams and imagination, in a clear attempt to reconcile with her past and manage her temperament and frustrations.

The fourth feature film by Kurdish German filmmaker Huseyin Tabak is a complex psychological drama dotted with socio-political commentary. The narrative is very conventional: it’s very easy to work out what happens in the second half of the movie. It all wraps up with a momentous battle on the ring, in a fine example of physical acting. There’s just too much at stake: her humanity, her dignity, her career and even her motherhood. Can Ali afford to lose this fight?

Gipsy Queen just premiered in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Extreme Job (Geukhanjikeob)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Radio voices. “Target in position.” “Unit 2 on roof.” Four criminals in a dimly lit apartment playing Mahjong. A knock at the window. A raid. But embarrassed lady cop Jang (f) (Lee Hanee) and her male boss Captain Ko (Ryu Seung-yong) can’t operate their window cleaning slings. The cliched, action packed raid by SWAT in which the criminals are swiftly arrested is visualised by the villain, but the actual police operation is a series of hilarious bungles, the criminals only “caught” when one of them is hit by a coach and the others are stopped by the resulting multiple car crash pile up. In a brutal debriefing with their chief, Captain Ko loses his position to young rising star Captain Choi, who’s just successfully caught a major criminal gang.

In order to save their reputation, Ko’s unit set up surveillance on the gang’s apartment where Hong and his men are awaiting the return of big boss Mubae (Shin Ha-kyun). There being a Chicken restaurant opposite, the cops take it over as a cover to watch the criminals’ premises. It turns out that one of their number Ma (Jin Sun-kyu) has an incredible family recipe for Suwon Rib Marinate Chicken which is an immediate success and overnight turns their fast food joint cover into a hugely profitable business. The team discover the joys of running a food emporium except for Young-ho (Lee Dong-hwai) who finds the others are becoming to busy too fulfil their police duties and back him up when needed.

Other memorable characters include merciless, ruthless and highly effective, female fighter Sun-hee (Jang Jin-hee) who uses a knife to put Hong on crutches on a whim from Mubae and rival gang leader Ted Chang (Oh Jung-se) who threaten to atart a turf war with Mubae.

Starting off as a lightweight caper, this is one of those movies that effortlessly shifts genre throughout, from caper to violent actioner to comedy to food porn and back again innumerable times. It’s aided no end by a clever soundtrack by a composer who understands the effect different pieces of music have on the audience, from the opening pizzicato caper strings to the closing titles which sounds like a spaghetti Western. Somewhere in the middle, a wounded character who may die is briefly underscored by the cantopop song from Asian mega-hit gangster outing A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, producer Tsui Hark, 1986).

As if this wasn’t already a huge crowd-pleaser, for the climactic fight sequence it reveals that Ko’s five man team are, for example, a Chinese national Judo champion (Ma), an Asian Muay Thai champion named Jang Bak after Ong Bak (Jang) while he himself has the nickname ‘Zombie’ because he’s sustained 12 stab wounds and just doesn’t die. These and other attributes are pressed into service with Ko taking bullet after bullet in pursuit of Mubae. This South Korean gem is proof positive, if it were needed, that even for the kind of entertaining movies on which it prides itself, Hollywood really isn’t the only game in town.

Extreme Job plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival.

Thursday, November 6th, 20.35, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Wednesday, November 20th, 18.20, Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast – book here.

Saturday, November 23rd, 15.30, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham – book here.

Watch the film trailer below:

Scattered Night (Heuteojin Bam)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Their dad Seung-won (Lim Hojun) hasn’t been around much recently. Then he and their mother Yoon-hee (Kim Hye-young) break it to their two kids Su-min (Moon Seung-a) and her slightly elder brother Jin-ho (Choi Jun-woo) that they’ve decided to split up and live apart. The question is, which of the two parents will either or both of the kids live with afterwards? Rather than fight over them, the parents leave it up to each of the kids to decide that for themselves.

Their mother is an ambitious teacher who pushes her students hard. Their father is much more relaxed aboutsuch things, so that’s one difference between the two right there. Jin-ho is studying with his mum at her school for his own exams, so it’s likely that he would move in with mum rather than dad. That just leaves Su-min, but she’s totally conflicted about which way to go.

If she lives with mum and elder brother, she has the advantage that she and her sibling are living under the same room. The two kids get along pretty well, so ther’s no reason why she wouldn’t want that. On the other hand, she likes dad a lot too. And she has problems understanding the fact that the relationship has broken down. Can’t they just get back together again?, she asks.

We never see Jin-ho that much outside the family unit (although we see him studying for exams with mum) but we see quite a bit of Su-min playing with Yu-chan, a boy of around her own age. Dad has given Jin-ho a drone for his birthday, but he’s so busy with exams that it’s Su-min who borrows it and plays with it.

After the overbearing Yu-chan takes the remote out of her hands to have a go then gets distracted and crashes and damages the drone, the understandably upset Jin-ho shows remarkable patience and forebearance to his sister, even going so far as reapiring the damaged drone so she can play with it again. He seems to be good at dealing with people and we suspect that he’s goig to be okay dealing with his parents’ break up.

Su-min, however, finds it all much more difficult. She’s very keen to go on a trip to Lake Park with the family if a bit miffed that her brother will stay behind to study. A family discussion goes in her favour, perhaps taking a little it too much advantage of Jin-ho’s good nature: the parents decree that whoever Su-min decides each of the two kids should live with, that’s the way it’ll be. She can see that her brother will likely end up with mum, but as for herself she finds it impossible to decide one way of the other.

All of which leads to a family trip in the car where she goes missing and parents and elder brother search for her. There’s no point in a spoiler to explain how it all works out – or doesn’t – but this is not really the sort of film where that’s a big deal – it’s a drama based around the characters, particularly the little girl, not a plot in need of resolution. Suffice to say, the film ends at a very interesting place which is utterly consistent with what it’s about.

The shooting style is deceptively simple – a handheld camera following characters around their home or in odd locations like the school, the car, the park, or playing in the nearby streets. It unfolds at a gentle pace yet you can feel the issue of the impending separation pressing in on Su-min and affecting her young life. In the end, it’s a striking portrait of a young girl dealing with issues she’d rather she didn’t have to face at all. It played prfectly well to an audience of adults as the closing LKFF film, but this is also a film that some children might well enjoy with their parents too – although it’s a long way from being a children’s film as such, confronting as it does with some quite tough, grown up relationship issues.

Scattered Night plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival.

Thursday, November 14th, 19.00, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Tuesday, November 19th, 20.20, Glasgow Film Theatre, Glasgow – book here.

Thursday, November 21st, 18.20, Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast – book here.

Sunday, November 24th, 13.15, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham – book here.

Watch a clip below:

Judy & Punch

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Seaside. Nowhere near the sea. A small town in the 17th century where allegations of witchcraft are regularly punished by torture, confession and stoning and the local Constable is an ineffectual ninny.

However all that is forgotten at the town’s palace of entertainment to which local celebrity Mr. Punch (Damon Herriman, also in The Nightingale, out next week) and his wife Judy (Mia Wasikowska) have returned with their popular puppet show featuring his puppet as a gleeful wife-beater and hers as his spouse, dutifully trying to protect their baby.

In the daytime, Punch is perfectly happy to be he who casts the first stone at an official stoning of paraded, accused, so-called witches while his missus is rather less enthusiastic. She has been trying, none to successfully, to wean him off the evils of drink, but the competition in the form of local woman of ill repute Polly (Lucy Velik) tempting him down the local boozer is proving too much for him to resist.

Home life is difficult: he hates their loyal but ageing caretaker couple and is so useless at looking after their baby girl that at one point the infant almost crawls into a blazing hearth fire.

When family circumstances worsen, Judy leaves Punch and falls in with a mainly female group of dissenters camping out in the woods. This Judy may have been thrashed within an inch of her life by her soused husband, but she’s had enough and is now working out how to fight back.

This is impossible to accurately synopsise without spoilers (hopefully I’ve given nothing away). It’s also filled with riotous detail – pub brawls, public hangings and stonings, official Ruffians who practice their violent law enforcement work whether the Constable agrees with their methods or not.

For generations of Brits, Punch and Judy as performed by a seaside puppeteer in a small vertical tent are indelible archetypes from childhood, along with the baby, the policeman, the dog, the string of sausages and the crocodile. Aussie director Mirrah Foulkes completely understands these figures, skilfully exploiting them to very specific narrative ends. She conjures a terrifying fantasy land where freedom confronts bigotry even as everyday folk marvel at the magic world brought to life by theatrical puppeteers.

As such, this plugs right into some powerful myths buried very deep in the British psyche then plays around with them to great effect. For anyone who grew up with the terrifying Mr. Punch, his much put upon wife and child and all the rest, this is essential viewing. And coming a week ahead of likewise impressive The Nightingale, it suggests there may be something of a wave of Australian fantastique at the moment.

Judy & Punch is out in the UK on Friday, November 22nd. On VoD in March.

Green Snake (Ching se)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

China’s White Snake legend has spawned numerous adaptations including the recent, animated White Snake / Baishe: Yuanqi (Amp Wong, Ji Zhao, 2019) which boasts fast paced action and state of the art CG visuals. Tsui Hark is from another era: the legendary Hong Kong director who almost single-handedly bought Hollywood-style special effects to Hong Kong movie production in such epics as Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain (1983) and the Once Upon A Time In China films (1991 onwards) alongside period romps like Peking Opera Blues (1986). For Green Snake, Tsui turned to Lillian Lee’s novel based on the White Snake legend which she adapted into a screenplay for him. Rather than tell the story from the perspective of the white snake as the original legend does, Lee shifts her narrative to the perspective of the younger, less experienced green snake.

In appearance, the two spirits start off as female humans down to the waist and snakes below, not dissimilar to Harryhausen’s half woman/half snake Medusa in Clash Of The Titans (producer and effects: Ray Harryhausen, 1981) but using full size puppetry/animatronic effects rather than stop frame animation. Because they want to enter the human world and experience romantic, sexual love, the two snakes transform themselves into full body, beautiful women.

Older white snake Bak Sei Juan (Joey Wang) and green snake younger sister Siu Ching (Maggie Cheung) initially leave their spirit world home and descend from the roof of a house in which Indian girls dance. Soon the pair swim their way up river to a more Chinese period village that could have come straight out of the Tsui-produced A Chinese Ghost Story /Sien lui yau wan (Ching Siu Tung, 1987, in which Joey Wang played an attractive ghost) where they both ingratiate themselves with a local scholar Hsui-Xien (Wu Hsing Kuo) with white Bak Sei intent of having his children while green snake Siu Ching goes off to seduce a Buddhist monk Fa Hai (Vincent Zhao) – whose two hundred years worth of studies have allowed him to run through the air and master various other physical and spiritual abilities – intent on banishing the pair from the human world back to the spirit world.

As you might expect from the director who in Zu: Warriors staged a priest keeping a demonic asteroid at bay using several thousand yards of eyebrows, Green Snake boasts extraordinary set pieces. These vary from shots of the two girls cavorting naked in a period hot tub (not that they reveal anything much, but the images positively drip sex) through various gigantic snake tails swishing about through water or in the air, epic airborne battles with the flying monks and a finale in which the monk’s red clothing is transformed into a vast shroud with which he and a magic crane which suddenly appears from nowhere battle the two flying snake women.

Memorable episodes include green Maggie Cheung trying to seduce the monk by gliding through the air around him while he attempts to concentrate poised in mid-air at being sexually pure and not distracted by her presence. The whole thing has a gorgeous Chinese score and the art direction makes you feel as if you’ve got lost inside a full colour version of the willow pattern plate, but an original Chinese version not some Western re-imagining. And while the men are standard comic fodder (the scholar) and equally standard flying monk action hero, the two women / reptiles are voluptuous sirens at one point mirrored by an army of women moving on all fours who besiege the monk.

While it’s recognisably a Tsui Hark film, at the same time he isn’t really repeating himself here: there’s nothing else in his body of work quite like this.

Green Snake plays in LEAFF, The London East Asia Film Festival as a late item in their Dilemma And Desire strand followed by a panel discussion.

Castle Cinema, Saturday, November 16th, 18.00. More information, and book here.

Watch a trailer for the film below:

and a promo which arguably represents it more accurately:

Ieoh Island (Iodo)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Environmental journalist Chun Nam-seok (Choi Yoon-seok) is sent by his editor on a boat trip junket. Both men are unaware that it’s promoting a proposed Ieoh Island hotel. Chun Nam-seok was born and raised on Parang-do island, off the coast of Jeju island. On Parang-do, Ieoh Island was regarded with a terrible awe owing to the water spirits alleged to live there and believed to take the fishermen from their boats during storms at sea. The island is populated by women who mostly work as divers and their children, the men having been lost at sea on fishing vessels or having left the island for other reasons.

Aware of Chun Nam-seok’s environmentalist credentials, but not of his past associations with the island, company man Sun Woo-hyun (Kim Jong-cheol), whose brainchild the proposed Ieoh Island hotel is, expresses a desire to colleagues to get rid of him and engages with a drinking contest with the man on deck during which Chun Nam-seok goes missing, presumed drowned. Sun Woo-hyun becomes a murder suspect and is later acquitted. However, since both Sun Woo-hyun and Chun Nam-seok’s editor Yang (Am Park) want to uncover the truth behind Chun Nam-seok’s disappearance, they go to Parang-do in the hope that more information will come to light and help clarify the mystery. The island women have never lived anywhere else, except for a barmaid (Lee Hwa-shi) who has the mainland newspaper regularly delivered to keep in touch with the outside world.

What follows is much of Chun Nam-seok’s life story told in a series of increasingly gruesome and bizarre flashbacks (often telegraphed by a bubbling noise on the soundtrack) most but not all of which take place earlier than those that precede them. Roughly, as a young man he tries to elope with childhood sweetheart Sohn Min-ja, who steals money from her mother so they can escape, but terrified of the consequences of taking her from the island’s matriarchy, he instead ties her up and leaves her to die on the rocky coastline.

When years later Chun Nam-seok returns, he takes a different woman Park Yeo-in (Kwon Mi-hye) as wife and they plan to start a business farming albalone for which she will raise the two million won seed money. Eventually, a mystery woman wearing a white shroud – perhaps an old woman although it’s impossible to tell – puts up the money with a clause to the agreement that if isn’t paid back, he will leave his wife and come and live with her. Unfortunately, pollution damages the albalone and ruins the business, causing the clause to be invoked. Sometime later, he lands a job as an environmental reporter on a Seoul paper.

The whole is peppered with a lady shaman (Park Jeong-ja) and various ritual dances culminating in an extremely graphic late scene which not only inevitably ran into trouble with the then Korean censors (although on this occasion we were shown an uneviscerated print) but also still shocks even by today’s standards. Not that the scene is gratuitous: it has to do with the sexual mores and primitive beliefs of the island’s (female) population and is absolutely in keeping with everything else in the film.

Much is made of the island locations and there’s some deeply unsettling use of editing and zoom lens. It’s a film which demands multiple viewing and must surely rank among one of the most powerful evocations of primitive beliefs ever committed to celluloid by anyone in any culture. These days, its environmental slant lends it an extra gravitas. There’s no trading in didacticism here, however. It remains one of the great works of cinema: its director deserves to be far better known and this is one of his finest works. A true masterpiece.

Ieoh Island plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below (sorry, Korean only):

Aimless Bullet (Obaltan)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Made and released in the brief period of about a year between the collapse of one dictatorship and the rise of another – and the temporary relaxation of state censorship that accompanied it in South Korea – Aimless Bullet deals with the struggle to survive in that country amidst economic collapse. Men including demobbed soldiers and officers try their hardest to find work, others lucky enough to have jobs struggle to support their extended networks of loved ones while women drift into prostitution – or, if they’re really lucky, become movie stars.

It opens with crippled, former military officer Gyeong-sik, constantly asking Sgt. Park and other drinking buddies not to call him ‘The Commander’, making a scene in a bar and smashing a glass door. Wandering through the streets at night alone afterwards, he’s accosted by former girlfriend Myeong-suk (Seo Ae-ja) who desperately wants him to fulfil his promise and marry her, but he won’t because as a cripple he feel an incomplete man.

Myeong-suk meanwhile is prostituting herself to get by. One of her brothers Song Yeong-ho (Choi Mu-ryong) is determined to find work and looks to have struck lucky when ascendant movie actress Miss Goh gets him a starring part in a film. But when he learns that it’s about a soldier with wounds just like his, he turns the part down. He can’t afford to by his niece Hye-ok the new pair of shoes he’s repeatedly promised her and the little girl has become accustomed to think of him as a liar. Things seem to be looking up when he meets Oh Seol-hui, formerly a woman lieutenant in the army, but their blossoming romance is cut short by tragic circumstances beyond their control their control. Frustrated, he decides to rob a bank – but then that goes wrong too.

His brother Song Cheol-ho (Kim Jin-kyu) suffers from toothache but is loathe to spend the money to get it fixed. As well as his daughter Hye-ok he has a son who bunks off school to make money selling newspapers. His wife (Moon Jeong-suk, star of A Woman Judge) is pregnant. He’s ground down by the daily drudge of working at Kim Seong-guk’s Accounting Office.

As the Commander and the woman lieutenant drop out of the plot to enable the narrative to focus on the two brothers, it lurches towards something like A Day Off, part crime thriller and part noir angst in a world where any promise of a better life always has another, less pleasant side to it.

Perhaps this is best represented by the scene where, like those of the confused heroine of Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929) Cheol-ho’s feet walk the streets. His eyes pass shopfronts filled with consumer products he can’t afford before he succumbs to visiting a dentist and paying for a tooth extraction. Even then, he’s told he can only have one wisdom tooth removed per visit, so even that proves less than satisfactory. He slumps into a taxi but keeps changing his mind as to where he wants to go. He has become, as he describes himself, an aimless bullet. The film, by way of contrast, knows exactly what it’s aiming at and in its final scenes hits its target – that of showing the human cost of economic depression – head on.

The film is also known as The Stray Bullet, although given the script’s content Aimless Bullet seems a more apposite translation.

Aimless Bullet plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival.

Wednesday, November 13th, 18.30, Picturehouse Central, London – book here.

Monday, November 18th, 20.20, FilmHouse, Edinburgh – book here.

Tuesday, November 19th, 18.20, Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast – book here.

Saturday, November 23rd, 13.15, Home, Manchester – book here.

Watch the Festival trailer below:

Height Of The Wave (Pa-go)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A small island community where everyone knows everybody else. When she was a kid, Yae-eun’s parents were washed away by a wave some 15 feet high. Somehow she remained in the boat, survived and was adopted by a local fisherman (Park Jung-bum himself). However, she is understandably terrified of going anywhere near water or boats. When a new maritime police chief Nam Yeon-su (Lee Seung-yeon) arrives on the island, her daughter Song-yi (Choi Eun-seo) bonds with Yae-eun (Lee Yeon). Both mother and daughter are initially unaware that the island harbours a dark secret around the orphaned girl.

The new chief, feeling her way around, hears of problems with attacks by wild boar. We don’t see much evidence of this beyond one attacked calf carcass and a sequence in which one of the locals guides the police chief out of an area where the beasts are likely to attack. Between them they carry a sheet as, the local reckons, it’ll fool the boars with their poor eyesight into believing there’s a much larger creature there than them.

Chief Nam becomes concerned for Yae-eun who seems to disappear with boys at every opportunity and is overheard to say things like, “it’ll cost you a hundred” and “you still haven’t paid for last time”. There are a mere four young people on the island. They all live in close quarters and there isn’t much there to amuse them.

This is described as a mystery, but to be honest the script telegraphs what’s going on so early and so loud and clear that it doesn’t really work as such. Park was here working on a script by another writer which perhaps explains the overall lack of gritty visuals and the irritating tendency of the film to tell not show its information. Also, the project was originally intended for TV before being later expanded into the theatrical version shown here.

It’s rather more effective on the level of character study of not only the cop but also her daughter and the orphaned girl she befriends and her mum is investigating. There are also a couple of terrific sequences, one involving a teenager with a gun and, almost at the very end, another with Song-yi wading into the sea to encourage Yae-eun to follow her and overcome her fear of water.

Overall, though, this isn’t a patch on Park Jung-bum’s two earlier features which he also wrote himself with no impetus from television. Hopefully, it will turn out to be a minor blip on an hitherto promising career.

Height Of The Wave plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below: