Tag: husband

Husband

Posted on by victorfraga

A promising British author’s career is being tested when her husband is tasked with playing the emotional spouse that has nominally been played by a woman. Devorah Baum balances her burgeoning success with a tricky family life, a scenario that’s made even dicier due to a prying camera that records every move. Yet this is a worthwhile experiment, because it documents the fragility of the male spirit, demonstrating an avenue that her husband – and every husband – could follow.

If you’ve been slacking in gender studies, you’ll have to make up your own opinion on the album, because the film doesn’t necessarily offer a suitable idea, but aims to create a dialogue men and women can engage in critically. What the film offers is a portrait of a marriage in full flow, capturing the pair in many guises. To some, they are two interesting individuals bringing their life philosophies into a marital pot; to others, she is a bright, vibrant woman who is enjoying the fruits of her success; and then there’s Josh Appignanesi who comes as a brilliant man, caught on a wave that is largely his partner’s creation.

One way or another, Baum and Appignanesi perpetuate stereotypes thought to be antiquated for a 21st century audience, yet they’re remarkably progressive in other areas. Better still, they genuinely seem to love each other, which is evident from the embrace they share at an airport. In many ways, the film is evocative of the brave work John Lennon and Yoko Ono were willing to showcase to the world, exposing marriage as both an exciting outlet and an institution that needs to be worked on if it wishes to survive. Husband is a brave film that flits between fiction and friction, culminating in a product that’s tense but deeply watchable, even if it asks audiences to journey with a couple they may not be particularly familiar with.

Behind the couple, a third character enters. It’s neither a child nor an adult, but a city looming over the pair, that’s as sparky and nuanced as the love they are attempting to grow. It’s New York, a beguiling, bewildering city that boasts a looming shadow over everyone who walks underneath it. As if responding to the towers over them, the couple remember their place in life, structuring their feelings to tailor to the present. New York will stand after you and I have finished our earthly journeys, but the love (or perception of it) depends on the commitment of the people behind it.

Husband is in cinemas and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, February 10th.

Goryeojang

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Over fifty years old, Goryeojang is sadly available as only a print with two reels (three and six) missing. The LKFF screened the version where the missing scenes are explained by a brief series of intertitles so that the rest of the film can make sense. It’s a tough film to pigeonhole. A description like period drama, which genre it absolutely fits, proves woefully inadequate as a description. To a Western viewer, it plays out like a classic fairy tale with archetypal characters and considerable amounts of cruelty. The art direction is light years away from any sort of social realism with its rural sets obviously artificially constructed in a studio, recalling (to name but one obvious example) The Singing Ringing Tree (Francesco Stefani, 1957).

The concept of Goryeojang – taking your elders up a mountain when they reach 70 so that they can face death – is central to the world conjured here and all the characters accept the idea as part of their fate. This idea introduced in an opening, present day, TV discussion programme which is never referred to again in the film (perhaps the payoff came in one of the missing reels). Everything else takes place in Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392). Keum (Ju Jeung-ryu) has remained in the village past her 70th birthday not out of some desire for self-preservation and longevity which we in the materialist West would recognise, but rather because her adult son Gu-ryong (Kim Jin-kyu) isn’t yet married and she wants to make sure that happens for him before she goes away to die.

Throughout the narrative a lady shaman loiters around the village’s sacred tree enacting strange songs and rituals to ensure local life proceeds according to tradition as it should. Early on, she prophesies to young mum Keum that the latter’s son will eventually kill the ten sons of the man Keum plans to marry, a prophecy which will overshadow everything that follows.

While her new husband in question is kind enough to her young son Gu-ryong, the former’s ten sons prove considerably less charitable and set the boy up in a game of blind man’s bluff wherein, while the boy is blindfolded, they place a venomous snake in his path which bites his leg when he unwittingly walks into it. This leaves the boy crippled.

Twenty years later as an adult, the boy has become socially ostracised as no able-bodied woman will marry him. He’s also done rather well for himself causing considerable enmity between him and his ten stepbrothers. When Gu-ryong eventually marries a mute, they kidnap and gang rape her, leaving him on his own again. Later, he adopts a young girl with a pockmarked face Ye-on, another outcast who like Gu-ryong didn’t fit in with their former cruel siblings.

With the area in the grip of hunger caused by drought, the lady shaman insists that Gu-ryong must take Keum up the mountain and leave her there to appease the gods who will then send the much-needed rain.

Sequences such as the blind man’s buff/snake episode, the gang-rape of the mute and, most particularly, the late scene at the mountain top where Gu-ryong must abandon the aged Keum to her fate lodge in the memory of the viewer. The latter sequence delivers a place littered with human skulls and bones across which Gu-ryong traverses back and forth as he tries to leave but his mum keeps finding last words to say or suggestions to make before he leaves her forever. Director Kim milks this for all it’s worth, yet the performances are so heartfelt and the material so disturbing that it really gets under your skin. Most of Kim’s films are set in the present day, so the period historical nature of this one is something of an exception. The sex, violence and cruelty of the narrative is, however, in keeping with many of his other films, as is the almost fairy tale like quality.

Goryeojang is sometimes also known as Burying The Old Alive.

Ieoh Island (1987) Director: Kim Ki-young, Tuesday, 12 November⋅18:15 ICA, book here.

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

A US Blu-ray of Goryeojang is released by the Korean Film Archive on November 14th. Available here.