Tag: Jesus

Bloodline (Hyeol-maek)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Widower of some three years standing Kim An-dong (Kim Seung-ho) has done alright for himself in the mining business in Hokkaido, but now it’s after the Second World War, the occupying Japanese have been thrown out of Korea and he’s come back to Seoul where he lives with his grown up son Kim Geo-buk (Shin Seong-il, the lead in A Day Off, Lee Man-hee, 1968, and a huge Korean star).

The Kims are one of three families in a ramshackle set of basic houses sharing a courtyard. Ggangtong (Choi Nam-hyun) lives with his wife Ongmae (Hwang Jung-seun) and daughter Bok-sun (Um Aing-ran) to whom Geo-buk has taken a shine. Ggangtong’s first wife having died, Ongmae is the girl’s stepmother and is teaching her to sing bar songs so she can make herself and the girl’s father a lot of money via prostitution. The girl is understandably upset about this and instead goes out with Geo-buk to sell socks to soldiers at the nearby U.S. Army base where his dad, seeing the Americans as the most secure source of income in the area, wants him to get a job. Sitting by the railway at night, the young couple talk about getting work in the textile factory at Yeongdeungpo as a possible route out of their economic troubles.

The third family comprises two brothers, one married, one unmarried. The older Won-pal (Shin Young-kyun) makes a meagre living out of scavenging bomb parts left over from the war. His wife (Lee Kyoung-hee), meanwhile, is extremely ill but Won-pal has no money to pay any doctor to even examine her, let alone find a cure, so she lies on the floor all day, barely moving. There’s a suggestion that the physical disabilities of both his wife and young daughter (Lee Gyeong-rim) have been caused by his ill-judged attempts to make money.

Won-pal‘s younger brother Won-chil (Choi Moo-ryong) went to university in Japan and has come back with the desire to write novels, “as if that’s going to put anything on the table”, as his infuriated older brother comments. When Won-chil is around, the pair seem to argue constantly. Their mother (Song Mi-nam) takes refuge in singing Christian hymns, citing Jesus’ words about “in my father’s house are many mansions” – pretty ironic given the family’s cramped housing conditions. If any other members of the family share her faith, they don’t show it.

Won-chil has been trying to find paying work – but nothing has come of it. He’s also having problems with the girl he likes, Ok-hui (Kim Ji-mee). To survive, she is having a relationship with an American soldier since the G.I.s seem to be the only people around with a decent income. Meanwhile, one Madam Hwasan interests An-dong in buying from her a 29 year old potential bride, a refugee who has come down from the North (where the Chinese communists are in power). The economy is on its knees and the sex trade in its various forms seems to be one of the few areas that’s flourishing economically.

There is a bright light on the horizon, however, in that the young couple eventually get jobs at the textile factory and are seen as facing an optimistic future together, so much so that Geo-buk writes to ask both fathers to come and visit them there. It’s as if the film is trying to paint a rosy picture of Korea going forward, particularly through its young, post-war generation. There’s a lot of darkness here, but the country is going to move out of it and everything’s going to be all right. After some of the bleak material earlier, you wonder if the happy ending is just that little bit too pat. Nevertheless as a picture of the immediate post-war period in Korea made about a decade and a half later on, it serves as fascinating viewing today.

The film is also known under the English title Kinship.

Bloodline plays Regent Street Cinema, 03 Nov 2019 2:00 pm in The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Book here. Watch the Festival trailer below:

Metalhead (Málmhaus)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tragedy befalls a rural Icelandic farming family when son Baldur (Óskar Logi Ágústsson), summoned for dinner by younger sister Hera (Diljá Valsdóttir), falls off the tractor into the threshing device he’s towing. A chunk of flesh comes off and there’s a surprisingly small amount of blood. The sequence is not perfect: had it been far more explicit with more blood, gore and medical detail, that would have fitted with the film’s subsequent investment in the excesses of heavy metal music.

The family predictably goes into shock and at the church funeral Hera glowers at a painting of Jesus. She deals with her loss by (1) adopting her brother’s metal band T-shirts, leather jackets and trousers (which, unbelievably, fit her perfectly) and burning all her own, very ordinary, young girl’s clothes, (2) listening to his heavy metal record collection and (3) playing metal riffs on his guitar and amp. She tries to leave the area for Reykjavik, but at the stop can’t bring herself to board the bus. After a few years, Hera is still living in the area as a metal-obsessed and -garbed teenager (Thora Bjorg Helga) and the guitar has inexplicably turned into a Flying V.

Neither of Hera’s parents have coped well. Her mum Droplaug (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) retains the dead boy’s room as if he were still alive while her dad Karl (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) blames himself for not putting a cover on the driveshaft. They’re pretending everything’s fine when it really isn’t and their relationship has grown cold. They’re also failing to meet the spiritual/emotional needs of their teenage daughter – not the easiest of tasks at the best of times and one made much worse by all three surviving family members’ repression of their tragedy.

Subplots involve Hera’s childhood friend Knútur (Hannes Óli Ágústsson) whose platonic relationship soon turns more physically sexual and newly arrived parish priest Janus (Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson) who bonds psychically with the girl when she learns he not only likes all the bands she does but also has a metal tattoo on his shoulder. The latter wisely rejects her attempts to throw herself at him.

The film has a few glimmering moments. An early meal time scene has mother glower at daughter while some tomato sauce hangs off the edge of Hera’s plate like blood in a still from an unmade horror film festering in the back of the writer-director’s mind. And the hand of a small kid in a metal T-shirt makes a respectful Sign of the Horns to Hera in a local shop.

There is much to admire in the portrait of a small village where community and Christian religion are woven together to everyone’s benefit, although viewers may wince at the way when Hera moves in with Knútur she suddenly abandons the leather jackets in favour of the more conservative woolly jumpers and outdoor weather jackets that everyone else wears. As if to say, in this community you need to conform, it’s unacceptable to be that little bit different.

Metalhead is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection.

Jesús

Posted on by victorfraga

This is Jesus like you’ve never seen before: he’s in an amateur k-pop band, he’s arrogant, he’s insecure, he’s violent, he’s bisexual and he has a very stormy relationship with his father. And unlike the Christian Messiah, he does not save and redeem people. Quite the opposite: he murders instead. Our protagonist here is the antithesis of the citizen any society would cherish and value.

Jesús (Nicolás Durán) is an 18-year-old “lazy bone” (as described by his friends) who leads an empty and hedonistic existence in Santiago of Chile: he dances, he takes drugs, he watches trashy television and he has sex in public places. He lives with his father, with whom he barely communicates except when he chastises his son for his behaviour and lifestyle. One day Jésus and three friends (one of which happens to be his occasional sex partner) brutally torture and kill a young gay man called Gonzalo in a park, in a morbid display of homophobia and feigned masculinity. The four men take enormous pleasure in their misdeed; it’s as if they discharged their sexuality through violence.

In reality, Fernando Guzzoni intended his film to centre around the father and son relationship, as a metaphor of his country’s turbulent political landscape. While he was writing his film script in 2012, the homophobic murder of Daniel Zamudio by four males – including a bisexual man and a Michael Jackson impersonator – shook his country, and so he decided to incorporate a murder under very similar circumstances in his movie. He replaced Daniel with Gonzalo, and the Michael Jackson impersonator with a k-pop dancer. And he retained the fact that at least one of the perpetrators of the homophobic crime had homosexual tendencies.

One of the most memorable and symbolic moments of the film is when Jésus cuts his hand with a knife, then proceeds to clean it and bathe in a local creek. Is it just his hands that are dirty, or is his whole body muddied with self-hatred? Can he wash his crime away? Can he cleanse himself of his homosexual tendencies?

The director did stumble across one problem when changing his movie script to include the homophobic crime. The infamous murder diluted the father-son relationship, which was originally intended to be the main story. The metaphor with the political landscape is pretty much absent, and the film instead became a social statement. Perhaps this was intentional.

Jesús is not easy and light watching. The violence is graphic and prolonged, serving as a painful reminder that homophobia is, quite literally, alive and kicking. This is not the only Chilean film to deal with the sadistic murder of Daniel ZamudioÇ last year the rock star Álex Anwandter directed You’ll Never Be Alone – click here for our review of the film. It’s remarkable that Chile is using cinema in order to atone for its homophobic transgressions.

The recent transphobic murder of transsexual woman Dandara in Brazil (which was filmed and published online) has caused indignation both in the Latin American country and the world. Let’s hope that the largest country in Latin America reacts to this barbarous crime in the same way as Chile: using cincme as a tool to remember and to denounce such gratuitous violence and the lives cut short.

Jesus is showing right now at the BFI Flare London LGBT Film festival, when this piece was originally written.

Watch Jesus online now, with DMovies and Eyelet: