Tag: Korea

Decision To Leave (Heojil Kyolshim)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

South Korea. City-based detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il from The Fortress, Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2017; The Host, 2006, Memories Of Murder, 2003, both Bong Joon ho) is married to a science nerd (Jung Yi-seo) who works at a nuclear plant in the seaside town of Ipo. Whatever sexual or romantic energy once existed between them has long since evaporated. She tolerates sex with him once a week on the grounds that research has shown it’s good for you and keeps you sharp, but she doesn’t appear to enjoy it much, going through the motions of a necessary chore. There doesn’t seem to be much more to this marriage for either of them than keeping up appearances. She lives and works in Ipo while he spends most of his working time away in the city, often going on nighttime stakeouts to observe suspects and forget about his habitual insomnia.

Which means that when Hae-joon finds himself investigating a case in which skilled amateur climber Ki Do-soo (Yoo Seung-mok from The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil, Lee Won-Tae, 2019; also The Host, Memories Of Murder) has fallen from a great height and the dead man’s Chinese-born wife Seo-rye (Tang Wei from Lust, Caution, Ang Lee, 2007) is a murder suspect, the detective is much more interested in her as a romantic subject than as a possible perpetrator, and this sensibility clouds his judgement. Eventually the case is closed, and she gets off scot-free, but the more time Hae-joon spends with her after this, and the more we see of her, the more likely it seems that she was the murderer.

The above constitutes what one might call the film’s first act. This first act and the subsequent second act, in which certain plot elements recur, recalls Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). In the second act, Hae-joon has moved to the seaside town presumably so that he can spend more time with his wife. One day the couple are wandering though the fish market where they run into Seo-rye, who by coincidence has likewise moved into the area, with her new and shady financial consultant husband in tow. The latter seems more keen than he should be to talk to Hae-joon’s wife and leaves her his card.

It turns out this second husband has a history as a scam merchant and has made a lot of enemies along the way. Before we get to know him much more, however, he turns up dead in his swimming pool. His wife could be responsible, but there is another suspect too, a victim of his sharp business practices, who looks more likely.

Rather than allowing all this to unfold in straightforward linear narrative fashion, director Park works in terms of layers and constantly jumps back and forth throughout. This is at once enthralling and infuriating to watch; enthralling because of the myriad of painstakingly worked out details piled on top of one another, infuriating because there is so much going on at any one time that it’s easy to lose track.

Things might make more sense on a second viewing, but equally they might simply prove as confusing as they did first time round. Without a second watch, it’s impossible to say. Nevertheless, it’s a very rich film, thoroughly engrossing; one to which, having seen it once, you’ll want to return.

Decision To Leave is out in cinemas from Friday, 21st October. On Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Curzon Home Cinema in March.

The Novelist’s Film (So-seol-ga-ui yeong-hwa)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

There are some huge changes in Hong Sangsoo’s filmmaking obsessions with The Novelist’s Film. Characters smoke e-cigarettes as opposed to regular ones, they wear/sort-of wear FFP2 masks in different poses and they are drinking makgeolli instead of soju. Otherwise, it’s another trip down the personal obsessions of one of the world’s most repetitive directors. If you’re already enamoured with his style, you’re in for a great time, but if you don’t like his work, you’re likely to get quickly bored. As I probably said last year. And the year before that.

One of the many in-jokes of Hong Sangsoo’s films is that the characters almost always seem to know each other well before they bump into each other: of course they do, they’ve been in the same films together over and over again! The Novelist’s Film starts outside a bookshop with the novelist Junhee (Lee Hyeyoung) having a smoke then walking and catching up with an old friend.

They sit and drink coffee, while Junhee explains how she has become bored of writing over and over again in a certain way. This sentiment is later echoed by a chance meeting with a filmmaker, another Hong doppelgänger, who adamantly states that he believes his work has changed. Having missed the chance to have her work adapted into a film by him, she meets his former muse Kilsoo (Kim Minhee), who she asks to star in her first ever film. And yes, they drink a lot, and the film finally ends, like The Woman Who Ran (2020) did, with Kim Minhee in a cinema alone, watching a film.

Why a novelist directing a film — a phenomenon that is not rare whatsoever — is presented as such a fascinating innovation with form is never really interrogated, but it’s worth pointing out that a Hong Sang-soo novel would be something I’d be first to read. Would it skew like Hemingway’s Iceberg-theory Short stories or the French nouveau roman? Given that the conventional novel is a place for evocating people’s inner lives, Hong Sang-soo is unlikely to turn in a Victorian or 19th century Russian style-epic anytime soon. His whole thing is highly cinematic, creating textures and ideas through performance, cutting, camera movement and lighting — but it’s an interesting thought experiment nonetheless.

As for the eponymous film itself, we catch glimpses of the 47-minute meisterwerk at a screening (previously attended by two (2!) critics and remarkably not even watched by the programmer of the cinema) by the end. It’s an even grainier and unfiltered work than what we’ve previously watched. And the storyline and themes are conspicuously absent. What does Kilsoo think as she finally walks out of the screening? We are never told. Hong, the ultimate, playful, trollish filmmaker, once again dances around the subject without facing it head on, inviting us to read between his Pinteresque pauses and excessively mannerized politeness.

Hong’s digital-aesthetic is even more bare bones that usual: you can count the number of cuts in the entire film with your hands, the black-and-white cinematography is super exposed with very high contrasts, and his characteristic zooms are sparsely deployed. When the director complains about finding funding, it shows in this work, which looks pretty cheap. Once again this is an actor’s showcase, a hangout study in art and life that is rich in nuance and line delivery. And leaning more funny than profound, this metatextual, stripped-down work is entertaining without ever reaching the heights of his best work.

All actors are on fine form, especially when their reserved nature and formal speech breaks down or is violently ruptured, resulting in more laughs than most genuine comedies at the Berlinale. But all the people laughing are film critics, the exact kind of people that have watched several Hong movies — especially at Berlinale, where he basically has a reserved competition slot — and revel both in the sameness and the ever-so-slight permutations. I never get too bothered when he has a slightly substandard, inconsequential work like this. He’ll be back next year. We’ll laugh once more. And probably make the exact same comments. And I’ll write another review.

The Novelist’s Film plays in competition at the Berlinale from February 10th to the 20th.

Black Light (Bit-Gwa Cheol)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

In the aftermath of an accident, it is human nature to want to fully understand exactly what happened. But what can you do when the key witness is in a coma, unlikely to wake up soon? This is the key issue that haunts Korean melodrama Black Light, which starts with a seemingly simple premise before adding multiple, often contradictory, layers.

Heejoo (Kim Si-eun) returns to her former home and returns to the same job she had in a factory before she got married to her late husband. She doesn’t seem to have it all together: a quiet, nervous woman, her fear of the past often leads her scurrying away from fearful situations. Then when she meets a canteen worker at the factory and the wife of the other man in the accident, Youngnam (Yum Hye-ran), she is forced to uncover the hidden secrets of the car crash which killed her husband.

Black Light gets more interesting as it goes along — indicting the factory and the local police force, as well as multiple supporting players, in what may or may not have happened. By the end, it seems like nearly everyone in the town has a part in what went on, making the film a complicated exploration of how the truth can be a slippery beast. Yet, appearing to have more perspectives on the central death than all three seasons of Twin Peaks, this multifaceted approach is both the film’s strongest and weakest points.

How many key reveals should a drama have? Conventional screenwriting suggests that you should save your reveal for near the end, thus creating a clever twist that makes you rethink what has come before. Black Light rips up conventional wisdom, delivering more “a-ha” moments than a season’s worth of Poirot. But when the revelations seem to go in multiple directions, it blurs both women’s perspectives together to create a blurry picture of what the truth really is.

The problem with this technique is that, while interesting from an academic standpoint, it ends up stripping these reveals from having any emotional power. Repetitious to a fault, it deadens the plot instead of enriching it. This is reflected in the style of the film too, with many confrontations shot in almost exactly the same way. Characters meet and are framed in a traditional two-camera shot. Then near the end of the scene, cinematographer Cho Wangseob cuts to a wide medium shot, with both characters balanced on either side of the frame. The style functions as a metaphor for the movie, which offers up both perspectives at multiple times before mashing them together.

I found myself pulled towards and away the film throughout its 107-minute runtime. On the one hand it’s a clever investigation of what the “truth” could be, told by unreliable, knotty protagonists, and handsomely mounted and acted. On the other, its repetitious and often melodramatic tone left me with little investment in what was going on. Evoking Burning in its enigmatic approach, it ultimately lacks that film’s haunting and imperceptible tension.

Black Light plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

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:

A Day Off (Hyuil)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Shot in stark black and white, this opens with a voice-over which immediately makes you think you’re watching a film noir. However, A Day Off is something else entirely – there are no cops or gangsters in sight, the narrative concerning instead a couple of doomed lovers and the opening voice-over bemoaning the hero’s meeting with his lover Ji-Yeon every Sunday. That said, it is all about poor people struggling to survive on Seoul’s mean streets and the main character is constantly cheating his fellow citizens or stealing money from them, so its subject matter is not entirely noir unrelated.

Heo-uk (Shin Seong-il, a huge star who also has a bit part in the earlier Bloodline a.k.a. Kinship, Kim Soo-yong, 1963) asks a consults a bird fortune-teller as to what the day will bring: her trained bird picks out a card warning him to Stay Away From Women. To get to his rendezvous with Ji-Yeon (Jeon Ji-youn) with scarcely any cash, he pulls a double con on a cab driver and a stall selling cigarettes to avoid paying his fare. Later, in dire need of money to pay a debt, he tries to wheedle it out of a drinking buddy. Later still, Heo-uk drops in on old school friend Gye-je so bored that he’s already had six baths that day and robs him of both the cash in his jacket pocket and the watch lying atop it before scarpering. This act will come back to bite him at the end when Gye-je catches up with him towards the narrative’s end and beats him up.

The main event, though, is the romance. Heo-uk meets Ji-Yeon in an alleyway and takes her to a deserted public park. It’s winter and there are no leaves on the trees. She talks about all the things they could have if only they weren’t so poor. They both berate themselves, He slaps her. It turns out she’s pregnant and needs the money to have what she coyly terms “an operation”. After robbing Gye-je, Heo-uk takes Ji-Yeon to the abortion clinic where the doctor warns him she wouldn’t be able to have the baby for health reasons and recommends an abortion. Once the operation is under way, Heo-uk goes to an up-market bar to get drunk and pick up the first woman he lays eyes on, the pair binge drinking their way through several bars before spending the night together on a building site.

Despite the weepy, romantic music when the couple are in the park together, this plays out as a brutal and hard hitting slice of life. Director Lee has an extraordinary eye and there’s always something going on visually – when the couple walk along the edge of the park, for example, the horizontals and verticals of the fencing preventing people from falling several feet into a ditch speak of inhuman, industrial production and an environment where people feel almost an afterthought. And towards the end, scenes of the hero walking in darkness are contrasted with visually far brighter images of him alone with his girlfriend in happier times.

The film is both utterly compelling and a real downer, showing as it does the human condition at its very worst and most meaningless. The South Korean authorities were not pleased: they demanded changes. When director Lee refused to make any, they refused the film a release. Now widely considered his masterpiece, it remained undiscovered until the Korean Film Archive unearthed it in 2005. When you see it, you’ll wonder why you’ve never heard of this film before. Absolutely unmissable.

A Day Off plays Regent Street Cinema, 02 Nov 2019 2:00 pm in The London Korean Film Festival (LKFF).

Wednesday, November 2nd, 14.00, Regent Street Cinema, London – book here.

Sunday, November 24th, 15.30, Home, Manchester – book here.

Watch the festival trailer below:

House Of Hummingbird (Beol-Sae)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Seoul, South Korea, 1994. Less than 10 years since South Korea has become a democracy. The year of the Winter Olympics, the death of North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and the Seongsu Bridge collapse. The latter incident will leave its mark on some of the characters here.

Teenager Eun-hee’s mum and dad (Jung In-gi and Lee Seung-yeon) run a small food store, sourcing “only the finest ingredients”. On occasion, they deliver to other suppliers and the whole family is roped in to make sure the orders are prepped and sent out on time. They are fiercely proud parents who want only the best for their kids. The best, as they understand it, is doing well in the school and university system, presumably with the idea of getting a well paid job afterwards.

This message is reinforced by her school. A male teacher has the girls chant, ” I will go to / Seoul National University / instead of karaoke”. He also gets his class to nominate the top two delinquents among them, defined as those who smoke or date instead of studying. Eun-hee is the top nominee. Or, as two of her classmates with a clear sense of privilege put it when talking about her, “dumb girls like that don’t make it to college and they become our maids”

.

Her brother Dae-hoon (Son Sang-yeon) is achieving good grades at school and looks set to go to university. He has a nasty side too: he periodically bullies and hits Eun-hee, making her home life a misery. Her sister Soo-hee (Park Soo-yeon) is out a lot and looks less devoted to academic work, on one occasion hiding in a cupboard to avoid their father.

Eun-hee herself (Park Ji-hoo) is an outsider who doesn’t really fit in at school. She likes to draw and wants to b a comic artist.

She has a boyfriend of sorts, schoolboy Kim Ji-wan (Jeong Yun-seo) who she tentatively gets to kiss her who is later dragged from her presence by his overbearing mother. A later same-sex romance with the shy Bae Yu-ri (Seol Hye-in) comes to nothing.

A lump under one ear will later cause her to be hospitalised.

Her parents send her to the local Chinese cram school, but that doesn’t motivate her academically until her teacher is replaced by university student Miss Kim Young-ji (Kim Sae-byuk), first seen smoking a cool cigarette on the school stairwell, who gets both Eun-hee and Calvin Klein clothing-obsessed fellow student Jeon Ji-suk (Park Seo-yun) to talk about themselves and their interests, the only person in the film to do so.

When the two students go shoplifting and get caught, Ji-suk reveals Eun-hee’s father’s name to the understandably incensed owner. It is Miss Young-ji to whom Eun-hee talks about the crime and in whom she subsequently confides, the one person in the film who brings her out of herself and gives her good advice, e.g. to stick up for herself when her brother beats her. Consequently, they become friends. And Eun-hee becomes vaguely aware, through titles on Miss Young-ji’s classroom bookshelf, of politics and such schools of thought as feminism.

It’s a bleak period picture of an emerging democracy where almost everyone seems to be focused on career at the expense of relationships or family. At the same time, though, it’s highly affecting as a sympathetic portrait of a teenage girl’s life which also exhibits an optimistic undercurrent in the character of a teacher who goes against the grain and shows a genuine interest in her pupils.

House Of Hummingbird plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below:

The Journals Of Musan (Musanilgi)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Jeon Seung-chul (writer-director Park Jung-bum) is a defector from Musan, North Korea trying to survive in the social underbelly of Seoul, South Korea. He has a badly paid makeshift job putting up fly-posters, operating on the fringes of the law. He dresses cheaply and is in need of a haircut.

He lives in the apartment of Kyung-chul (Jin Yon-guk), who occasionally brings women back for sex. His landlord has no scruples about shoplifting and also runs a lucrative scam in which other North Koreans give him money to send to North Korea.

Seung-chul reads his Bible in his room while listening to Christian worship music. He puts up with his flatmate’s pickups but draws the line when Kyung-chul takes him to a department store and steals a pair of trousers which Seung-chul wants. Seung-chul returns the pilfered item. He later alienates Kyung-chul by bringing a stray puppy home.

He attends a medium-sized Christian church on Sundays complete with pastor, robed choir and free after service meals. But he doesn’t know anyone there. The church fails the Biblical admonition that believers should welcome strangers into their midst because no-one there ever sits with Seung-chul or talks to him.

He likes a girl in the choir Young-sook (Kang Eun-jin) but she hasn’t noticed him and he can’t bring himself to talk to her. Stalking her, he learns she works running a sleazy karaoke bar where there’s a job vacancy. The twin prospect of more work and getting to know Young-sook better propel him to apply for and get the job.

The one person who appear to genuinely have Seung-chul’s best interests at heart is a cop, Detective Park (Park Young-dong), who tries to help him find better paying and more secure work. But it’s hard because Seung-chul’s ID number identities him as North Korean so no-one wants to employ him.

Shot in highly effective, long takes that really make you feel like you’re in its protagonist’s shoes, this is a slow yet compelling piece that really gets under your skin and marks out its director/ writer/ actor as a unique and articulate voice.

The film portrays a precarious existence. Various elements in Seung-chul’s insecure way of living threaten to collapse around him one by one. His fly-posting boss (Seo Jin-won) thinks his work is substandard and two thugs repeatedly beat him up for working on their turf. He falls foul of Young-sook when she finds him karaokeing to Christian choruses with the club hostesses. Then Kyung-chul’s scam unravels and the two men find themselves relentlessly pursued by three North Koreans he’s defrauded.

Made on a shoestring and breaking numerous conventions, this extraordinary independent movie is like a breath of fresh air. That’s perhaps because first-time director Park is working out how to shoot a feature as he goes along. Although things happen later on which to some extent redeem the way society and church characters here deal with the underclass, this is a searing indictment of their attitudes to some of Korea’s most vulnerable people.

Park’s second feature, the three hour long Alive (2014), plays in the LKFF on Tuesday. If it’s anywhere like as good as this debut, audiences are in for a treat.

The Journals Of Musan plays in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF). Watch the film trailer below:

And here’s the trailer(Korean, no subtitles) for his follow up film Alive – showing in the LKFF Tuesday, November 13th:

Tickets here.

Mothers (Dangshinui Bootak)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Hyo-jin (Im Soo-jung) and her stepson Jong-wook (Yoon Chan-yong) didn’t really know how to react when his father died. And they haven’t seen each other for around a decade. But now, the grandmother who’s been looking after the boy in the interim is no longer in any fit state to do so. So, would she be able to take the boy in?

It’s a good question. Hyo-jin’s already busy running an academy to teach teenagers and her assistant Mi-ran (Lee Sang-hee) is pregnant with another child. And Hyo-jin’s relationship with her own mother is hardly exemplary – it seems that whatever Hyo-jin does, her mother criticises or disapproves.

A further mother appears in the shape of a different female, Joo-mi (Seo Shin-ae), a friend of Jong-wook who is not exactly his girlfriend, more a companion. Initially, she gets on better with his mother than he does, for instance ringing Hyo-jin to let her know where her son is when he doesn’t want anything to do with his mother and won’t even call her.

Then Joo-mi announces she’s pregnant. Jong-wook is not the father. (We’ve seen no sign of any physical sexual activity between them). He likes the idea of parenting a child. She, on the other hand, thinks the child would be better off if adopted by a responsible family.

There is great potential here for exploring all manner of complex mother/daughter, mother/son, mother/foetus relationships and director Lee Dong-eun does so by complex, almost novelistic dialogue. The filmmaker has an extraordinary sense of flow about the way he shoots scenes with his excellent cast. This striking quality is one the passable but somewhat insipid trailer, with its much faster cutting, completely fails to convey.

Some of the difficult behaviour of the boy towards his mother is anticipated by her behaviour towards her own mother in earlier scenes. The way this is handled within the larger body of the narrative is extremely subtle, not at all forced and, consequently, most impressive. Jong-wook aside, since he plays quite a pivotal role in the proceedings, the male characters are largely peripheral with an assortment of female characters major and minor to the fore.

I’m not sure if this is a exactly ‘woman’s picture’, although it certainly contains much material of interest to women. Watching as a man, I found its situations drew me in while the deftly sketched characters held my attention. Its concerns may be undeniably feminine concerns, but at the same time they’re the sort that interest not only women but also men.

Mothers could so easily descend into mawkishness, sappiness or sentimentality, but it never does so and is all the better for it, opting instead to deal in intelligent observation of ordinary lives. That may have something to do with it being an independent rather than a mainstream Korean movie. Whatever, it makes for fascinating viewing.

Mothers plays in the London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:

Little Forest (Liteul Poreseuteu)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Raised in the countryside by her mother (Moon So-ri) but dissatisfied with life there, Hye-won (Kim Tae-ri) moves to Seoul and acquires a boyfriend. But after both of them have taken their exams, she returns to the village in which she grew up to get some space and think about her life.

The boyfriend has passed his exams and is hoping she has done the same, leaving messages on her voicemail to this effect, but she’s still waiting for her own result to come through. She doesn’t respond to his messages.

For reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, but which surface to a degree in the course of the narrative, her mother has left, presumably to start a new life now that the job of raising a well adjusted daughter is complete. She very much exists in Hye-won’s memories though, in which psychic location we she quite a bit of her onscreen, often interacting with Hye-won’s younger self as a little girl.

We also learn that her mum was a single parent after her husband died of an illness when Hye-won was small.

The girl doesn’t really miss the big city and there are compensations. There’s a boy Jae-ha (Ryu Jun-yeol) around her age who has returned from his travels to become a farmer and absolutely loves what he now does. And a girl Eun-sook (Jin Ki-joo) who works at the bank in the nearest town. The latter confesses to Hye-won her designs on the former and good-naturedly warns her to keep her hands off. The three of them spend a great deal of time together, either in pairs or as a trio.

The three-way friendship is genuinely engaging. It could very easily have been played as a love triangle but director Yim Soon-Rye never goes down this route and the film is arguably all the better for it. That was one of the reasons I personally liked this film even more than critical favourite Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) which has a UK distributor whereas, at the time of writing, this one sadly doesn’t. Running through the whole thing as a non-narrative thread is Hye-won’s cooking, a series of episodes of mouthwatering Korean food porn to make you drool. There have been other movies in this select category over the years: the Danish period drama Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987) and Taiwanese outing Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994) spring to mind.

In fact, the whole film is like a little taste – or numerous glimpses, culinary and otherwise – of paradise. That’s not just the food either – the three characters occupy a very attractive world that you can’t but help to want to live in. The pace of life is slow and moves with the seasons, the film starting off in Winter with snow on the ground and slowly working its way through the rest of the year. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching this in a movie, at least the way it’s done here. It’s a total slap in the face for the ‘get a steady boyfriend, conform’ ethos that to Western eyes seems to underpin feminine notions of Korean social mores.

The property was originally a 2002 manga in Japan by Daisuke Igarashi which spawned a two-part, Japanese big screen adaptation Little Forest: Summer/Autumn and its sequel Little Forest: Winter/Spring (both Junichi Mori, 2014). Judging by the new Korean version, it translates well between different Oriental cultures.

The result is gem which deserves to be picked up for a proper UK theatrical release. (Did I mention this before?) Not least because it may help more accurately redefine notions of manga here. Which in this case denotes rural existence, the passing of the seasons – and cookery.

Little Forest played in the 62nd BFI London Film Festival (LFF), where this piece was originally written. It can be seen again in the London Korean Film Festival (LKFF) on Saturday, November 3rd, 18.30 at the Rio Cinema, Dalston. Tickets here. Watch the film trailer below:

Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days (Singwa hamkke: Ingwa yeon)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When people die, they are taken to the world of the afterlife by specially designated guardians. Dead people undergo up to seven trials in 49 days in order to determine whether they will be reincarnated. That’s the basic premise of Korea’s Along With The Gods franchise.

The original film Along With The Gods: The Two Worlds (Kim Yong-hwa, 2017, pictured below) wowed audiences by piling on extraordinary set pieces exploring a series of hells and their attendant court chambers that comprise the afterlife. It also introduced the guardian captain Gang-lim (Ha Jung-woo), tormented by memories of his human life on Earth as a warrior in the Goryeo dynasty just over a thousand years ago, and his two sidekicks: one a young male warrior type Haewonmak (Ju Ji-hoon), the other motherly young woman Lee Deok-Choon (Kim Hyang-gi), both of whose earthly memories have been wiped.

This time round in Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days, the three guardians’ human charge is deceased soldier Kim Su-hong (Kim Dong-wook), accidentally shot in the original film by fellow soldier Won Dong-yeon (Do Kyung-soo) then buried by Won and his commanding officer Lieutenant Park (Lee Joon-hyuk). A suggestion here that Kim might not in fact have been dead at the time of his burial is echoed in 1,000-year-old flashbacks of Gang-lim hinting he may have similarly failed to rescue his warrior king father from beneath a pile of battlefield corpses.

Pleading for soldier Kim, the two assistant guardians are forced to return to Earth to capture renegade guardian Sung-ju (Ma Dong-seok) whose self-imposed exile in the house of a grandfather has prevented the latter’s ascension to the afterlife. This forces the film to juggle an effects-laden journey through vast otherworldly landscapes with a more parochial, comic story based around a house and its immediate courtyard area lacking the same epic scale.

Sung-ju reveals the two guardian assistants’ past histories. They lived on Earth at the same time as their captain, effectively throwing in a further plot of a wintry historical epic about warrior sibling rivalry and a homeless girl caring for a group of orphans.

It might be less well balanced overall, but this second film nevertheless achieves some very impressive, state of the art visual set pieces, among them immersion in a sea of biting flying fish, a journey across a burning rock field disgorging humanoid lava monsters and a Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993, and sequels) homage featuring velociraptors, a T. Rex and a mosasaurus. Yet at the same time it delights in throwing in constant narrative complications with scant regard for character development making it all too easy to drown in multiple plot details.

Like its arguably superior predecessor, Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days been a massive hit in its native Korea. Marvel-type teaser scenes at the end suggest plans for further franchise instalments (there are apparently two more films already in the pipeline) and it all works well enough as visual spectacle or lightweight, popcorn entertainment. However, given the good and dirty idea of people coming to terms with the consequences of their past actions nestling at the margins of the script, it’s a crying shame more couldn’t have been been done with that element on a par with the extraordinary visuals.

Along With The Gods: The Last 49 Days was shown as a London East Asia Film Festival teaser and is out in selected cinemas across the UK on Thursday, August 16th. Watch the film trailer below:

https://vimeo.com/281567990

Two Doors (Doo gae-eui moon)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The story of the Yongsan tragedy. Yongsan is an area of Central Seoul which had been the site of a US military base and the infrastructure such as bars and prostitution which had grown up around it. Once the US military decamped to another area, the developers hoped to move in and regenerate the area. For ‘regenerate’ read ‘gentrify’, a situation not entirely unfamiliar in parts of the UK at present. In Yongsan, when some tenants in one particular housing block refused to move out, activists seized on this and helped stage a protest.

Instead of listening to their grievances as the protesters would have hoped, the authorities surrounded the block with police whose presence only served to aggravate the protesters into throwing firebombs. The police subsequently stormed the building with intent to remove the protesters who barricaded themselves inside and whose last stand would take place in a lookout structure on the roof of the building.

With water cannon concentrated on both the block and the lookout, a SWAT team was lowered onto the roof in a container carried by a crane and the protesters retreated into the lookout. Tensions were high on both sides when the lookout suddenly burst into flames. The ensuing inferno claimed the lives of five protesters and one police officer. Initially, no-one was quite sure what had happened.

A court case followed. It concluded that the police operation had been necessary to uphold the rule of law and incarcerated four protesters who’d managed to survive the fire.

The Pinks film making collective didn’t think these arguments were good enough and set out to make a documentary about the incident. The surviving protesters being in prison weren’t available for interviews, so all the filmmakers had to work with was the footage shot by journalists and police at the incident plus audio recordings of the trial. There are also a few interviews of people on the protesters’ side.

Out of these limited materials came an extraordinary film. You feel like you’re watching the tragedy unfold in real time with commentary after the event trying to piece together exactly what happened. What emerges for a viewer unfamiliar with recent Korean political history is a terrifying picture of a repressive, right wing regime where ordinary people are stamped on in no uncertain terms.

The police going inside the building and the SWAT team airlifted in by container are clearly under extreme pressure. This is one of those cinematic experiences where you believe one group (the police) to be in the wrong, yet at the same time they’re in an impossible situation and you feel for their plight. That doesn’t render their actions right, correct or good, but it does in some sense put you alongside them and elicit a degree of sympathy.

As documentaries go, this is a must see and whilst it obviously would have a particular resonance for a South Korean audience, for an international one it transcends such concerns with its picture of a repressive regime and the toll exacted from those charged with maintaining it on the ground. Although it’s a very different situation, UK residents will recall the Grenfell Tower tragedy too.

Two Doors plays in the London Korean Film Festival. A follow-up film The Remnants was made by the Pinks film making collective five years later and is also showing at the Festival.