Tag: Korean

The Beast

Posted on by victorfraga

The bomb disposal specialist said: “You never know what somebody might tell you. When they think you’re somebody else”.

The works of Elmore Leonard came to mind when watching Jung-Ho Lee’s crime thriller of familiar territory. Leonard wasn’t a filmmaker, but his novels read like he could’ve easily been one, or for that matter, an American variant to Jean-Pierre Melville. He had a seamless swift. The crime wasn’t so much the fuel of the narrative, it was more so the spirit of the crime, and the temporal proceeding between cops and killers. The characters were regular day-to-day people, behaving within and without the nature of their lives and in midst of a prolonging episode that may, by narrative arc standards, reform them. That line of dialogue from the specialist, Mankowski, echoed for every scene featuring both Jeong Han Min-Tae (Yoo Jae-Myung), and Jeong Han-Soo (Lee Sung-Min), two opposing cops with distraught pasts solving a murder.

Tae and Soo aren’t necessarily different, they’re two hard-boiled cops who cautiously break the law in order to seize it all. They both want a promotion, and whoever solves the grisly murder of a 17-year-old girl, first, will find themselves up above from the rest. In this hunt, it’ll be revealed Tae and Soo aren’t who they say they are, one attracts tabs from prior negotiated thugs, the other uses the template for licit rulings to manipulate the strategy of the other’s squad unit’s attempt at barricading members of a gang.

None of this is really as important as the murder, itself. Which, for a good 90 minutes of the film, descends in a threading of countless subplots. We’re introduced to a shady informant (Ho-jung Kim, from Kwon-taek Im’s Hwajang), and a sergeant (Daniel Choi) whose fate in an Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2004) inspired raid sequence determines the ties between Tae and Soo’s unit squad.

For the most part, The Beast isn’t a boring film. It is lengthy at its 132-minute mark but weighs in a lot of unnecessary action that could’ve been an opportunity to refine the two leads. There’s nothing singular in their nature other than both men must have this promotion for the sake of their own credibility and as a sentiment towards the commitment they’ve given for careers that have made them wallowed in despair. So much happens in this film for it to be boring, however none of what’s happening measures the significance of the originated crime. These characters only speak plot, their motives only serve the following moment, it is energetic and alive in its pacing, yet this is more of a ‘by-the-books’ within genre and plot.

What’s missing here is a sense of personality. Lee Jung-Ho has the pieces for a much more complex narrative put into one – not two, or four, or 10 storylines. The ambition by idea and vision gets in the way of a potentially well rounded arc between two rivals of similar notions regarding their own eventual vices. Both Lee Sung-Min and Jeong Han-Soo are experienced and formidable actors who give this straightforward material edge, while sparing the viewers of their own pedantic colloquy and moody facades we’ve seen so redundantly tried in American noir dramas like True Detective. The initial prognosis of The Beast, is every dog has its day. By the climax, none of the violence and the deception really have any meaning behind where both cops emotionally route to. That is to say at least the violence of this film has a blench effect only such violent South Korean films are capable of achieving.

This is not in the means of the choreography (as the kind of choreographed fighting is nothing particularly of sensation), but in the very barbaric and raw beatdowns several characters endure from Tae and Soo’s wrath. Broken teeth, faces being scrapped against a cemented stonewall, noses gushing against barstools, and the rotting ligaments of the murdered victim. The Beast is a visual splendor for the modernist new wave of South Korean noirs that lacks a distinction when set amongst other thrillers of this genre such as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2003), A Bittersweet Life (Kim Jee-woon, 2006) and I Saw the Devil (Jee-woon, 2011). But almost like any of the relentlessly released juniors of this cinema, Jung Ho-Lee’s film comes from a place of ambition and a ferocious endeavour to keep this pulp desaturation of hard crime to prevailing existence. This is his directorial debut (starting out as a screenwriter for the 2017 Sik Jung and Hwi Kim’s period crime piece The Tooth and the Nail), so all he needs is a script of evolving and involving characters that are not traditionally mechanics of the auto-pilot syndrome. Characters who, for instance, like the character Chris Mankowski of Leonard’s world, who have an opinion on almost anything than just what’s there.

What his directorial debut The Beast further showcases, is the great potential he’d make for a mini series of similar means. There’s perhaps a story there nuanced of the fight and stillness these two cops inhibit, and a plot exposed to an enigma of the National Police Agency.

The Beast is available on VoD on Monday, April 6th.

Coming Home Again

Posted on by victorfraga

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM THE TALLINN BLACK NIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

This is no one’s idea of a happy return. Chang-rae (Justin Chon) has a promising job and career in New York. His mother regrets that he left and hardly visits his parents in San Francisco. The family migrated from Korea when our protagonist/scriptwriter was just three years old. One day the young and bright writer does return, but there are hardly reasons to celebrate. His mother is dying with stomach cancer. The chemotherapy isn’t working and the tumour is quickly methastasising. Chang-rae wishes to bond with his still young and good-looking mother. They have to bond mostly through pain, as there is virtually no joy in terminal cancer.

The latest movie by 70-year-old Hong Kong-American writer Wayne Wang zigzags back in time to before and after his mother was diagnosed with cancer. The healthy and vibrant female is contrasted with her bald and ailing version, as she experiences the symptoms of very intense chemotherapy. Chang-rae notes that the disease is particularly cruel because it prevents her from eating. Food is central not just to Korean cinema, but also to Korean culture as a whole. There is abundant kimchi, yache twigim and noddles throughout the film. Food of a token of love. We learn that mother used to make delicious kalbi, and she taught her son that “the meat should always stay attached to the bone”. Her teaching acquires a tragic symbolism as she succumbs to the fatal disease.

In the film’s most powerful sequence, Chang-rae attempts to make kalbi on New Year’s eve for his mother, father and sister. At this stage, mother has requested that all chemotherapy should stop and she should receive palliative care instead. Chang-rae and his sister struggle to acquiesce the impending death. Mother is far more accepting of her fate. It becomes clear that wanting to protect and hang on to the loved ones is sometimes a gesture of selfishness. Her children’s altruistic yet erratic behaviour only serves to increase her pain.

We also learn about the moment mother first experienced symptoms of cancer, during a car journey with her husband. He stopped the vehicle so that she could throw up. Despite not being present, that event became fossilised in Chang-rae’s mind. He shudders with fear and raises a number of questions every time he sees two people huddled up in a car parked on the roadside. Could one of these people be about to experience the same fate as his mother? A very accurate depiction of trauma by proxy.

Based on an essay by Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee himself, Coming Home Again is cinema at its most raw personal. Plus a fine example of cinema as a healing tool, for a wound that Chang-rae left open for a long time. This is particularly difficult viewing for me because losing my mother – who also lives very far away and has battled with cancer – is my very greatest fear in life. Coming Home Again reminded me of the unbreakable bond between mother and son, and of unchallengeable nature of impermanence. A must-see.

Coming Home Again just premiered in Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, which is taking place right now.

Parasite (Gi-sa-end-chung)

Posted on by victorfraga

A small family of four lives in a shoddy basement flat in an impoverished district of South Korea. They face unemployment, and the future does not looks bright. They steal wi-fi from their neighbours. They panic when the password is changed, leaving them disconnected from the rest of the world. But that isn’t their one “parasitic” action. All four are con artists. One by one, they take up highly qualified jobs with a super-rich family, which also consists of four members. They are very well-spoken and manipulative. Their bosses never suspect that there’s something wrong with their highly “diligent” workers. These impostors are also extremely charming. Your allegiance is guaranteed to lie with them.

Firstly, the son Ki-woo (Wook Shik-choi) forges an Oxford diploma and takes up a job as an English teacher for the family’s teenage daughter Da-hye (Jung Ziso). Eventually, he also seduces her. Then the cynical daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam) becomes an art teacher and therapist for the family’s young son Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun). She demands that her bosses never interrupt her “lessons”. The father Ki-taek (Song Hang-ho) becomes a family driver after Ki-jung plants some knickers in the family car, getting the previous driver sacked. Last but not least, the mother Ghung-sook (Hyae Jin-chang) becomes the housemaid after after their loyal employee Moon-gwang (Jeong-eun Lee) is fired, following an cunning plan to make her look infected with TB.

The wealthy boss Mr Park (Sun Kyun-Lee) is kind and polite, while his wife Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong) is as gullible as one can be. Like a gaslighting victim in the Hollywood films from yore. Their mansion is beyond extravagant, with lavish furniture and enormous glass walls facing an ostentatious garden. It reminded me of the house in A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971), plus a few Korean items. Their money is so abundant that they splash it on a luxury tent for youngest son, who has suddenly become obsessed with American Indians. They epitomise a lifestyle that’s empty and futile in its essence, and yet envied by most South Koreans.

There is also an enormous dungeon complete with corridors and bedrooms. A little bit like Josef Fritzl’s basement. Its entrance is concealed behind an enormous larder, and the house owners seem completely unaware of its existence. One day the old housemaid Moon-gwang returns claiming that she has “forgotten” something. She reveals to the four scammers (who are throwing a little party in the house because the house owners went camping) that her husband has been living there for more than four years, hiding from shark loans.

Failed capitalistic dreams, invidiousness and consumerism are at the heart of his creepy little tale. This 132-minute movie is an extended riff on the pitfalls of a fast-growing economy with little regard for the least advantaged. South Koreans are becoming increasingly materialistic, competitive and aggressive. They are are prepared to cheat, to swindle and to wheedle their way up the socioeconomic ladder, where their can enjoy and boast their social status.

Overall, Parasite is a fast-paced comedy of the absurd with a few ingredients of a thriller thrown in. It has some very peculiar moments, including an awkward sex scene between Mr Park and his wife (with our adorable scammers hiding underneath the sofa), and a very major flood in the district inhabited by Ki-taek’s family (with dirty water gushing from the toilets). Poverty is nasty and murky. So stay away from it. The final part of the film, however, is a little redundant, with the plot suddenly descending into grisly violence. It feels a little directionless and gratuitous. Still, there are plenty of dirtylicious moments to enjoy.

Parasite premiered at the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It won the Palme d’Or, in an unanimous decision by the jury. It then became the first foreign-language movie ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture. The film was also a bit hit with film critics and industry delegates alike. Very few people had reservations.

It’s out in cinemas across the country on Friday, February 7th. On VoD on Monday, June 1st.

Parasite is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

The Return

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The plight of Koreans adopted by foreigners who take them far away from the land of their birth is the subject of this Danish-Korean co-production, the first feature by Malene Choi. It’s basically in English, with parts in Danish (with English subtitles) and parts in Korean (with no subtitles, that language not being spoken by the film’s Korean-born, Danish-bred characters).

It all starts with strange, disconcerting electronic sounds and equally unsettling images such as a person disappearing through a door which closes behind them, the shot trimmed in such a way as to leave almost none of the frames of the disappearing person in the shot. Or a woman, who we’ll later discover to be Karoline (Karoline Sofie Lee), viewed from behind as she trudges through lower leg deep mud on a beach (an image which, by accident or design, reminded me of the similarly apocalyptic image towards the start of fellow Dane Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, 2011).

Karoline has left the Denmark she knows from her upbringing to travel to South Korea where she was born to try and find her birth parents. She checks in to a hostel which functions as a temporary base for birth Koreans adopted in other countries trying to track down their parents. She bonds with Thomas (Thomas Hwan) who, like her, was adopted by Danish parents.

Thomas, who is not new to this process as Karoline is, advises her after a frustrating visit to a Holt International Children’s Services (HICS) office where a lady who works there gives Karoline the runaround. It’s not clear whether the lady hasn’t checked hospital records because, as she claims, such records are rarely kept, or because she can’t be bothered, or because it’s somehow against some unwritten law of Korean culture to ask for such things.

Whatever, our female protagonist finds the whole experience frustrating, even harrowing. Thomas advises her that people who threaten such functionaries with their refusal to leave often get told the information they seek. Interestingly, the charity employee is a real life one, the scene staged presumably with her not being told the two actors were actors so that she would treat them like real life adoptees.

This brings us to a fascinating aspect of the film. Its director and many of its actors, including the two leads, are Korean adoptees to other countries (Denmark in the case of the director and her two leads). The script was based on Choi’s own experiences searching for her Korean birth parents. She then encouraged her cast to improvise, drawing on their own experiences of their searches for their families. Serial vox pops with one young woman feel like she’s recounting her own personal experiences. You feel like you’re watching documentary and fiction rolled into one – a most unsettling experience…and yet it works.

Thomas has considerably more luck with his own search and takes Karoline along to meet his mother. In a remarkable single shot scene, son and mother communicate on a very deep level eating a meal she has prepared, despite not sharing the same verbal language and without anything so clichéd as a hug. The effectiveness of this scene is is down in no small part to the extraordinary performance of the actress playing his mother.

Altogether, this is a remarkable, heartbreaking film likely to resonate with anyone adopted into a foreign culture trying to trace their birth family, or even people adopted without the trauma of being sent abroad.

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

Burning (Beoning)

Posted on by victorfraga

What do we burn for? Is the question at the heart of Lee Chang Dong’s latest, an extended masterpiece that meditates on the transience of identity, voyeurism, and a changing South Korea. But the Hitchcock of it all, might come as a surprise.

Yoo Ah-in plays Lee, an aspiring writer who begins a fling with a Shin (Jeon Jong-seo), a girl he once bullied in high school. He soon moves out of Seoul and back to his father’s farm, where propaganda alerts from Pyongyang echo from across the border. In a nation that, Dong suggests, increasingly revolves around city life, his family duty has him tethered to a liminal Korean zone.

When Shin returns from a trip to Africa to awaken her ‘Great Hunger’, it’s with a new man in town, and that’s where Dong lights a stick of dynamite that takes two hours to go off. Soon we realise that Lee’s obsession with Shin has become irrevocably linked with her new squeeze, Ben, a wealthy yuppie who espouses Übermensch philosophy and cooks pasta while listening to Jazz (this is based on a Murakami story, after all).

For a long time, Burning resides in Shadow of A Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) territory, as we contemplate Yuen’s guilt in a crime that may or may not have taken place. In fact, the “wrong man” theme is recurring in Hitchcock’s films.. Casting Steven Yeun (from the television series The Walking Dead) as a man who has seemingly rejected Eastern ideals in favour of a western-capitalist version of himself is a stroke of genius. The Korean-American actor gives a brilliant, balanced performance, playing him straight down the middle.

But then Burning veers into a detour that’s all Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), as Lee’s busted pick-up truck tails Ben’s sports car. It is one of the most breathtaking sequences of the year. When we think of the Hollywood directors that return again and again to Hitchcock, like De Palma or Verhoeven, they often take the technical bravado as a way of entering their characters’ psychology. Dong approaches that psychology straight on, through rigorous handheld camerawork that wouldn’t be out of place in more social realist dramas. But that’s how he sneaks this rising tension up on you.

Burning doesn’t just explore his characters’ desires, it manages to make them stand in for a search for a new Korean identity. Small elements, like the way each character holds a cigarette, or the interrogatory looks that the trio share, almost seem to provide an answer. But then its gone.

This use of symbols might prove problematic, particularly in regards to Shin, who’s character mostly serves to drive the men on either side of her to further extremes, without much of an arc of her own. But equally, this seems to be the point. As she dissolves from the plot, we realise that this tussle of masculinity is about no-one but the self. It’s a primal fight over ego, knotted in 21st century anxiety. And by the time Dong has finished fanning the flames, each element has a remarkable, haunting clarity.

Burning showed as part of the 62nd BFI London Film Festival and also the Cambridge Film Fest, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 1st. Available on VoD in June 2019.

The Day After (Geu-Hu)

Posted on by victorfraga

I watched my first film by the Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo earlier this year in the Berlin Film Festival and I hated it. I found On the Beach at Night Alone so boring and insufferable that I compared it to “watching paint fade”. I thought that it was even slower than Eric Rohmer’s films (who I happen to like a lot), which a critic once famously described as “watching paint dry”.

I am now on my third Hong Sang-soo film and so I have decided that I reassess my relationship to his language and pace. The black-and-white The Day After takes place almost entirely during a single day, when Song Areum (Kim Min-hee, pictured above) starts her new job, only to be confronted and assaulted by her boss Kim Bong-wan’s (Kwon Hae-hyo) wife, who mistakes her for his lover. Understandably, she wants to keep it quiet, but Bong-wan insists that she doesn’t. Then his real lover unexpectedly turns up and the story takes a hilarious turn. The fallibility of the male is fully exposed, plus his inability to recognise his mistakes, lies and shortcomings.

The Day After is urgent in its simplicity. The dialogues are mundane and banal, and yet extreme engaging in their shallow philosophical thinking. Despite being set in Korea, you will feel that this have taken place anywhere and you are guaranteed to recognise yourself in the platitudes that the characters utter. The little twists are extremely credible and touching in their directness and candour. The catty and the petty fights are very similar to the ones you have experienced, whether you are Korean, British, Nigerian and Ucuadorean. This is cinema at its fullest universality.

The very beautiful and talented Kim Min-hee (she won the Silver Bear for On the Beach at Night Alone) is a regular actress for Hong. In fact, she’s the protagonist in all of his three films that I have seen. The three movie also have common topics: all three focus a young woman having an affair or a dalliance with an older and more powerful man. I would hazard a guess that his films have strong autobiographical elements. And they almost feel like a continuation of each other. And the more you watch, the more you get absorbed. Maybe watching paint fade isn’t so boring at all!

The Day After showed at the 70th Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. The film is opening the London Korean Film Festival starting on October 26th. We are giving away a pair of tickets for the special screening. Just write to us at info@dirtymovies.org; we will announce the winner on October 25th.

The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo)

Posted on by victorfraga

Punch! Ouch… Now punch again! Kick! Slash that throat! Blood gushes! Stab his chest! More blood gushes!!! Slice that leg! Shazam! Blood splats everywhere!!! Sever his hand! Aha… More blood gushing! Scream, shout, run, duck, twist, hit her on the face! Jump out of the window! Survive. Brouhahaha. Slash another throat. Yet more blood gushes. Carry on. Slash ten more throats. Run, hide, jump. Oops. Explosion! Boom! Blood everywhere. Slash some more throats. Yeah!!! HUFKvbblkj!!! Run again. Boom again!!! Finally…TAH DAH more blood gushes!!!

This is more or less what the Villainess is all about. In fact, it works quite well in the first 10 minutes, when it emulates some sort of video game. The problem is that the film is two hours and ten minutes long. The special effects are good and arresting enough to start with, but their unrelenting repetition with an infinite number of characters and an incredibly complicated plot make this film very painful to watch.

The story more or less revolves around Sook-Hee (Kim Ok-Vin), who is trained to become a highly skilled assassin. She eventually ends up working for South Korea’s Inteligence Agency Chief Kwon, where she becomes a sleeper cell. She gives birth to a daughter, is given a new identity and home, under the promise of freedom after 10 years serving her country. She falls in love with an informer, and her plans go terribly awry.

The film intends to make some sort of feminist statement by placing empowered and efficient women in the main roles (Sook-Hee and Kwon), plus many more in supporting ones. Yet the gaze is extremely masculine (the director Jung Byung-Gil is a man); this is the type of testosterone-fueled movie more likely to please men. It attempts to be some sort of Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003), with a bloody marriage and even a daughter witnessing her father being killed from under the bed, but it fails tremendously to do so because it focuses too much on the violence, and there’s hardly any room for character development. This is neither Ang Lee nor Park Chan-Wook; it lacks elegance and cohesion.

The Villainess showed as part of the 70th Cannes Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 15th, plus there is a special screening at the Regent Street Cinema on Monday September 11th as a preview of the Korean Film Festival (which takes place from October 26th and November 19th)

Claire’s Camera (Keul-Le-Eo-Ui Ka-Me-La)

Posted on by victorfraga

No, I didn’t overlook it and repeat myself. This is a Korean film set in Cannes and it also premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The film features the big star of the event, the emblematic French actress Isabelle Huppert. So it’s only natural that it received a lot of attention and a filled up one of the large theatres of the Palais des Festivals.

It’s also a good film. It tells the story of the film saleswoman Jeon Man-hee (Kim Min-hee), who is made redundant from her job while in Cannes for the premiere of a film by the director So Wansoo (Jeong Jin-young). Her female boss accuses her of dishonesty, but in reality she’s being dismissed because she had sex with the filmmaker, with whom her boss also her a relation. Meanwhile, the teacher poet Claire (Isabelle Huppert) casually meets both the director and Man-hee, and she develops a bond with the young and pretty lady.

Claire always carries a camera around and takes pictures of most people she meets. She wants immortalise qualities in some sort of Dorian Gray way, arguing that people change very quickly, even within a few hours. Huppert is excellent, conveying profundity in the most banal actions. There are some moments of awkward silence – probably due to the cultural differences between the French and the Korean – which are both funny and moving. Huppert isn’t just the master of the dysfunctional. She’s also very good at the mundane.

The serendipitous meets, the small talk, the triviality of the events, the placid attitude of the characters and the slow pace of the movie are very much reminiscent of the late French filmmaker Eric Rohmer. Both Sang-soo and Rohmer directors have a very female sensitivity, and they know how to touch viewers with a simple and straight-forward language, devoid of complex tricks and epic twists. This is very human cinema, arresting for its simplicity.

Claire’s Camera showed as part of the 70th Cannes Film Festival (2017), when this piece was originally written. Hong Sang-soo is one of the biggest exponents of Korean cinema right now, and three of his films showed in Cannes last year. The director confessed last year that he’s in a relationship with Min-hee, suggesting that the film has many biographical elements. Claire’s Camera shows on July 23rd as a teaser of the London Korean Film Festival.

The Handmaiden

Posted on by victorfraga

The grudge and the rivalry between the Japanese and the Korean is no novelty, but what about transposing this inimicality into an unlikely lesbian romance with a British twang? This very ambitious endeavour is inspired on Fingersmith, a 2002 historical crime novel set in Victorian Era Britain by and written by Sarah Waters, moved to Korea in the 1930s, the period of Japanese occupation. And a big chunk of the action takes place inside a countryhouse blending British and Japanese architecture. The Handmaiden is a rich mélange of cultural references.

The very young, petite and charming Sookee (Kim Tae-ri) is hired as a handmaiden to the taller, older and equally attractive Japanese heiress Hideko (Kim Min-hee). She lives in a large, secluded and impressive mansion in the countryside. In reality, Sookee was recruited by a criminal posing as a Japanese Count in order to help him to seduce the rich lady, seize her wealth and lock her up in a mental asylum. But soon the two women are sexually drawn to each other, and the plans takes an unexpected turn. Many more twists will follow, in a very long and epic story divided in three parts.

The cinematography of the film is certain to leave you breathless: the costumes are plush, the residences are luxurious, the outside is bright and verdant. The film aesthetics are somewhere between Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) and Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976). In other words, it’s a combination carnal pleasures and colourful fantasy. It’s a 100% technically accomplished movie, but it fails in some other aspects.

handmaiden800450
The Japanese heiress Hideko is extremely elegant and attractive.

The sex scenes partly are partly convincing. While there is definitely sexual tension between the two beautiful actresses, and some moments are highly erotic – including a 69, scissor sisters action and very bizarre finger-in-the-mouth moment – the gaze remains extremely masculine. Park Chan-wook may have wanted to celebrate lesbian romance, particularly as he found inspiration in a book authored by a woman, but the final outcome comes across as a piece of male voyeurism. I doubt that lesbians will relate to all the wiggling and giggling of the two protagonists.

Another problem with the film is the gratuitous violence in the end, which comes across as a very perverse substitute for the previous carnal pleasures. And the convoluted film narrative has some redundant elements. The repetition of some sequences, while placed in an entirely new context, sometimes feels a little long and unnecessary.

The Handmaiden is showing in the BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival taking place this week – click here for more information about the event. The film is out in cinemas in April.