Tag: Lee Seung-yeon

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:

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”

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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:

Alive (Sanda)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Jung-chul (writer/director/star Park Jung-bum) is a foreman supervising workers who lives with various relatives and dependents in a house situated in isolated woodland. His sister Soo-yun (Lee Seung-yeon) is mentally ill, given to bouts of both initiating casual sex at the local bus station and recriminatory self-flagellation in an isolated shack in the woods. Her husband has walked out and Jung-chul removes the front door from their house.

Jung-chul is given to sharp, often irrational, knee-jerk responses. Nevertheless, the couple’s daughter Hana (Shin Haet-bit) understandably looks to Jung-chul more than her unfit and unwell mother or her absent father. Also living in the house is essentially good-hearted and honest, if not very smart, Myung-hoon (Park Myung-hoon).

Meanwhile, the daughter of Jung-chul’s boss is about to get married to a wealthy suitor, and to fulfil the dowry the prospective in-laws suggest the boss buys an expensive, huge, state-of-the-art TV for the couple the cost of which will place a severe strain on his company’s finances.

That’s just the set up of an extraordinary, character-driven outing which runs for almost three hours. (At least, it did in the version shown at LKFF 2018, although the director claims he has a four and a half hour cut too.). On one level the pace is slow and things take a long time to happen, but the seemingly languorous pace is deceptive because writer-director/star Park packs in a lot in the course of 175 minutes. Early on, for instance, a trusted colleague of Jung-chul’s is given money by him to pay wages to subordinate members of the workforce, but runs off with the money leaving Jung-chul to stop the unpaid workers stealing company equipment to sell it off to get what they’re owed.

From the early flagellation sequence, with its echoes of some of the more austere forms of Christian piety, there’s a suggestion that, as in Park’s earlier The Journals Of Musan (2010), religion is once again going to play a significant role. Sure enough, there’s a whole subplot about Jung-chul making sure Hana attends church, even though he doesn’t go himself. In the pew, she prays fervently for her mother’s health and the family’s other needs, but when things get too much she runs away from home and robs the collection box at the back of the church in order to survive.

A further plot element involves a production process using soybeans, one in which temperature is critical. A window in the fairly primitive manufacturing facility is left open, causing the temperature to drop and the pressed cuboid shapes of soybean to develop a nasty black mould and a tendency to crumble, rendering the entire crop useless after months of backbreaking, labour intensive work. Coupled with the financial strain of the boss’ commitment to buy the expensive television for his daughter’s dowry this spells disaster for the company and, in turn, the workforce. But who was responsible for leaving the window open when it was supposed to have been shut?

As the narrative proceeds, it seems like one bad thing after another happens to Jung-chul and his nearest and dearest, as if fate – or God – has it in for him, and those around him. Or perhaps, as in the case of the boss agreeing to commit money to the expensive TV he can’t afford, Jung-chul’s swiftness to anger when things go wrong or various other bad decisions some of the the characters make, which we won’t reveal here, the fault lies at least in part with many of the protagonists’ independent actions or the responses to the situations in which they find themselves. Either way, rural life as portrayed here is a harsh existence with plenty of pitfalls for anyone choosing even momentarily the wrong path. As with the director’s earlier film, it’s a remarkable and compelling work that deserves a wider airing than the festival circuit.

Alive plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer (Korean only, sadly) below: