Tag: Park Jung-bum

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:

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:

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.