Tag: pregnant

Aimless Bullet (Obaltan)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Made and released in the brief period of about a year between the collapse of one dictatorship and the rise of another – and the temporary relaxation of state censorship that accompanied it in South Korea – Aimless Bullet deals with the struggle to survive in that country amidst economic collapse. Men including demobbed soldiers and officers try their hardest to find work, others lucky enough to have jobs struggle to support their extended networks of loved ones while women drift into prostitution – or, if they’re really lucky, become movie stars.

It opens with crippled, former military officer Gyeong-sik, constantly asking Sgt. Park and other drinking buddies not to call him ‘The Commander’, making a scene in a bar and smashing a glass door. Wandering through the streets at night alone afterwards, he’s accosted by former girlfriend Myeong-suk (Seo Ae-ja) who desperately wants him to fulfil his promise and marry her, but he won’t because as a cripple he feel an incomplete man.

Myeong-suk meanwhile is prostituting herself to get by. One of her brothers Song Yeong-ho (Choi Mu-ryong) is determined to find work and looks to have struck lucky when ascendant movie actress Miss Goh gets him a starring part in a film. But when he learns that it’s about a soldier with wounds just like his, he turns the part down. He can’t afford to by his niece Hye-ok the new pair of shoes he’s repeatedly promised her and the little girl has become accustomed to think of him as a liar. Things seem to be looking up when he meets Oh Seol-hui, formerly a woman lieutenant in the army, but their blossoming romance is cut short by tragic circumstances beyond their control their control. Frustrated, he decides to rob a bank – but then that goes wrong too.

His brother Song Cheol-ho (Kim Jin-kyu) suffers from toothache but is loathe to spend the money to get it fixed. As well as his daughter Hye-ok he has a son who bunks off school to make money selling newspapers. His wife (Moon Jeong-suk, star of A Woman Judge) is pregnant. He’s ground down by the daily drudge of working at Kim Seong-guk’s Accounting Office.

As the Commander and the woman lieutenant drop out of the plot to enable the narrative to focus on the two brothers, it lurches towards something like A Day Off, part crime thriller and part noir angst in a world where any promise of a better life always has another, less pleasant side to it.

Perhaps this is best represented by the scene where, like those of the confused heroine of Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929) Cheol-ho’s feet walk the streets. His eyes pass shopfronts filled with consumer products he can’t afford before he succumbs to visiting a dentist and paying for a tooth extraction. Even then, he’s told he can only have one wisdom tooth removed per visit, so even that proves less than satisfactory. He slumps into a taxi but keeps changing his mind as to where he wants to go. He has become, as he describes himself, an aimless bullet. The film, by way of contrast, knows exactly what it’s aiming at and in its final scenes hits its target – that of showing the human cost of economic depression – head on.

The film is also known as The Stray Bullet, although given the script’s content Aimless Bullet seems a more apposite translation.

Aimless Bullet plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival.

Wednesday, November 13th, 18.30, Picturehouse Central, London – book here.

Monday, November 18th, 20.20, FilmHouse, Edinburgh – book here.

Tuesday, November 19th, 18.20, Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast – book here.

Saturday, November 23rd, 13.15, Home, Manchester – book here.

Watch the Festival trailer below:

Wet Season

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It seems to be constantly raining in urban Singapore. Ling (Yeo Yann Yann) is forever sitting in her parked car injecting insulin. She has a job teaching Mandarin to a class in a local boys secondary school. Half a dozen of them are such poor students that she sets up a remedial class after hours to get them up to speed, but while they’re made to attend, they really aren’t interested. With one exception.

Wei-lun (Koh Jia Ler) will be in trouble with his parents if he doesn’t do well in Mandarin. As the other boys bunk off the remedial class with the slightest excuse, it pretty quickly develops into Ling teaching Wei-lun on a one-on-one basis. He doesn’t live that far from her home, so she often gives him a ride home in the car afterwards, unaware that behind her back he has for a long time been taking pictures of her with his mobile phone in class.

Ling has been trying to have a baby with her husband Andrew (Christopher Lee Ming-Shun) for some eight years. He’s long since lost interest and their relationship is severely strained, with Andrew hardly ever at home working long hours in his high pressure, financial job. Thus it falls mostly to Ling to look after Andrew’s wheelchair-bound father (Yang Shi Bin) who lives with them who is unable to dress, bathe or feed himself and requires a high level of care. He spends his days when Ling is out at work watching TV reruns of kung fu movies.

As Ling’s tuition of Wei-lun proceeds, he asks if she can accommodate his attending after school wushu (a form of martial arts) classes. She starts to tutor him in her home so that she can keep an eye on her father-in-law at the same time. The boy seems to get on with the elderly invalid, at least in part because of a shared enthusiasm for martial arts. Eventually, Wei-lun invites her and her father-in-law to watch him represent the school at a national wushu contest. Focused on becoming pregnant and frustrated by Andrew’s lack of romantic interest in her, Ling fails to notice the boy’s increasingly obvious infatuation.

The constant rain seems almost like a fifth character in this drama beating on car or building windows and sweeping across roads making driving conditions treacherous. While it looks naturalistic, the rain has been staged for the cameras at considerable expense. It adds much to the overall atmosphere of the piece, not least to the sense of impending disaster.

Both Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler appeared in Anthony Chen’s earlier Ilo Ilo (2013) but the director didn’t set out to cast them again, it just worked out that way. The child actor is now considerably older than he was on the earlier film and, as such, almost unrecognisable.

In this newer film, both leads give terrific performances, with Yeo’s nuanced portrayal of a woman under numerous forms of stress finely observed while Koh’s role as a teenager completely out of his depth in a world of more complex adult issues convinces.

Various details come together: the incessant rain, Ling’s stress caring for an infirm and ageing parent scarcely helped by pressures of trying to conceive a child with little encouragement from an increasingly distant spouse, the increasing isolation of teacher and student as they increasingly find themselves sharing each other’s company. Chen never loses his grip delivering his uncompromising vision, a powerful experience which never lets up. Here’s hoping an enterprising UK distributor gives this the release it deserves.

Wet Season plays in the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer below: