With only a decade between them, marquee headliners Kim Seung-ho and Shin Yeong-gyun would seem best suited to co-star as brothers for a war pic but in Kim Ki-duk's Five Marines, they play a military father-son duo with a history as potentially woundful as the DMZ. They're not the only family following a wacky Hollywood logic when it comes to ages. Performers Hwang Hae and Hwang Jeong-sun take on the roles of a soldier-son and his seamstress-mother despite a mere five years separating the two. (Crazily, he's older than she is.) I mention these odd details because in some ways, Kim's patriotic paean to the South's infantrymen feels like the cinematic equivalent of asummer stock production, as if the director had assembled a group of actors first, and the material second. Except, it's hard to imagine him picking this script. More like it was assigned.
Given the constraints, he's cast as best as he can. So what if everyone's around the same age. Maybe age is irrelevant when we're wearing standarc fatigues and camouflage helmets. The first half of the film is spent meeting the battallion — which aside from the aforemention army G.I.s — also includes a city smart aleck (comedian Flyboy), a new recruit (Nam Jang-il), a heartbreaker (Choi Mu-ryong), and a chaplain. Eventually, this crew paddles behind enemy lines in order to accomplish a dangerous mission. (Less dialogue and clownery; more action with whispers!) And — in true war movie fashion — only one of these guys is going to survive! Consider that a spoiler? If so, you haven't been watching many war pics. Five Marines is nothing if not standard issue frontline heroics.
The 1960s are the decade in which movies swung from predominantly black-and-white to color, with Korean auteur Yoo Hyun-mok making the jump somewhat late himself around '67 with The Guest Who Came on the Last Train. I'm glad he dragged his feet. For Yoo was a director who truly understood how to maximize light, shadow, and depth in a monochromatic world. His films really feel like moving pictures. He uses doorways to frame action, positions actors for portraiture, embraces the odd angle as a way to reorient us. Repeatedly in The Daughters of Kim's Pharmacy, he makes the most out of the setting whether it's a dockside or a hilltop, a bamboo forest or a barren hill.
Yoo's artistry — and that of cinematographer Byeon In-jib who collaborated with him on Forever With You, Freely Given,and The Sun Rises Again — elevates this melodrama to art. This tale of four siblings cursed by an ancestor's suicide teeters on the allegorical and it's no coincidence that the family matriarch (Hwang Jeong-sun) searches for help from a shaman when her seaside life sinks into misery. "I am breathing so I have no choice but to live," she remarks matter-of-factly. I can relate. I can even forgive the second eldest daughter for feeling optimistic about marrying a strange man fresh out of prison. The unexpected can be so much more appealing than the predictable when life totally sucks.
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