Through Korean Cinema: A Well-Spent Hour in the Archives

I'd noticed Through Korean Cinema in the lineup of Kanopy, the streaming service of the public libraries both in Connecticut and New Jersey. I wasn't enticed. I figured this documentary would simply present information I already knew. Boy was I wrong. Not only did this hour-long film — produced, directed, edited, and scored by Italians (!) — skip over any movies made during the Japanese occupation because, as one critic put it, they weren't truly representative of Korean culture given the oppression, but many of the directors I'd expected to see featured in this movie were not: no Kim Ki-duk, no Bong Joon-ho, no Shin Sang-ok, Im Sang-soo. As for Hong Sang-soo, he gets a passing reference but nothing more. What's going on here!? Well, clearly, I'm about to get educated.

For Through Korean Cinema does showcase five homegrown auteurs of import. Two I confess I did not recognize by name: Park Kwang-su and Lee Myung-se. Checking out my own archives here at Korean Grindhouse, I see I've actually watched one film by the first Park (Meet Mr. Daddy which made me cry buckets). I've also seen a few by Lee, although none I particularly liked. Through Korean Cinema makes me want to give him another shot! As for the directors I did know immediately, Leonardo Cinieri Lombroso's interviews had me seeing these men anew. I had no idea of Im Kwon-taek's prodigious output with well over 100 movies to his credit; or of Lee Chang-dong's self-punishing apprenticeship as an A.D.; or of Park Chan-wook's very first film which was a box office dud. In a little over an hour, my list of "films to watch" has grown quite a bit. Now how do I track down Chilsu and Mansu?

Sopyonje: Troubadours in Trouble

An homage to a poor family of pansori singers, Im Kwon-taek's Sopyonje sure pays attention to the period details: the corsetting under a man's shirt; the caretaking of a traditional buk drumskin; the proper position assumed by a gonsu, the artform's requisite percussionist. It also passes on the classic generalities attached to musicians of many genres: a blind young chanteuse who feels more deeply; a woman who kills herself for a talented performer; two squabbling, competitive vocalists who drink in excess while flanked by flirtatious groupies.

Sopyonje's anti-hero is the irasicible pansori artist Youbong (Kim Myung-gon, who also wrote the screenplay!). A master musician banished from the troupe which schooled him and now raising two children — one his by birthright; the other, by fate — he's prepping the new generation to carry on the venerable art and inspire a lot of enjoyable incidental dancing from those who listen. But this is back in the days when artists get no respect: "Just because I sing, it doesn't mean that I'm low in stature." That's poorly translated but I didn't write these subtitles. You get the gist.

Gilsotteum: Nice to See You Again

The split between North and South Korea isn't simply a political matter. Families were torn apart when the country broke in two. That personal damage was news again when TV channel KBS started airing emotionally heartbreaking, splitscreen interviews of long lost relatives finally reunited years after that defining war. That now-historic footage, interwoven throughout Gilsotteum, makes for a powerful viewing experience even today.

Set against these archival clips is Im Kwon-taek's soap opera about two star-crossed cousins — once in love, now married to others — who find each other unexpectedly at station headquarters before embarking on a shared search for their own ill-begotten son. The mother (Kim Ji-mee) lost custody of the boy while in jail. The father (Shin Sung-il) never had any luck in tracking the infant down. Can these two adults — back together again, decades later — locate their child now that he's become a man? And what'll they do if they do? Why ask to see his double vortex hair of course! Sounds like something out of Aeschylus to me. Greek tragedy meet Korean cinema!

Festival: Death Becomes Him

A grandmother (Han Eun-jin) dies at the start of Im Kwon-taek's quirky family drama Festival. Except she doesn't. She reawakens posthumously — apparently an old habit with her — but then succumbs to death, this time for good. Once she does, the funeral's intricacies begin to unfold, many unfamiliar to many Westerners such as draping calligraphy scrolls in the courtyard, painting the name of the dead on a ceremonial flag, and unmasking the face of the elaborately wrapped corpse for a late guest (black sheep Yong Sun played by a ravishing Jung Kyung Soon). Outside these Korean funeral rites, Festival has much more on its mind.

The main event is intercut by flashes of the past and vignettes drawn from a "Benjamin Button" novel penned by the late woman's son Jun-seop (Ahn Sung-ki), a celebrated author who draws inspiration from his family. This structural device blurs the line between art and reality, no doubt making the investigative work of one The Age of Literature journalist Lee Yong-soon (Oh Jung-hae) exceedingly difficult. What's truth? What's fiction? Is Ahn's character to be trusted? With all that booze flowing? Well, he's certainly dashing. And due to Ahn, a bit of an enigma, too.

Village in the Mist: Out-of-Towner Out of Luck

To be honest, Im Kwon-taek's Village in the Mist reminds me exceedingly of the kooky psychosexual movies of Kim Ki-young. This battle of the sexes is so out there that I couldn't separate the social commentary from the sexism. Though nothing is stated definitively, what might be happening is that a townful of women are all getting impregnated by a nitwit vagabond (Ahn Sung-ki) who's the one reliable local sperm source since the rest of the men are impotent because of inbreeding. Struggling between appreciation and resentment, the villagers treat their resident babymaker like a pet in a way that would horrify that ASPCA. They feed him, beat him, taunt him, fondle him, throw rocks at him, work to get him drunk, and try to strip him naked so they can see if he's hung like a horse.

The new teacher (Cho Nam-kyeoung) is perplexed. Not horrified. More curious. Obviously she can't hear the forboding music that's underscoring much of the action. What's going on here, she wonders, as she handwrites letters of longing to a boyfriend who'd rather get smashed with his military buddies then trek out to nowheresville to visit his lady. She never quite puts it together. And once she gets raped, she puts such desires aside. Village in the Mist has her confessing pleasure about her assault but that's PTSD talking. Or male fantasies being projected. Or reprehensible cohorts not calling out the creators on their crap.

Mandala: Monk Mania

Horror. Vintage noir. Dystopian scifi. Sports movies. Movies about teachers. Movies about underdogs. There are plenty of movie genres that I like fairly consistently. One very specific niche is Korean movies about monks. These are different than Korean movies about priests (Love So Divine, The Divine Fury, Thirst) which tend to focus on notions of guilt. They're also different than American movies about monks (The Golden Child, Seven Years in Tibet) but who couldn't see that coming. Yet my experience with this Korean sub-genre has proven consistently enjoyable from the high-brow Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring to the low-brow Martial Monks of Shaolin Temple. Strengthening my predisposition is Im Kwon-taek's artfilm Mandala.

A buddy pic about a nomadic ascetic (Ahn Sung-ki) and his carousing elder (Jeon Moo-song) who's been excommunicated from the brotherhood, Mandala asks plenty of questions about the meaning of life. So which monk holds the key to enlightenment? Well, if you're asking that question at the (admittedly oddball) end, you've somehow missed the point. There is no one way. Or there is one way for each one and what that one is may be one of many if there actually is a way at all. Sound too heady? Too bad for you! Slow-moving but deep-diving, this picaresque tale is filled with philosophical musings if not much of a plot.

Battle of the 38th Parallel: Fiancée Under Fire

It's a testament to the wide range of prolific director Im Kwon-taek's vast cinematic output that you can find his movies at the Korean Film Archive's magnificent archival YouTube channel as well as at the Wu Tang Collection, an online pulp movie aggregator with an incredibly different agenda. A war pic heavy on artillery and light on character development, Battle of the 38th Parallel falls comfortably in the latter's more lurid lineup. Ghastly dubbing and severe editing (that's cut a half-hour from the film) make the pulp appeal here even greater; any dialogue — or monologue, for that matter — comes across as so much filler before the next air raid, the tank invasion, the next tossed grenade, the next sniper shot, the next launched missile. Dead bodies proliferate.

Oh sure there's a plot involving a young woman (Kim Chang-suk) in search of her enlisted boyfriend, a commanding officer for the South ("When you see your fiancee, tell him I died like a soldier") but having crossed enemy lines and made her way to safety, she's not about to rest on her laurels. Once she's received that less-than-romantic letter from her paramour, she's back on the road to shellshocked Seoul to deliver a late serviceman's diary to his anguished family. Strangely, the long journey that made up most of the film is completed in reverse in the blink of an eye. That's what happens sometimes to squeeze in your final message before the end: "We must never allow such a war to occur again!"

Farewell to the Duman River: Im Kwon-Taek's Strong Start

It's kind of amazing that celebrated Korean director Im Kwon-taek's first film, Farewell to the Duman River, led to such an illustrious career. This melodramatic war pic isn't your conventional crowd-pleaser or arthouse crossover with atmospheric music in short supply, an extended chase scene fairly devoid of tension, and periodic jumpcuts that jar the viewer with no clear intent. And yet, Im's maiden voyage into moviemaking is definitely more than watchable, and not just for its feel-good story of revolutionary college students and their endless shootoffs with the Japanese.

What makes Farewell to the Duman River so undeniably delightful is the trio of actresses driving much of the action. Moon Jeong-suk plays a femme fatale supplying the rebels with needed info while Kim Hye-jung captivates as a man-hungry mountain-girl triggered into heat by the wounded hero. Neither woman is a match however for Eom Aeng-ran. In the role of the lead's pregnant girlfriend, she goes from demurely seeing her man off to war to robbing the family safe to turning the tables on an amoral uncle (Heo Jang-kang) to chasing the enemy through the snow with a machinegun and not one ounce of mercy. The gun-fight on skis got me delirious yet nothing beats a good ol' fashioned machine gun mama.

Pursuit of Death: The Opposite of Bromance

Imagine spending your whole life hating someone. And not just hating them but chasing them. And not just chasing them for your entire adult life but in this prolonged, decades-spanning process, sacrificing everything that really matters: Your wife, your child, your career, your reputation, your eyesight, your health... Is it worth it? It certainly doesn't appear to be in Im Kwon-taek's Pursuit of Death (a.k.a. Jagko). As the former cop (Choi Yun-seok) hounds a Communist rebel (Kim Hee-ra) across decades, only to end up widowed with stomach cancer and a limp, this film's protagonist is neither particularly sympathetic nor heroic. He's suffering from an obsession that suggests some unresolved childhood trauma but what that might be I haven't a clue.

His adversary (Kim Hee-ra) isn't much better. A roaming womanizer who contracts VD and poisons his nemesis with mercury scraped from a mirror, this guy is downright mean despite his luck with the ladies — who frankly are the only other characters that are developed at all. Pursuit of Death's focus is narrow: We meet a taxicab driver, a former fellow officer, a check-in doctor at the rehab center where the leads meet and match wits but they're all largely expendable. The musical interlude in which most of the rehab center patients sing favorite songs from their past isn't informative so much as bizarre.

Director Im has made over a hundred films in a career that spans over half a century. Some of these movies — such as Hanji and Revivre — are quite good. Others — like this one — not so much.

Revivre: Who Has Time For a Life?

On the surface, Oh Sang-moo (Ahn Seung-kee) is a devoted husband. When his dying wife (Kim Ho-jung) gets yet another brain tumor, he's the one who shaves her head at home then spoon-feeds her gruel in the hospital. But to a certain degree he's just going through the motions. At the funeral home, he doesn't cry — simply asks his daughter to donate mom's clothes to a charity — and seems more focused on the cleavage of his new coworker Choo Eun-joo (Kim Gyu-ri) than on his dead wife's portrait at the wake. Well, everyone grieves in their own way. Oh does it by cold-bloodedly having his wife's perfectly healthy dog put to sleep shortly after her death. (It was her wish!)

Which isn't to say that Oh is not there for his wife throughout her time of need. He changes her diapers then deodorizes the room, catches her vomit in a pail then wipes off her comforter, takes a Viagra pill so he can get it up when they're having sex. (Although he'll be fantasizing about Choo for that last bit, truth be told.) No one is going to accuse Oh of being a poor caretaker. And how many times can you indulge in emotion when your daily lifting someone up onto the toilet then rinsing off their privates afterwards? Don't you eventually have to detach? Otherwise, there's crazy time ahead.

The casket scene in which the recently departed's daughter (Jeon Hye-jin) and sister (Sin Yeong-jin) make a hell of a lot of noise merely points out that the ones who grieve most effusively may be the people who have been less a part of the dying process, which can prove messy and exhausting? (Did the son-in-law feel anything at all?) Should we really think less of Oh simply because he's answering his cellphone while the casket is being wheeled to cremation? In Im Kwon-taek's Revivre, there's business to attend to as a marketing executive. Who has time for a life?

Baek Sang Art Awards: Best Film and Best Supporting Actress for Kim Ho-jung

Hanji: Paper! Paper! Read All About It!

It's a good thing, I didn't read the synopsis of Hanji in the MoMA Korean Film Festival brochure beforehand. I never would've gone to the theater. A film about the challenges, setbacks and rewards encountered by a local government official helping to revive the traditional method of papermaking hardly promises the stuff of high drama. And funnily enough, within this movie itself, are snippets of what appears to be the dreaded documentary we'd expect from that description: a clunky primer on the fine art of Hanji that pans reverentially over intricate antiques while a droning voice-over puts us summarily to sleep. Crafting a new copy of the Annals of the Chosun Dynasty may be a momentous occasion to scholars but most of us are not going to perch on the edge of our seats, desperately waiting to see if the undertaking succeeds. Will they master the old craft? Who cares! Director Im Kwon-taek does a little, perhaps, but at the same time that's not the story that he's set out to tell with Hanji either. Im's sublimely understated film is based on a real story but doesn't relate history so much as it distills  reality. (That's much more interesting!) His Hanji quietly conveys how the lives of people of no historic note are deeply impacted by something as unexpected as a well-meaning civic restoration project.

The movie's central character is  Pil-yong (Park Joong-hoon), a womanizing bureaucrat incapable of advancement and burdened with a wife (Ye Ji-won), whose severe disability was caused in part by his last extramarital affair. As he works to incite the masters of the local paper-making community to participate in the project, he strikes up a friendship of sorts with a divorced female film director (Kang Soo-yeon) who makes the aforementioned documentary, in part because she can't get funding for a feature film. No major love triangle emerges. Throughout Hanji, conflicts are small; treacheries, minor. What distinguishes Hanji is not its ability to extract tragic consequences from a historic footnote but rather its acknowledgment that a story with little razzle dazzle can nevertheless be the biggest thing to happen in some people's lives. Im's blunt depiction of cubicle culture, stroke rehabilitation, and petty crime as nothing but a part of daily life, any life, every life, underscores that the familiar and the pedestrian can still be quite deep. There's a beautiful passage in Hanji during which one character talks about the moon being a source of light that you can stare at continually without danger. Like the moon, most of us will not be as radiant as the sun but our insignificant lives are no less worthy of uninterrupted, loving attention.

Chunhyang: Famous Courtesan Returns Better Dressed, Less Tragic

Oh no, not her again. Yes, it's another movie about Chunhyang (Lee Hyo-jeong), Korea's favorite daughter of a hooker, bride of the governor's son. And once again, she's too proud, too loyal, and too good for her own good. Because of that, she's still getting jilted when her young husband moves to Seoul. And she's still getting beaten by cudgels when the new governor (Lee Jung-hun) comes to town. So what does director Im Kwon-taek bring that's new to this torturous romance? A much younger leading man (Cho Seung-woo), lots of fabulous hats and robes, and a singer who narrates the action in front of a contemporary audience that acts like an Evangelical congregation. There's less tension here for both real and filmed audiences, as the director rushes the initial courtship as well as the subsequent punishment. In place of the venial and the penal, Kim shares excessive footage of the characters getting from Point A to Point B, which since they're always splendidly costumed, comes across as a dynastic fashion show in the great outdoors. There's also a strange brief moment when rainbow sperm shoot across the night sky but that aside, Kim's version is adamantly folksy, not flashy. Of the three renditions of this popular tale I've seen, this one's the least popular.

Son of a General II: Ex-Con Gets His Kicks From Raising Hell and Reading Literature

Im Kwon-taek's General's Son was such a big hit that the next year, the director slapped together a sloppy sequel that neither furthers the story nor fleshes out its hero. Gangster-activist Kim Doo-han (Park Sang-min) is back after a short stint in the penitentiary and he's fighting mad! Motivated by either patriotism or petty thievery, he's fallen right back into the same behavior that landed him behind bars: He's executing roundhouse kicks on the Japanese and flirting with the geishas at the local bar. Shame on you, Kim! It's one thing to beat up foreign thugs for your country but a little maturity is called for too. You should pick a single prostitute to be your gal and settle down. Didn't all that time in the clink teach you anything? Well, maybe Kim's judgment and his memory (he seems to have forgotten his lineage again) is clouded by all those congratulatory shots of liquor he's always receiving. He's older now. He's more circumspect. But he can't handle liquor like he once could. And since he's also developing a love of literature after two hired students read the novel Pure Love out loud to him, everyone in town knows his days as a kingpin in a double-breasted suit are numbered. That purple prose is deadly.

General's Son: Gaining Popularity by Kicking Japanese Butt

I'd like to pimp-slap the Foley artist who first introduced the smack of a bare hand on leather as the simulated sound for karate kicks and roundhouse punches. In General's Son, the perpetuation of this tradition pulls you out of a movie that should be more patriotic biopic than martial arts fantasy despite its numerous hand-to-hand combats. The subject-at-hand is Kim Doo-han (Park Sang-min), a real-life gangster-turned-activist who became a national hero after standing up to the Japs during occupation and acting as a Robin Hood to prostitutes. Furthering Kim's myth, director Im Kwon-taek attributes his hero with an aristocratic bloodline and a rear end that supposedly drives the other guys in prison crazy. (Here's a guy with broad appeal!) Adding to the movie's fabulist aspect is its sloppy disregard for period detail: Guys wearing half-cocked fedoras topping greaser ducktails face off in front of strip mall architecture. When it came out in 1990, General's Son was a blockbuster. You could say its immense success helped usher in the slick cinematic masterpieces which would follow in the nineties while acting as a clunky capstone for what preceded. But you don't need to since I just did.