The Water Mill: Lord Have Mercy

There's a world of a difference between the comic book movie and the the fable on film. For whereas the former is typified by hero worship and snide asides, the latter distills human behavior into small scale tragedies of a much more personal nature. Unlike the more-or-less invincible leads of their Marvel-made counterparts (kryptonite notwithstanding), the leads in folktale cinema suffer dearly when they take a loss. There is no full recovery, anymore than there is a conquering of evil. Which one is more like real life, I ask you? Those superhero movies piss me off.

Lee Man-hui's The Water Mill is an exquisite example of the folktale film, an aching mix of Cinderella, Samson, and The Gift of the Magi. How else to explain this tale of a strongman (Shin Yeong-gyun) who comes across a slipper in the river, only to bump into his soon-to-be beloved (Ko Eun-a) the day she's missing a shoe. Their subsequent romance is fraught with issues: she's married, in debt, and doomed. The first issue is resolved when her husband dies; the second, is made right when her new lover sells himself to pay off her I.O.U. But the third item, well, that's going to require stealing undergarments and praying to the west wind. And when's the last time you've heard of that approach working out?

Bloodline: Poor, Poor Miserable Need

Opportunity is scarce for the residents of the hilltop shanties in Bloodline: a sock-selling daughter (Um Aing-ran) gets pressured to become a "hostess"; a cigarette pedlar (Shin Yeong-gyun) can't scrounge together the doctor's fee for his wife (Lee Kyoung-hee). In this part of town, one tough-luck story is no better or worse than the other. Newspaper serves as wallpaper; your daily outfit has at least one patch. And generally, it goes downhill from there.

Neo-realism Korean-style rarely disappoints and Kim Soo-yong's group portrait of North Korean defectors making hard-scrabble lives for themselves just south of the 38th parallel is no exception. This career-making film, shot in expert black and white, covers a lot of territory too including swank nightclubs, military barracks, construction sites, and street merchants. You can see the inequities in all these environments and how inflexible the system is to change. Is it any wonder that the older generation (Kim Seung-ho, Hwang Jeong-sun, Choi Nam-hyeon) have grown dissatisfied with the life they chose? Was it worth all that trouble and effort just to get a family-sized can of papayas? The spark of hope is reserved for those who get out!

Awards: Blue Dragons for Best Film, Best Actor (Kim), Best Actress (Hwang), and Best Supporting Actor (Choi); Grand Bell for Best Film.

Seashore Village: The Merry Widow

Shamefully uneducated in the Korean language, I'm fully aware that I repeatedly miss nuances in Korean films. In the award-winning Seashore Village, for instance, one English subtitle reads "It's a boy" but the actual dialogue is "It's got a penis" — something I'd have missed without my current Korean-American love interest. There's a big difference between those two statements extending way beyond mere Americanization. What other phrases got expurgated in the name of decency, I don't know. But translation gets complicated when what's acceptable becomes a shaping factor. Considering Seashore Village revolves around the sexual bond between a widow (Ko Eun-a) and her second husband (Shin Yeong-gyun), I'd hazard a guess that other frank statements have been "cleaned up" in the name of propriety. What can't be hidden, however, is the couple's explicit physical connection, something which guides much of the action — sometimes delightfully, sometimes disturbingly. (Also, inescapable is a lighthearted lesbian tryst between two minor characters who, far from reviled, are viewed as a subject of merriment by the local women.)

Shot in a fable-making black and white yet feeling incredibly contemporary, from its haircuts to its moral relativism, Kim Soo-young's 1965 classic Seashore Village feels equally archival and anticipatory, like an unintentionally modern artwork that nods to rape culture, Stockholm syndrome, gynocentric communities, shamanism, gender norms, and a back-to-nature movement as if such components were always an unavoidable part of life. And they were. And they are. With exceptional performances from its two leads, Seashore Village is concrete proof that Korea has been making world-class cinema for at least 50 years; what an invaluable service the Korean Film Archive provide us by showing us as much on YouTube!

Romance Gray: Two Old Men, Two Young Ladies

The movies of Shin Sang-ok are the cinematic equivalent of summer stock: You see the same actors over and over: sometimes with bad age makeup and powdered wigs; more often in typecast roles they've played before. Here Shin regulars Han Eun-jin, Shin Yeong-gyun, Kim Seung-ho, and Choi Eun-hie are all back on board for Romance Gray (a.k.a. Love Affair), a lighthearted melodrama about a pair of philandering husbands, who get caught by their dowdy wives, in affairs with two women who hustle at the local bar. The initial advice proffered at the sewing bee is that cuckqueans need to spend more time on their appearance. But these two ladies escape a fate worse than divorce by unexpected means outside the powder room.

For the wife of the college professor, the plot will involve extortion, a fake mustache, an instant photo, and some martial arts moves. For the wife of the company president, the resolution will follow a forgotten pajama top, a righteously smashed-up apartment, two boozing broads, and some runaway kids who may or may not return. Yet despite all the drinking and shouting, most folks do get back together. Just not all... And that one loose thread is what makes this a pretty darned good genre picture.

Footnote: Romance Gray's screenwriter Lim Hee-jae also wrote the scripts for Madam White Snake, My Mother and Her Guest, and Seong Chun-hyang. Kudos to him!

A Reluctant Prince: The Man Who Shall Not Be King

Watching A Reluctant Prince can be somewhat like channel surfing except each time you change the channel, you've got most of the same actors involved with a different plot. The opening section feels like a comedy about two tight-knit brothers (Shin Yeong-gyun and Kim Seung-ho) pointlessly persecuted by the government. Then when, fairly early on, the younger sibling (Shin) gets suddenly promoted to king because of his bloodline, you think it's going to be a Pygmalion story. But the king never masters the ways of the court and the focus shifts to a forbidden romance — that between him and his hometown girlfriend (Choi Eun-hie). Then even that story line gets abandoned after she comes to realize that it's best for the nation if she weren't around. Which leaves the king to go on a Leaving Las Vegas bender that lasts for years (during which he toys with falling in love with the queen).

So how do you classify Shin Sang-ok's 1963 movie? A bromance? A romance? A period piece? A tragedy? Well, it's definitely not the last option because A Reluctant Prince is played in a broad style that forbids you to inhabit its more serious moments — and there definitely are some — for very long. In fact, scenery-chewing of the highest caliber may be what holds A Reluctant Prince together. The cartoon-like glee exhibited by Choi and Shin when stitching up a pair of torn pants that has left his privates exposed or the exaggerated childishness they parody while running around the palace courtyard at night may ring as false but it's also incredibly fun so why begrudge them the pleasure they're apparently having. A Reluctant Prince is a movie that wins you over for all the wrong reasons. Or makes you realize there are times to abandon "what should be" or "what could be" and simply embrace "what is."

Evergreen Tree: My Favorite Teacher

I'll admit this right up front. I'm a total pushover for movies about idealistic teachers who move into poor and/or working class neighborhoods and go on to become valued members of the community — films like the classic To Sir With Love and the all-but-forgotten Sing. So I'm definitely the target audience for Shin Sang-ok's Evergreen Tree which focuses on young educator Yeong-shin (Choi Eun-hie) who has taken her pedagogy to the countryside where she's about to inspire an entire small town to help her build an elementary school from the ground up.

And she's got a love interest too: teetotalling, charismatic community organizer Dong-hyeok (Shin Yeong-gyun), a fellow high-minded graduate who's working to better another coastal village through his own brand of rural activism. The stars may have destined these two for each other but first there's some serious work to do. For Yeong-shin that means farm work, fundraising, hands-on construction, and dealing with the local Casanova (just back from Tokyo); for Dong-hyeok that means fieldwork, aerobics, choral singing, and managing the farmer's guild. If all goes as planned then it'll be at least three years until these two love birds get married. A bran-new wedding bell that doubles as a school bell? Why not!

But when did any two-and-a-half hour movie spotlight a romance in which all went according to plan? Problems are bound to arise like a bad case of appendicitis, an alcoholic relapse, and a well-timed bribe. (Man, you can always count on the self-serving rich people to foil the collective betterment efforts of the poor!) But romance isn't the only reason for living. Good works have their place too. And if there's a drought in your neck of the woods then this movie can overcome that with its final waterworks.

Red Scarf: War Hurts Women

After watching her early sloppy-drunk scene in Shin Sang-ok's war pic The Red Scarf, you're reminded how much actress Choi Eun-hie was restricted by the material provided to her throughout her career. To her credit, in many performances, she periodically pushes against the "lady" stereotype in which she's been straitjacketed but she's never quite as exciting as she was when she played that amoral hooker in the brilliant A Flower in Hell. The Red Scarf isn't a bad showcase for her talent, mind you, it's just that she'd be that much more compelling if she could rail against the military-industrial complex instead of serve it.

How does she serve? Basically, she's condemned to being a soldier's wife, not once but twice — first to a one-screw-loose pilot (Nam Kung-won) who proposes shortly after meeting her; then to his much calmer replacement (Choi Mu-ryong) who unlike his comrades has not been burdened with a nickname like "Sissy" or "Nerd."

How she gets from one man to the next is all due to the machinations of a brusque, alcoholic major (Shin Yeong-gyun) who doubles as the local matchmaker with a kind assist from the bar's good-time madam and bartender (Han Eun-jin). Yet as the adrift young woman becomes domesticated a second time, she also becomes less fascinating; and as insanely preposterous as the rescue of her second husband from behind enemy lines might be, you secretly wish the leading man had been killed so his wife could move on to husband number three or at least descend into a world of boozing and whoring and drugging and thieving. Or jumping in an airplane and becoming the first female fighter pilot in South Korean history.

Rice: Communism for Non-Communists

Rarely do you see a movie so unapologetically histrionic as Shin Sang-ok's stridently socialist drama Rice. How exaggerated does this one get? How about a man sobbing while banging his head against a bamboo stalk then saying "I'm not crying"? Or a woman who confesses her deep feelings while flames from a fire lick the space between her and the camera? Or a politician who says to a war veteran, "Do you think I'll even consider a cripple for my son-in-law" to a daughter (Choi Eun-hie) who wears pigtails until she finds her true independence as a woman?

The camera shots can be equally grotesque: a point of view from within a casket; a face framed by a hole in a rock underground. And yet despite how Rice traffics in exaggeration with agit-prop dialogue that may have set the groundwork for the eventual kidnapping of Shin and Choi to North Korea, there's still some powerful moments that occur in this oddball flick. Your heart goes out to the movie's hero (Shin Yeong-gyun), a disabled war vet who goes from one government department to the next in search of backing for an agricultural project that all agree has worth but none will fund. You also get a certain rush when one townsmen calls his fiancee out for asking him to compromise his integrity during a manufactured red scare.

Indeed this movie abounds with relevancies to our current cultural crises by showing examples of women who side with a patriarchy that oppresses them; illustrating how the wealthy will undermine the working class's attempts to become autonomous; revealing the complicity of a religious institution with corrupt power as well as how that eventually backfires; and detailing the sacrifices real changes entails — which sometimes necessitates forsaking your own father! You may snort derisively of the sub-plot involving the rolly-polly figure but in Rice, as in life, you simply have to take the good with the bad and make the best of it.

Bound by Chastity Rules: Two Movies for the Price of One

There are two stories being told in Shin Sang-ok's Bound by Chastity Rule a.k.a. The Memorial Gate for Virtuous Women: One is a tale of forbidden love between a virgin widow (Choi Eun-hie) and a field hand (Shin Yeong-gyun); the other concerns an ultra-conservative sister-in-law with a troublingly masochistic relationship to honor. The same characters drive both stories but the two tales' contrary viewpoints only sometimes align. Regardless of screenwriter Hwang Sun-won's intents, you're neither feeling the love nor understanding the honor. The problem with the pseudo-romance is that our heroine has been raped by her supposed love interest and clearly wants to abort the shameful (to her) baby that comes of the attack. She may admire the worker beforehand; afterwards, she seems legitimately scared. The problem with the tale of honor is that the family that she's married into comes across as undesirable from the get-go: her child-groom leaves her with a stumpy finger; her mother-in-law — who wears poorly done age makeup — advises her to stick needles in her thighs as a way to fight off sexual longing.

Holding the movie together is none other than Choi Eun-hie who rather than try to make sense of it all allows simple moments — from the exuberant joy of a rainstorm following a drought to the domestic satisfaction of stitching a shirt for her well-meaning father-in-law (Kim Dong-won) — to segue into aftermaths of inner conflict. She is a woman on shaky ground pretty much all the time. Like other Shin Sang-ok melodramas from the period, the "happily ever after" coda is rife with unhappy possibilities. A life led in self-abnegation seems unlikely to end with heartwarming familial bonds with a stranger, lush soundtrack or not.