Descendants of Cain: Not Scary Red Scare

Maybe we're supposed to sympathize with the Old Guard landowners in Yoo Hyun-mok's Descendants of Cain. But I sure didn't. Well-intentioned Park Hun (Kim Jin-kyu) may have parlayed his roles as sympathetic squire into beneficent school teacher but he's also been stringing along O Jang-nyeo (Moon Hee), his masochistic housekeeper who's been lusting for him all these yearsduring which her absent, wifebeating drunk of a husband (Choi Bong) has been making a dubious name for himself in the party. Park is that latest in a line of kind lords of the manor but are the impoverished villagers really supposed to come to the defense of the "good" slave-owner? Who in their right mind wouldn't rejoice at a land re-distribution plan?

The refusal to cast the protagonists as good guys and the antagonists as villains is what makes Descendants of Cain so effective. The lowest of the low can have his moments of truth-telling; the best educated can also be the most delusional. The new social order may mercilessly judge all members of the upperclass regardless of their moral center but it also finally challenges a system that accords wealth, health, and -- to some degree -- happiness as a birth right guaranteed only to the moneyed minority. Fights break out but I, for one, was surprised by who stabbed who.

Awards: Blue Dragon Award for Best Film (1969); Buil Film Award for Best Film (1969).

Even the Clouds Are Drifting: From Hard Luck to Hardcover

Working class dramas are in short supply in Hollywood right now so I'm turning to 1950s South Korea for some bleak realism today. The movie is Yoo Hyun-mok's Even the Clouds Are Drifting, an effective story about a pigtailed teenager (Kim Yong-ok) whose family goes deeper into poverty when her coal-mining brother (Park Sung-dae) loses his job. Thank the goddess, things will eventually take a turn for the better once everyone starts reading the orphaned girl's diary: her brother, her teacher (Han Mi-na), her best friend (Jo Hyeon-ju), and the boss's eldest daughter (Jo Mi-lyeong) — who fortuitously has contacts in the publishing world.

In no time flat, this plainspoken memoirist is going to become a best-selling author! But before that happens, the girl's makeshift family must be broken apart, forcing her and her younger brother (Park Gwang-su) to shack up with a drunken uncle (Choi Nam-hyeon) and his unsympathetic wife (Jeong Ae-ran). As if she needed to accumulate more hardship as raw material for her book! I can't wait to read the chapter in which she shatters an ivory statue of an abstract female deity. Is that what it takes to get a prayer answered?

Forever With You: Two Men, Two Women, Innumerable Problems

It takes a certain level of confidence to start a film off with an extended take of three children silently building a dirt fort outside a prison. (Not even credits are happening!) It takes an even greater boldness to have a handful of adults exaggeratedly act like children in a series of flashbacks for the first quarter of your movie. But anyone who's seen Stray Bullet is bound to come to Forever With You with the belief that director Yoo Hyun-mok's risky choices will deliver a pay off. They're not wrong. Forever With You fairly teems with stageworthy compositions and an overall sense of mystery. If it's no Aimless Bullet, it's surely a stepping stone to get there.

An earlier flick in Yoo's oeuvre, Forever With You is more moody melodrama than tragic thriller: Its two adjoining love triangles feature a harmonica-playing gangster (Choi Bong), a shopgirl-turned-mob-wife (Do Kum-bong), a shady businesswoman (actor unknown), and a pitiable exconvict (Lee Yong) who in five packed days will discover that the world has largely left him behind after ten years in the slammer. (Although there is that matter of paternity regarding one nine-year-old girl...)

Rainy Days: North Vs. South for Grannies

Nuclear families torn apart by opposing views have been around since Cain and Abel, the Capulets and the Montagues, and the Hatfields and the McCoys. (You can touch base with me or my younger brother if you're looking to hear it play out anew.) So why does the fierce divide, and fall out feel so painfully pronounced in Yoo Hyun-mok's household war drama Rainy Days? Observed by a quiet village youth (Choe Yong-won) during the 1950s, the maternal and paternal grandparents are at each other's throats as one uncle (Lee Dae-kun) sides with North Korea while the other (Kang Seok-woo) aligns with the South. Admittedly, then as now, the fascists are dumber and meaner and more threatening but the actual cause of conflict isn't the crux of the matter. Not for Yoo.

Yoo isn't promoting neo-liberalism any more than he's attempting neo-realism: An early scene in which one grandmother (Hwang Jeong-sun) has psychic premonitions is bookended by another of that same matriarch coaxing a snake — who might be the reincarnation of her dead son-in-law — out of the front yard. For me, those mystical moments made Rainy Days not just poignant, but strange. Cinematographer You Yong-kil's muted palette creates a nostalgic feel but I wonder if period politics would've been better served by black and white. Not that I'm right and he's wrong.

The Daughters of Kim's Pharmacy: Sisters of Disaster

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.

School Excursion: Kid Power

Adults are such a drag. Not all of them. Most though. I suppose, sometimes, teachers can be cool. Like Kim Seong-seo (Ku Bong-seo), for instance. He's the elementary school teacher on remote Seonyudo Island in Yoo Hyun-mok's family movie School Excursion. The spirit hasn't died in Kim. He's a big-hearted lug not afraid to risk his arm to retrieve some careless kid's dirty shoe from under a bus. He knows more than most but he doesn't show off about it and doesn't look down on those who know less. He's not seduced by money. He doesn't see the good life as fancy clothes and electric washing machines. He lives from the heart and recognizes generosity and curiosity as admirable qualities.

You can see why he's so committed to his young charges. They share his sense of hope, his delight in simple pleasures. And he's nurtured by their innocent longing, their unbridled enthusiasm, their unfiltered wonder. Who wouldn't prefer a bunch of scrappy boys and girls over their jaded parents? Who wouldn't feel more useful in a town with scant resources than they would in a city of overabundance? He's not the only one to recognize their charms either: The kids at the city school quickly become enamored of their seaside peers, with each adopting one for the duration of their mainland stay. Good times had by all.

Stray Bullet: The Story of an Aimless Life

It's not enough to be burdened with a prostitute sister and a shiftless war vet of a brother (Choi Mu-ryong). No. Stray Bullet's protagonist (Kim Jin-kyu) has to have a crazy mother, two hungry kids, a pregnant wife (Moon Jeong-suk), and a nagging toothache too. Akin to Italy's postwar neorealist films, Yoo Hyun-mok's black-and-white, working class drama illustrates with quiet poignancy that you may follow the precepts of Confucius and be the good son, the good husband, the good father, and the good worker and still end up with a fairly shitty life. When you're poor, taking the high ground of self-sacrifice means being one small step from the gutter. Given its strong social realist message, you'd almost think that Stray Bullet was a product of North Korea. But it's hard to imagine that country's movie industry telling this downer without an uplifting Communist coda. There's no propaganda here. Instead, witness the chilling scene in which the son, a paperboy, is seen running with a stack of today's news, the cover of which is a crime committed by his uncle. The downtrodden must capitalize even the darkest of moments. When life's anything for a buck, your conscience is a cage.