Sunrise/Sunset: Filmmaking as Tourism

As a former New Yorker, I have a soft spot for a film that features familiar NYC locations. Whether writer-director Ougie Pak shot Sunrise/Sunset in Times Square, Washington Square Park, Madison Square Park, the Lincoln Center courtyard, the glass-boxed Apple store on Fifth Avenue as well as on The High Line and the Columbia Univeristy campus, and the brooklyn Bridge for ease or symbolism doesn't matter to me. Even seeing signage indicating Broadway and 76th Street feels quietly significant. A walk to the Queensboro Bridge even more so. Do it all in black and white and I'm that much more nostalgic.

Sunrise/Sunset's story is admittedly slight: A young Korean man (Lee Kwangmin) -- still wearing braces -- comes to NYC to visit his girlfriend (Kim Woohyun) who's moved abroad with the hopes of getting into an American college. During his weeklong visit, their relationship begins to unravel as his spontaneous fantasy of attending Columbia University is frustrated by a matriculating student (Paik Tobee) who advises him that he'll need to prep for his SATs, not just TOEFL. (His school tests in Korea didn't go so well.) A self-directed crash course at the Barnes & Noble culminates in his prompting Google translator to speak the English equivalents for curse words from his native tongue. At 47 minutes, this doesn't qualify as Pak's first feature. I'd call it a long novice short. You can grade it accordingly.

Clytaemnestra: Trauma Drama

I signed up for the Criterion Collection last month because I wanted to watch two Pasolini movies: Medea and Oedipus Rex. Then I failed to cancel my subscription. So I thought I'd check out their holdings re: Korean films. Frankly, it's not extensive. But among the few movies that popped up in my search results were a handful by Korean-American Ougie Pak. Unfamiliar with his work, I decided to watch Clytaemnestra, an hour-long film about a Korean troupe of actors rehearsing Aeschylus' Agamemnon in Greece. (Notice a theme?) More specifically, the movie focuses on the woman (Haru Kim) cast in the lead female role then demoted to Cassandra then demoted further to the chorus.

Her ongoing humiliation is painful to watch. And it doesn't end with losing increasingly smaller roles either. Interestingly, Pak's Clytaemnestra works not so much because of the anguish emoted by the female lead. Credit instead the performance of her foil played by Jongman Kim. As the director of the film's experimental production abroad, this dynamite actor sustains intensity whether he's telling his cast to increase their energy, drunkenly exiting a post-rehearsal drinking binge, or berating his former leading lady for bad behavior. Even a handwave dismissing the fired and disgraced actress feels loaded with meaning and attitude. Is the play within the movie any good? Is the replacement actress (Kim Taehee) any better? It's questionable. Which makes this film's effectiveness that much more mysterious. I knew the end from the start. Isn't that how it always works with Greek tragedies? Isn't that part of the pleasure?