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.

Three O'Clock on a Rainy Afternoon: A Love Pentagon

Three O'Clock on a Rainy Afternoon is one of those tragic romances that's so fraught it seems likely that someone might kill themselves while listening to opera. The only question is who? The Korean-American war correspondent (Lee Min) whose bride abandons him before the honeymoon? The violin player who unknowingly crushes on his best friend? The young woman (Kim Ji-mee) who's promised herself to two possible husbands? The homegrown veteran (Choi Mu-ryong) with severe depression and a cane? The undergraduate music student who seems to fall for everyone while no one really cares? Oh yes, there's a lot of frustration in this love pentagon. But as to leaping into oblivion, as one character puts it, "I was too weak-willed to go through with it."

There's also a lot of Western references in director Park Jong-ho's heartbreaker circa 1959: a jazz band at the army barracks, another one at The Pagoda nightclub, a ballet company doing pas de deux, a music class with a few bobbysoxers, some wedding vows spoken in English, and a professed proficiency in the cha-cha. They've even adopted one truly unsettling American ethic in this post-war Korea. Per one drunken, former G.I.: "I miss the battlefields on a night like this. When I felt frustrated, I would point my gun at the enemy. After a round of firing, my heart would feel much lighter." Gun therapy! (And yes, this is the type of guy who would take a slug a woman... and does.) Soon enough, you're no longer wondering if one of these character is going to slit wrists and taking bets on which one might pull out a pistol and shoot another in a fit of passion. Well, someone does die. But not in that way either.

Hurrah! for Freedom: A Fragment of Liberation

Gertrude Stein once said that she enjoyed the beginnings of movies but lost interest once she could figure out the plots. I understand her viewpoint. Somewhat related, I'm a big fan of movies with missing footage. I enjoy being left in mid-air by a truncated flick, films like The Widow and Yangsan Province, historic works which end not where the director planned but where the footage comes to an end. Sometimes, there's something less pat and more real about stories that are inconclusive, accidentally or not. It's as if we'd suddenly turned our heads away from the action then discovered that all of the players had left, thereby leaving us to come up with our own conclusions and narratives. Such is the case with Choi In-kyu's Hurrah! for Freedom which not only ends in the middle of the action but periodically jumps around as if some internal footage had also disappeared.

What we know in Hurrah! for Freedom is that the Korean resistance is committed to rioting as a way to combat Japanese occupation and people from all walks of life are getting involved: mothers, nurses, lovers... At times, Hurrah! for Freedom can recall the Italian Neo-realists with its intense-faced men and low-gloss interiors; other times, the style feels almost French New Wave like the highly stylized cuts that happen between a guard and a hospital patient. Vignettes of a woman breaking up a fight between two boys only to get a mud-ball thrown at her back and a man caressing another man's face in a homoerotic manner pull you in as well. This film may also be known as Viva Freedom, but I couldn't resist Hurrah!

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.

The Great Battle: Fight, Fight, Fight

Many war movies throw in secondary story lines that pull us out of the action and make us impatient to get back to the fighting. Perhaps the intent is to make us bloodthirsty. There's no such issue with The Great Battle, Kim Kwang-shik's big, fat historic epic of an actual 88-day battle that took place between a small ingenious group of Goguryeo (Korea) and the unrelenting, much larger Tang empire (China) as the two camps fought over the Ansi fortress, way back in 645 A.D. With alarming or exhilarating regularity (depending on your point of view), blood spurts from throats, chests, shoulders, mouths, dismembered arms, dismembered legs, decapitated heads, even an eye socket as each side attacks the other with catapults, arrows, axes, swords, boulders, fire wheels, battering rams, and some innovative oil bombs. Carnage is in no short supply.

Near the ever-growing pile of dead bodies and funeral pyres are some really likable characters too: the clever Commander Yang (Jo In-sung), the naive cadet Samul (Nam Joo-hyuk), the defiant women's auxilary leader Baek-ha (Kim Seol-hyun), her dashing male counterpart and love interest Paso (Eom Tae-goo), the tireless, axe-wiedling Hwal-bo (Oh Dae-wan), his frenemy swordsman (Park Byeong-yeon), and at least a half-dozen others, warriors all. The rousing film is also filled with memorable lines you can imagine people thumbtacking on their cubicle walls like "I never learned to retreat," "You must risk your life for what you cherish," and "Do you only fight winnable battles?" If you haven't figured it out yet, let me tell you: Self-sacrifice is definitely a theme here.

The occasionally washed-out cinematography never attains the beauty of the costumes, which extend to fancy armor for some of the horses and a host of hair clips that look runway ready. Whether we'll be seeing them at Fashion Week this year is anyone's guess. I certainly wouldn't trust the predictions of Shi-mi (Jung Eun-chae), the movie's down-on-her-luck psychic. Her visions became suspect the minute she renounced her own gods.

Song of Retrospection: Composition Class

The North Korean film industry has definitely developed a number of tropes since its politicized inception: The underestimated female leader, the stern and demanding coach, the soulless Yankee pig, the accordion-playing Everyman... And you will find quite a number of them in Song of Retrospection, director Ryu Ho-sun's formulaic and patriotic movie about one European composer (of Asian descent) who, through at least two pairs of corny eyeglasses, sees the wisdom, strength, and compassion of the North Korean people while a prisoner of war held captive by a female soldier who also happens to write music and speak English. Her song, in fact, becomes somewhat of an obsession for him after he hears her sing it (while accompanying herself on the accordion, of course) to an all-male squadron of her fellow soldiers on the front lines during the Korean War. These enlisted men are never too busy for a singalong! You might start to think that North Korean soldiers have but two states of being: hurt and happy.

Eventually, the composer (nationality unknown, probably not American, though his name is Komak) tracks down his humble muse at an international youth music festival being held in Berlin. (These scenes are a weird mix of archival footage from the era and sepia-tinted sequences in which North Koreans sometimes wear blond wigs when representing Caucasians.) There, at the German festival, she gives him her one page of sheet music with which he apparently becomes so engrossed that he eventually builds a whole symphony around it. It's not a bad song, mind you, but it works better when sung by a single voice simply accompanied then when it's provided a full orchestration. Gone is his dream of creating a victory march on commission from the United Nations. His muse is now the Great Leader. He feels strongly about it so why resent that? What I do resent are the fake mustache the protagonist has glued to his face for a good portion of the movie as well as the powdered hair atop any character who we're supposed to believe has aged. The 2010s are clearly not the Golden Age for North Korean cinema. Nor is it, despite the odd wigs which argue to the contrary, the Silver Age either.

The Other Side of the Mountain: Why Does He Love Her

To refer to Son-ah (Kim Hyang Suk) "noble" would be a bit of an understatement. As her North Korean town's first homegrown nurse, we see her suck the blood and pus out of the throat of an ailing child, draw blood from her own arm to aid in the recuperation of a weakened young man, and pluck out pieces of shrapnel from an unconscious soldier's face with a pair of tweezers. Factor in her subsisting on the dregs of the porridge so others can eat a full bowl, and you'd be hard-pressed to come out with many other movie characters as self-sacrificing as her. Complicated she is not.

Yet you get the feeling that Il-gyu (Kim Ryung Min), the AWOL soldier who falls in love with Son-ah, is mainly drawn to her rosy cheeks and her maidenly manner, and that her strength of character is somewhat of an afterthought, although, to his credit that changes over time. But it's a lot of time to effect the change — decades in fact — as Il-gyu goes in search of his mom at the end of the war, reunites with his childhood pal (who's now missing half a leg), gets involved in some black market trading, and then heads over to Amsterdam to study to be a surgeon. Only after he's done his residency and established in his profession does he actually make it back to North Korea for a conference... wiser and richer but with a heavy heart.

Once he's landed in Pyongyang, he asks a cheery conference worker to track down his beloved — which she does. You can imagine his stupefaction when he discovers that not only has she stayed single while waiting for his promised return but she's also founded and runs a hospital architecturally modeled after a wood carving he'd made right before he left. Now that's devotion!

Footnote: Directed by Korean-American Joon Bai, The Other Side of the Mountain was co-produced by companies form North Korea and the USA!

The Admiral: Roaring Currents: Hope Floats Eternal

Not to sound too pompous or show-offy but I've taken to re-reading the works of William Shakespeare of late and I remember feeling very conflicted about Henry V in particular. How could I reconcile my own enjoyment of the play with the historic drama's outright pro-war sentiment? But then I saw Kim Han-min's blockbuster The Admiral: Roaring Currents and it all became clear: They're both underdog stories. Think of the St. Crispin's Day speech, how the English militia had the numbers stacked against them, how the odds-on favorite ended up losing... Now transport the action from the fields of Agincourt circa 1415 to the waters of Myeongnyang Strait circa 1597.* Heighten the drama by having the little guy defend instead of attack. Then picture this: Korea has 12 battleships versus Japan's fleet of over 300.

But Korea also has Admiral Yi (played by Choi Min-sik who I like a lot better than Laurence Olivier or Kenneth Brannagh). Yi's an ailing, wizened, crafty, old leader who values patriotism much higher than survival. (He's not the type who retires early for veteran's benefits.) He may not have the numbers of the Japanese or the creepy face-mask of his rival leader, the Pirate King (Ryu Seung-ryong) but he's got a tactical way of thinking that leads him to torch the sailors' houses so they have to commit to their ships and later plays a game of peek-a-book with a sniper thereby putting his own life in danger so an archer can arrow the gunman in the eye. Yi also gets advice from the dead, who inspire him to lure the Japanese ships into a heaven-sent whirlpool. Spirit contacts can be very useful during wartime, you know? Especially when your exasperating son (Yul Kwon) is still asking "Why is the sky blue" type of questions, despite his age. Famous person's child syndrome?

*Strange coincidences: While researching this movie review, I discovered that Shakespeare wrote Henry V shortly the after The Admiral's climactic battle took place in Korea. Furthermore, Great Britain is about 80K square miles while South Korea is just over 84K square miles.

The Front Line: Breaking All the Rules for a Pyrrhic Victory

Everything's fair in love and war. That's certainly an extremist point of view. It's also an idea which the war pic Jang Hun's The Front Line has made its underlying principal minus the love part. Within the context of war, no action is considered unacceptable -- not shooting a squadron of your own men, not using an injured, baby-faced soldier (Lee Da-wit) as bait to catch a sniper, not transporting messages from the enemies to their friends just for some chocolate or a bottle of wine, not letting an assassin (Kim Ok-bin) go because she's a woman. Whenever this status quo is challenged, a shouting match may ensue between the crafty officer (Go Soo) with the unappetizing tactic and the upstanding, undercover agent (Shin Ha-kyun) who everyone knows is undercover. No matter how heinous the suggestion put forth by the diabolical soldier, he is the one who is going to get the support of the troops. Morality, evidently, is antithetical to the battleground.

It doesn't end there either. When the fat captain (Jo Jin-woong) who's been giving lousy orders for the entire film finally goes too far endangering the men you can shoot him and take over. When the command from above is to defend at all costs, you can flee. When your best friend is revealed to be a complete traitor, you can forgive pretty quickly. You can even shout hurtful things to little girls with missing limbs without losing the respect of most of your fellow comrades. It's stress-related behavior, I guess.

I'm not sure why Korea chose to put this movie in contention for an Academy Award -- it didn't make the short list. The story isn't just anti-war, it's anti-person. And as war movies go, the battles recall video games in that you can see the objective (climb the hill) or go into a monochromatic environment (explore the tunnel) as the casualties roll by and the landmines explode like so many special effects graphics intended to enliven your faux world as the story/adventure pushes forward. The snag is that there isn't a character here who I'd want to play. I want my token back.

A Little Pond: The Big Picture for the Little Fish

In a generation, most of us will be forgotten. In another generation, most of the rest of us will be forgotten, too. There's a hierarchy to history and the little people (i.e., you and me) aren't destined for the annals of time. At most, we'll get a headstone that'll act as a backrest for a picnicker in 100 years. If we're really lucky, maybe this movie by writer-director Lee Sang-woo will stick around to tell our story too.

His war movie, A Little Pond, focuses almost exclusively on barely individuated civilians, who find themselves in the middle of a battlefield through no fault of their own. When we meet the villagers they're living a life of no consequence. Suddenly, they're commanded to desert their hometown Nogunri. Then they're commanded to evacuate their hiding place up the mountain. Nothing they do will save them though. Neither their needs nor their lives are important to their so-called protectors who order them around in English, a language they don't understand.

That language barrier actually explains too why the American soldiers are initially so paranoid of them. Unable to get instructions followed quickly, the soldiers perceive any reluctance or misunderstanding as possible subterfuge and resistance. The tension between the two cultures is inevitable and when the battle inevitably begins, the villagers find themselves dodging bullets and bombs which take some of them out indiscriminately. Stay behind to help someone and you're doomed. Run ahead and your chances to survive are slim.

Accidental deaths, sadly, are succeeded by intentional ones. This is war and mass slaughter is the order of the day. The American saviors become the American butchers as the helpless and unarmed hiding beneath a bridge leading nowhere are shot down one by one as what must be some sick form of damage control. There's a great moment near the end where a juvenile soldier for the Korean Communists asks if there are any survivors, and a young boy his age stands to face him. The safety of neutrality has always been a myth!

Tearjerker reunions cap this war pic for the people, a film that has plenty of schmaltzy moments throughout. But "life as a sentimental mess" is a valid point of view and what's a Korean movie without magic butterflies.