Terracotta 2013: Preview

This year, the Terracotta film festival is divided into four strands: In Memory Of: Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui; Current Asian Cinema;  Terror-Cotta Horror All-Nighter and Spotlight on Indonesia.

The first four days will take place at the Prince Charles Cinema, Leicester Square, London, with the Festival shifting to the ICA for the remaining time.

CURRENT ASIAN CINEMA

The Current Asian Cinema strand showcases the best in Asian mainstream and independent cinema and consists of films from  Hong Kong, China, Japan,Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea.

Hong Kong

It is nice to see the coverage of Hong Kong cinema expanding from previous years. This year’s films are: Cold War (Sunny Luk & Longman Leung: 2012), A Bullet Vanishes (Law Chi Leung: 2012), Love Me Not (Gilitte Leung: 2012) and Drug War (Johnnie To: 2012).

My pick would be The Bullet Vanishes, which is not only visually breathtaking but has an intriguing plot about the mysterious deaths of factory workers who die from bullet wounds without any actual bullets being found.

China

The Assassins (Zhao Yiyang: 2012) is one of my picks of the Festival. Not only does China excel at epic cinema but The Assassins has one of my favorite actors in it: Chow Yun Fat. Chow Yun Fat’s collaborations with John Woo in his Hong Kong balletic bloodshed films are the some of the finest films that came out of pre-Handover Hong Kong. Despite a misguided move to Hollywood, Chow Yun Fat’s presence in The Assassins is enough to make me buy a ticket.

Taiwan

When a Wolf Falls in Love With A Sheep (Hou Chi-Jan: 2012), a surrealistic romantic comedy set on Nanyang Street – a place famous for its crammer schools known as  buxibans – is well worth catching.

Japan

My pick of the Japanese films showing – Land of Hope (Sono Sion: 2012), See You Tomorrow, Everyone (Yoshihiro Nakamura: 2012) and The Story of Yonosuke (Okita Shuichi: 2012) – would be See You Tomorrow, Everyone by the director of Fish Story. which details life on a Japanese Council estate from the perspective of Saturu (Gaku Hamada), a naive young men who has been lead to believe that everything on the Estate is so perfect that he should never leave it. However, I expect Sono’s Land of Hope to be one of the big draws to the Festival – although I have yet to forgive him for Cold Fish.

Thailand

Viscra Vichit Vadakan’s Karaoke Girl is the only contribution from Thailand this year and is a gritty, docu-drama about a Bangkok hostess’s struggle to provide for her family in rural Thailand.

South Korea

The South Korea section of the Festival boasts two of the highest grossing films of 2012/2013 domestically and the follow-up to the cult hit Invasion of Alien Bikini, Young Gun in Time (Oh Young-doo: 2012).

While I suspect Jo Sung-hee’s Gothic romance A Werewolf Boy to sell out almost as soon as tickets are released (I have yet to read a negative review), I am excited about the opportunity to see The Berlin File (Ryoo Seung-wan: 2012), an espionage thriller by one of South Korea’s finest contemporary directors.

Contrasting in style and budget to the films over, Young Gun in Time promises to be one of the better South Korea science fiction films of recent years and comes highly recommended.

THE TERROR COTTA ALL-NIGHTER

My favorite section of Terracotta  even though pulling an all-nighter is beyond me these days, boasts an outstanding line-up and includes one of the best examples of Edo-Gothic horror cinema Nakagawa Nobuo’s Ghost Story of Yotsuya (1959). On its own, Ghost Story of Yotsuya is reason enough to make an effort to stay up all night!

My pick of the other films showing is Belenggu (Upi, Indonesia: 2012), merely because it boasts a giant, rabbit throwing rabbit – what more could a horror fan want?

Countdown (Nattawut Poonpiriya, Thailand: 2012), with its demonic drug dealer whose clients are in for an exceedingly bad trip, also looks worth catching.

Japan seems to specialize in off-beat zombie films, and Zomvideo seems to continue the trend. In Zomvideo office workers have only everyday stationary supplies to defend themselves from the zombie apocalypse.

Also from Japan is Henge (Metamorphosis, Hajime Ohata: 2012), a fairly short (52 minute) film in which a wife has to deal with her husband’s metamorphosis into a hideous monster.

(reviews of the above will be available soon).

SPOTLIGHT ON: INDONESIA

One of the highlights of Terracotta 2013 is this introduction to contemporary Indonesian cinema with three films that promote a very different view of Indonesian cinema to that commonly associated with low-budget horror cinema. My pick of the three films showing is Opera Jawa (Garin Nugroho/Arturo Gp/Arswendi, 2006), which is based upon the Sanskrit epic ‘Ramayana’ and takes the form of a Javanese ‘opera’.

However Mouly Surya’s What They Don’t Talk About When They Talk About Love (2013), which is set at a special needs boarding school, sounds well worth catching as does The Dancer (Ifa Isfansyah: 2011), set in 1960′s Indonesia, which was the official entry at the 85th Academy Awards.

IN MEMORY OF: LESLIE CHEUNG AND ANITA MUI

Leslie Cheung (1956- 2003) was one of the great stars of Hong Kong Cinema, who sadly took his own life in 2003. He leaves behind a considerable legacy as actor, director, singer and songwriter. Perhaps best known in the West, for his role as Cheng Dievi in the award-winning Farewell My Concubine (Kaige Chen: 1993), it was his role as Kit in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986) that marks the beginning of his meteoric rise to super-stardom in Asia and beyond.

Anita Mui (1964-2003), also died in 2003, succumbing to cervical cancer in November. Like Cheung, she began her career as a singer before diversifying into film and gained international recognition for her role as Elaine in the Jackie Chan star vehicle, Rumble in The Bronx (Stanley Tong: 1995).

In 1988, Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui appeared together in Rouge (Stanley Kwan), a supernatural romance about a doomed love affair between a prostitute and a rich businessman. A difficult film to get hold off until very recently, Rouge is one of my picks of Terracotta 2013.

Also showing is this section of the Festival are Won Kar Wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990) and Happy Together (1997) both starring Leslie Cheung.

Full details can be found here: Terracotta Festival 2013

TERRACOTTA FAR EAST FILM FESTIVAL 2013 – Preview coming soon

The 5^th Terracotta Film Festival promises to the biggest and best yet expanding from the usual four days to ten days. The films will be screened at The Prince Charles Cinema and the ICA. With an outstanding line up of mainstream and independent cinema from across Asia and masterclasses from some of the key players of Asian cinema, Terracotta has something for anyone with an interest in Asian cinemas along with screenings that will please the general cinephile and a special Terror-cotta (with Fright Fest) all night line-up of the best of Asian horror (which includes my all-time number one Japanese horror film).

The festival this year is organised into four strands: Current Asian Cinema, In Memory Of: Leslie Cheung & Anita Mui, Spotlight on: Indonesia and of course, the Terror-cotta horror all nighter as previously mentioned.

Dates for your diary are:

Thursday 6 June to Saturday 15 June 2013.

Check back here for a brief rundown of the full line up after 4pm tomorrow (7^th May 2013).

If you cannot wait, perhaps you want to think about entering Terracotta’s (in conjunction with Cathay Pacific) short film competition, the remit of which is: the film can be shot on any device (including i-phones), and can take any form as long as it addresses the key theme of ‘Asia in London’. The prize for the winning film is:

• 2 Cathay Pacific Economy class return flights from London Heathrow to Hong Kong
• 3 nights stay at a Design Hotel The Mira Hong Kong including daily breakfast for two
• Winning entry to have an Official World Premiere screening at Terracotta Festival 2013

You can submit your short film any time between now and 12 noon on 20th May 2013.

Full details and how to enter can be found at: Asia in London

A Good Lawyer’s Wife (Im Sang-Soo: 2003)

Most of Director Im’s films to date could be classified as ‘woman’s films’ as the protagonists are strong woman who are shown having to navigate the many obstacles placed in their way in order to be independent in what remains a predominantly patriarchal society in which women should know their place and that place should be one of subservience and obedience. While in the West, Director Im is probably best-known for his 2010 remake of Kim Ki-young’s classic 1960 Gothic melodrama, The Housemaid (하녀: 1960) which had its UK premiere at the 5th London Korean Film Festival, he is one of South Korea’s most noted directors, both domestically and on the international festival circuit. Never shying away from addressing key social and political issues, Director Im directly addresses female subjectivity, subjugation and sexuality in A Good Lawyer’s Wife (바람난 가족: 2003).

The protagonists of A Good Lawyer’s wife, is Ho-jung (Moon So-ri) , who is, as the title tells us, the wife of a lawyer. Yet the title is deceptive in its English translation, as it is Ho-jung who is good, and not in fact her husband, Joo Young-jak (Hwang Jung-min). Indeed, Young-jak is a largely unsympathetic figure, not only does he have sex with a succession of young woman but he has little time for his clients, viewing the practice of the law as a purely money making venture: a capitalistic attitude which will lead to tragedy. Ho-jung’s search for an identity outside of being a ‘good wife’ takes the form of a sexual journey of discovery. Unable to have an orgasm with  Young-jak, she seeks satisfaction elsewhere and finds it in an unconventional relationship with the teenage son, Shin Ji-Woon (Hong Tae-gyu), of her neighbor. At the same time, Young-jak’s mother, Hong Byung-han (Yoon Yeo-jung) is on her own voyage of sexual discovery after her husband succumbs to liver failure as a result of alcoholism.

Like Director Im’s other woman-centred films, A Good Lawyer’s wife is very direct in its representation of female sexuality and female desire. While the search for sexual fulfillment as a metaphor for the search for female emancipation is in some ways a cliche, the powerful central performance by Moon So-ri as torn between patriarchal desires and her own desires, adds authenticity to the journey for self-discovery. While I did enjoy the film, especially when it took a darker turn, I felt that it was still a patriarchal vision/ version of female emancipation in that the sex-scenes said more about male desire than female desire or fulfillment.As such it could be argued that A Good Lawyer’s Wife, despite Director Im’s intentions, is complicit with the dominant ideology of patriarchy which relies on a conventional view of compulsory heterosexuality and gender binaries.  The fact that A Good Lawyer’s Wife was partly promoted in terms of its explicit scenes of sex, thus reconstructing the female – here Moon-ri -as the object of male desire seems to attest to the difficulty of defining female subjectivity without recourse to sexual cliches.

Having said all this, I would recommend A Good Lawyer’s Wife but more because of the performance of Moon-ri than the overall narrative of the film itself.

UK Premiere: Tormented 3D (Shimizu, Japan: 2011)

For all of those who live in London, the UK Premiere of Shimizu’s Tormented 3D (aka Rabbit Horror) is taking place this coming Friday at the Rio Cinema as part of the Pan-Asian Festival. The screening begins at 11:30 pm and directions to the cinema can be found at Rio Cinema.

Tickets can be booked directly through Asia House

About the Film 

According to Asianwiki, the plot concerns “A young woman searches for her younger brother who was dragged away into an alternate world by a rabbit …” see Asianwiki for more details. 

Who wouldn’t want to see a film about alternate worlds and giant rabbits?

About the Director

Shimizu is a prolific Japanese director and the director of one of the best, if not the best, contemporary Japanese horror film, Ju-on ( 呪怨: 2000), as well as its sequel Ju-on 2 ( 呪怨２), and the US remakes, Ju-on: The Grudge and Ju-on: The Grudge: 2. He also directed the more experimental Marebito (稀人: 2004), which is well worth checking out if you haven’t already seen it.

I will not be able to attend because it is too far away for me to get home easily that early in the morning, but I am interested to know what people think.

Stoker (Park Chan-wook, US: 2012)

Stoker, Director Park’s first foray into directing an English language film, is an intense Oedipal drama which although making a number of intertextual visual references to Bram Stoker’s seminal Dracula (the asylum from which Charlie escape, the spiders that climb up India’s body), eschews the supernatural and preternatural worlds and instead instead focuses in on the fragility of the human condition through an interrogation into the functioning of the familial unit. As in his earlier female-centered Gothic dramas, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (친절한 금자씨: 2005)   and I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK (싸이보그지만 괜찮아: 2006), Director Park is concerned with exploring female subjectivity as contained and constrained by patriarchy.

At the center of the dysfunctional family unit in Stoker is the sullen and emotionally distanced India (Mia Wasikowska) who when the film begins is in mourning for the sudden loss of her father, Richard (Dermot Mulroney), and in constant war with her glamorous mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) who she perceives as not grieving sufficiently. Into this fraught mother-child dyad, comes a substitute father figure in the form of Richard’s brother, Charles (Matthew Goode), completing the oedipal triangle of mommy-daddy-me. With his debonair charm and worldly ways, Charles soon becomes an object of desire for both women, and the stage is set for a bitter conflict which can only be resolved through death in order for India to complete and resolve her oedipal complex. Stoker is a paradigmatic example of pop-psychoanalysis and the narrative navigates Freud’s drama of desire and death within the familial unit. While the resolution might be unconventional vis-à-vis the oedipal complex,  the playing out of the Oedipal conflict is not.

As to be expected, Director Park’s strong aesthetic and artistic sensibilities are evident and he creates a beautiful and timeless canvas which frames the drama. However, the script by Wentworth Miller, is cliched and I found Mia Wasikowska as the sullen teenager transiting to adulthood as unconvincing. This is partly because  she looks too old to be a teenage girl on the verge of adulthood (Wasikowska was in fact 23 during the filming).

Compared to similar horror film heroines,  Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins) in Gingersnaps (John Fawcett, Canada: 2000),  Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) in Heathers (Michael Lehmann, US: 1988), who are obsessed also obsessed with death and have difficulty in dealing with the transitions into adulthood,  India is a one-dimensional figure as played by Wasikowska, whose entrance into womanhood is signaled by a scene of masturbation in the shower while she fantasizes about Charlie and the ‘primal scene’, after which she symbolically takes her mother’s place by wearing  the same type of glamorous clothes as her mother rather than the drab, figure concealing costume of a sexually repressed teenager. Swapping the unconventional narrative and genre conventions of South Korean cinema, Director Park constructs an all too conventional narrative with an over-codified female lead, who is the object of patriarchal fears and desires, as signaled by the first low-angled close up shot of India which fragments the threatening female body and thus disavows the possibility of castration through the substitution of the fetish – here shoes function as the fetish throughout, with the sneakers that India receives on her birthday (which she thinks are a present from her father, rather than her Uncle) being symbolically exchanged for high-heels when she enters into adulthood.

The dark threatening tones of the opening scene construct a mise-en-scene of danger and disavowal, containing a threat of death (castration), which will be fulfilled towards the narrative’s conclusion. To successfully navigate the Oedipus complex, the girl-child needs to separate from the mother (the original love object in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis) and go from desiring to have her father’s child to desiring father-substitutes thus according with the incest injunction and the needs of bourgeois society. India’s separation from the symbolic father, Charlie, is done using the tools that her real father taught her, while her separation from her mother takes the form of imitating the mother – the frequent mirroring of shots framing mother and then daughter in the same position and taken at the same angle) – before the act of vengeance in which the daughter becomes the mother.

It is certainly possible, to view India as the typical unreliable Gothic heroine  whose point-of-view is compromised by her fantasies and repressed desires. This is suggested by offering more than one version of the death of a young man who attempts to rape (or does he?) India and who is murdered by Charlie (or is he? does this ever in fact take place?). As such the narrative becomes one which is located in the pre-Oedipal or Lacan’s imaginary (the world of images and  narcissism), and is a playing out of childish fantasies and wish-fulfillment rather than a staging of the Oedipal complex. While such a reading is perhaps more productive, it does not alter the fact that Stoker is a conventional replaying of normative heterosexuality and the dictates of compulsory femininity. After all if the killing of Charlies, as the substitute father-figure, is just a fantasy, then patriarchal order is restored.  However, even if the murder is a reality within the diegetic world, it says more about male fears and desires than female subjectivity thereby conforming to the dictates of the dominant patriarchal ideology that informs so much of US cinema.

In conclusion, I found the film to be an uncomfortable fit with Director Park’s oeuvre and one of his least challenging works. Having said this, I realise that I am at odds with critics and audiences in the West who have raved about Stoker. Stoker is beautifully composed as one would expect of a Park Chan-wook film, but in the final analysis, just too Americanized and conventional for this viewer.  However, Director Park remains one of my favourite directors and his Sympathy for Mr Vengeance ( 복수는 나의 것: 2002) remains an uncompromising cinematic tour-de-force. I preferred the supernatural and preternatural Gothic of his previous film, Thirst, rather than the domestic Gothic of Stoker.

Forever the Moment (우리 생애 최고의 순간: 2008)

Director YIM’s first commercially funded film, Forever the Moment, is based around the true story of the South Korean Women’s handball team who came second to Denmark in the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics. The first film about handball – a sport that I hadn’t heard of before last year London Olympics when people were snapping up tickets in the desire to see some Olympic action firsthand and details of the rules and history were being exchanged by people who like myself were new to the game  - Forever the Moment is an entertaining film, strongest when the focus is on the troubled lives of the women themselves rather than on the on court action – although that might be because of my unfamiliarity with the game rather than any shortcoming of the film.

Much of the conflict and action off and on-court is a result of the tension between older players including Mi-Sook (Moon So-Ri) and Hae-Kyung (Kim Jung-Eun) and the younger ones, Oh Su-Hee (Jo Eun-Ji) and Bo-ram (Min-ji) as the new coach, Ahn Seung-pil (Uhm Tae-Woong) attempts to improve the team’s prospects by introducing new ‘Western’ style training to the women’s chagrin. Old bonds are reformed and new ones are formed as the women become united against the attempts of Seung-pil to dictate their diets, their training and relationships and victory becomes a possibility.

While Forever the Moment follows closely to the structure of the sports film, we are denied the moment of triumph with which such films generally end signifying the completion of the teams/protagonist’s trajectory from underdog to eventual victor overcoming seemingly unsurmountable odds in the process, instead the final image is a freeze frame of the women at the conclusion of the game – capturing a moment of loss reconfigured as triumph. While the team might come second, the women themselves are victorious in their negotiations of identity formation within a patriarchal society in which they are accorded secondary status – relegated to supporting roles unless contained within the domestic sphere as good wives/daughters. Director YIM offers identifiable characters whose lives may well seem overly melodramatic to some, but who are nonetheless authentic representations of a feminine identity still in the process of formation and whose resistance to patriarchal constraints is envisaged as a point of liberation through an attempt – however fractured it may be – of self-definition. Although Director YIM does not seem herself as a feminist director, the concern of the film with women’s struggle – in which sport functions as a metaphor for society as a whole – does offer glimpses of a feminist viewpoint if not aesthetic.

Whether sports films are your cup of team or not, Forever the Moment has a great deal to offer viewers, in both its quiet meditations on female identity off the pitch and frenetic reconstructions of key matches on the pitch. It is not my favorite film by Director YIM as I think her talents are better utilized in a smaller more independent features such as Fly Penguin(날아라 펭귄: 2009) and Rolling Home with a Bull (소와 함께 여행하는 법: 2010), when the emphasis is on character rather than action, but it was a smash hit in South Korea where it topped the box-office on its opening weekend. This commercial success was followed by critical success when Forever the Moment was awarded Best Film at the 29th Blue Dragon Film Awards in 2008.

Director YIM Soon-rye

It was nice to end the wonderful Year of 12 Directors, with a month devoted to the films of a female director, YIM Soon-rye (임순례). I didn’t make the first screening which was Waikiki Brothers (와이키키 브라더스: 2001), Director YIM’s second feature film, but managed to catch the other three films that were shown. While I wasn’t that keen on Forever the Moment (우리 생애 최고의 순간: 2008) – probably because I am not a fan of sports based films – I really enjoyed both Fly Penguin (날아라 펭귄: 2009) and Rolling Home with a Bull (소와 함께 여행하는 법: 2010) and it was great to have the opportunity to meet and talk to Director YIM before the screening of the later at the Apollo Cinema on the 20th December. Director YIM’s films focus on marginal characters and identities and as such can be considered within the broad banner of social issue cinema. While her primary focus is not on the oppression suffered by women under patriarchal capitalism, she does bring a sense of truth and authenticity to her female characters, who are more rounded and complex than generally found in female centered films by male directors that struggle to find a midway path between the virgin/whore binary or the good wife/the new woman, and in which women’s voices are often appropriated in order to construct/reconstruct a viable and sometimes violent masculinity. Poignant moments in Forever the Moment tell of an authentic female experience, from not being acknowledged as authoritative  or as being able to be in a position of power and/or being torn between the seemingly exclusive roles of being a good wife and an independent woman. In Fly Penguin, two of the interlinked stories concern woman’s struggle to be heard in both the domestic – the home – and the public – the workplace, while in Rolling Home with a Bull, a young woman helps guide a would be poet on his journey to spiritual enlightenment.

It is not surprising therefore to learn that Director YIM had participated in the first Human Rights  omnibus film, If You Were Me/ 여섯개의 시선 in 2003, with The Weight of Her, a short film about female students being forced to change their appearances  – lose weight and/or have plastic surgery – in order to accord with the dictates of compulsory femininity under a patriarchal society (there have been four other films in the series since, including an anime film). Director YIM has a cameo appearance at the end of The Weight of Her, juxtaposing reality and fiction, and foregrounding the centrality of image as constitutive of female identity in contemporary South Korea.

Meeting the Director

Before the screening of Rolling Home with a Bull, I was invited along with other critics/reviewers to meet Director YIM for a group interview. A number of us, including myself, were interested in her experiences as a female director and her feelings regarding responsibility to women to deal with specifically female issues/identities (this came up again in the Q&A session with Tony Rayns after the screening). Director YIM pointed out that her films did not deal specifically with female experiences/identities, and that in fact she was as interested -if not more so – with male identities and in particularly oppressed male identity and the violence such oppression often results in. I think for a woman, it is always exciting to meet a female director – as there are still so few of them relatively – and there is a need (for me at least) to see the representation of woman outside of patriarchal constraints, fears and desire. I think this need is difficult for some male critics (including Tony Rayns) to understand. It is not that we want female directors to be limited to telling female stories (and I am not being essentialist here, I think it is our experiences as being woman that unites us in a multitude of complex and difficult ways) but we want to be able to connect to female characters on screen rather than disconnect.

Director YIM pointed out that when she started in film in 1996, she was the only female director, and therefore there was pressure on her to direct female-orientated if not feminist films. However these days there are feminist film directors in South Korea who have emerged over the last ten years, and this has taken the pressure of her. Interestingly enough – and in opposition to some of the articles I have read on Korean cinema – Director YIM said that there are no more female directors today in South Korea than when 10 years ago. However, in terms of people involved in the making of films including production staff and editors, the industry is divided equally 50/50 .  While this demonstrates a significant shift in gender relations in the film industry, it does not take away from the fact that there is a shortage of woman at the helm of the industry. (There will be a link to the full transcript of the group interview in due course).

It was such a pleasure to meet Director YIM and was a wonderful end to a great year of Korean Cinema in London courtesy of the Korean Cultural Centre in London and the London Korean Film Festival. I am looking forward to what 2013 holds for Korean Cinema with a great deal of anticipation.

A Better Tomorrow (무적자: 2010)

A remake of John Woo’s seminal Hong Kong classic (1986), A Better Tomorrow updates and relocates the action from a pre-handover Hong Kong to contemporary Busan where Kim Hyuk (Joo Jin-moo), lives the good life, selling illegal arms together with his best friend, Lee Young-choon (Song Seung-hun). However, this ‘success’ is overshadowed by the fact that he was forced to leave behind his mother and younger brother, Chul (Kim Kang-w00) when defecting from North to South Korea some years earlier leading the pivotal plot conflict between two brothers,  more or less intact from the original.

While there is no doubt that visually A Better Tomorrow is stunning, or that the action sequences are well choreographed and spectacular, it pales into comparison with John Woo’s original, which is almost the Holy Grail of the Hong Kong ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre of the 1980s. In addition at 125 minutes, the film was at least half an hour too long and the periods of lengthy exposition that punctured the action were to the detriment of overall narrative coherence and spectatorial engagement. As a fan of John Woo, I suspect that it was always going to be difficult for me to appreciate a remake of one of his most seminal works and I lost interest half way through, which did not help. And unlike other reviewers, I missed the melodramatic relationship between Sung Chi-Ho (Ti Lung) and Jackie (Emily Chu Bo-Yee) from the original, which gave the film ‘heart’ which the remake lacked.

I am not against remakes in principal, but this was not a patch on the original (which I believe was itself a remake 1967 Cantonese film, Story of a Discharged Prisoner). I missed the presence of  Chow Yun-Fat and the flair and technical proficiency of John Woo – I am off to watch the ‘original’ again then.

 

 

Failan ( 파이란, Song Hae-seong: 2001)

Kang-jae (Choi Min-sik) is a small-time gangster, eking out a living by selling porn videos to teenagers in the small video shop he manages. Failan (Cecilia Cheung) is a young Chinese woman who comes to Korea looking for her remaining relatives after her parents die. Failan agrees to a paper marriage with Kang-jae so that she can stay in Korea, after she discovers that her relatives have emigrated to Canada. Just as Kang-jae is about to make a deal to serve 10 years in prison on the behalf of a big-time gangster, he finds out that Failan has died. During his trip to pick up his wife’s ashes, Kang-jae discovers that Failan had fallen in love with him and changes his mind about going back to prison: a decision which can only led to tragedy.

This short synopsis makes Failan sound like a straightforward romantic melodrama, but in fact there is little that is straightforward about it with the ‘romance’ between Kang-jae and Failan unfolding through a series of flashbacks which fracture Kang-jae’s present journey to retrieve Failan’s possessions. Failan’s unrequited love for Kang-jae is told through  letters to him that he discovers amongst her belongings.

However while Choi Min-sik’s is excellent, as always, in this role as a petty gangster whose downward spiral has almost robbed him of his humanity, Cecilia Cheung does not convince as the dying Failan who is meant to be the emotional core of the film. While I am aware that Failan has been seen by many critics as one of the best films of New Korean Cinema, I was unconvinced. As much as I appreciated the construction and aesthetics of the film, I found it lacking. I much preferred Director SONG’s later Maundy Thursday/우리들의 행복한 시간, in which the doomed relationship between the lovers is fully fleshed out and believable. Failan was like a  beautiful piece of postmodern art, all surface and no substance.  I just hope that the emotional core of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow/  英雄本色 (1996) one of the best examples of ‘balletic bloodshed’ has been preserved in Director SONG’s recent remake ( 무적자: 2010).

Crocodile (악어, Kim Ki-duk: 1996)

Crocodile is the directorial debut of enfant terrible of South Korean cinema, Kim Ki-duk. It is an astonishingly accomplished piece of work for a first film, even more so taking into consideration that Kim Ki-duk had no formal training. Instead Kim Ki-duk studied fine arts in Paris, and it is his impeccable understanding of aesthetics that permeates his films enabling the director to construct complex, layered mise-en-scene utilizing natural objects and locations as backdrops to his intense tales of the fragility of  human relationships and the landscapes of concrete modernity against which these relationships are formed and deformed.

Crocodile itself sets the template for many of Director KIM’s early works, including Bad Guy/나쁜 남자 (2001) which it reminds me the most of, with its detailed analysis of the lives of society’s outcasts, and their struggle to exist in a hostile landscape. The film concerns the lives of a group of four of these outcasts – Crocodile (JO Jae-hyeon), grandfather (JEON Moo-song), a young boy Yang-byul (AHN Jae-hong) and a young woman Hyun-jung (WOO Yun-gyeong) that Crocodile rescues from drowning from the Han River where he and the others live, eking out a living by the selling the effects of suicide victims and hustling on the city’s busy streets.

These are lives almost bereft of hope in which violence is a fact of life, as perpetrated by those surrounding this ‘family’ including corrupt cops, mobsters and a variety of street hustlers – here as elsewhere in Director KIM’s films, violence only begets more violence, and death is never very far away. Crocodile himself is the archetypal male protagonist of Director KIM’s early works, whose hatred of self is expressed through violence towards [female] others. For Crocodile rape is the currency that expresses relations between men and women, and is the only way that he can communicate with them.  At one point, when Crocodile  is attempting to rape the girlfriend of a rich businessman who he is attempting to blackmail, he uses a condom telling his unwilling victim that he wouldn’t want to bring another like him into the world, which foregrounds Crocodile’s self-loathing. Scenes such as this in Crocodile would seem to give credence to criticisms of Director KIM’s misogynism.  However this would be to fail to understand that at is heart, Crocodile is  a love story, albeit it a cruel one, in which Crocodile is humanized through his relationship with Hyun-jung, a redemption that is only fulfilled through death with the lovers at the bottom of the Han river, amid the discarded belongings that Crocodile has fashioned into an underwater living space. There is beauty in cruelty here, as elsewhere in Director KIM’s oeuvre, and beauty that is fashioned out of the rubbish of modernity.

As in the death scene with which the film ends, the cinematography is stunning utilizing a color palate drawn from the natural world to externalize and emphasize character psychology. There is beauty in nature, and KIM Ki-duk’s cruel beauty serves to remind us of that beauty, which is being discarded through the process of modernization and industrialization, mimicking the manner in which Crocodile and his ‘family’ have been discarded by society in order to remind us of the human costs of such intractable machinic process.

Crocodile is available to buy on double DVD with Arirang, Director KIM’s award-winning documentary, and can be purchased direct through Terracotta Distribution at a discounted price. These are two films – at polar opposite ends of the scale – by one of South Korea’s leading directors, that should take pride of place in any cinephile’s collection.