Jang Yong-woo: A DREAM COMES TRUE (2009)

장용우: 돌멩이의 꿈

You can find the original article in Hungarian here →

A Dream Comes True:
An Out-of-Tune Genre Mix

After watching this film, an image flickered before me: like when heavy rain soaks through layers of posters pasted on top of each other, and bits of an older one begin to peek through from beneath the top layer, creating a new, somewhat confusing third image. On the surface, we are presented with a pleasant romantic comedy, yet it doesn't exist in its pure form because elements of a tragic melodrama bleed through it. Why screenwriter Miho Nakazono wanted to force this direction upon a story that could have stood on its own feet remains a mystery; had the rom-com been allowed to flourish in its pure form, we would likely have seen a better result. As it stands, however, every character is smeared with a bit of a tragic past. Furthermore, the cinematic execution of the accidents occurring before our eyes doesn't help matters, as director Jang Yong-woo achieves the opposite effect: instead of shocking us, they are more likely to provoke laughter.

Director Jang Yong-woo

The entire film feels like a performance on an out-of-tune instrument; even though we hear it is off-key, it isn't entirely unenjoyable—in fact, at times, what we hear is quite interesting. A third-rate, penniless, and debt-ridden comedian, who also suffers from a gambling addiction, unexpectedly finds himself in a position where he must escort a young boy—who has just lost his father—to the mother the child has never met.

Accompanying the child is a metal briefcase locked with a code, presumably containing money. The story holds no surprises; naturally, an emotional bond grows stronger between the boy and the man during their travel adventures. As expected, a female character also appears, making it seem likely that our protagonist’s fate will be resolved through her. However, the writer-director’s will dictates otherwise—a conclusion that, while saving the film from the usual clichéd happy endings, hangs off the story with a questionable result... well, let’s just say that not every genre-mixing can be called a success.

The male lead, Cha In-pyo, is capable of enriching the figure with deeper shades alongside scenes encouraging comedy, and perhaps the inherent kindness radiating from him is the film's greatest appeal. The character of his female co-star, Kim Hyo-jin, possesses more inconsistencies; although we are introduced to her as a washed-up, alcoholic actress, she suddenly becomes a completely sober assistant to the man-and-child duo. The little boy, Chae Geon, is very cute, especially in the cheerful scenes, but he fails to solve the opposite situations convincingly—and this might not be his fault, as the film itself doesn't strive to achieve authenticity there. Interestingly, this film is also part of the SBS Telecinema series, whose installments are broadcast on South Korean and Japanese television after their theatrical release.

This film can safely be crossed off your "must-watch" list; I would only recommend it if you truly have a completely useless summer afternoon on your hands.

Ounie Lecomte: A BRAND NEW LIFE (2009)

우니 르콩트: 여행자

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A Brand New Life:
A Poetic Journey from Abandonment to Hope

I could say "all's well that ends well"—reflecting on how the third film of the weekend finally brought a truly magnificent cinematic experience.

Ounie Lecomte’s film is a breathtakingly beautiful work, with the unique quality that while watching it, the thought that you are viewing a "movie" never even crosses your mind. The story and the manner of its execution draw you in with such elemental force that the screen practically swallows you, making you a participant in events that flow slowly, with unstudied simplicity and everyday naturalness.

Director Ounie Lecomte

Lecomte incorporated her own life experience into the film, which was overseen by none other than Lee Chang-dong as producer. It is as if his signature poetic realism shines through this story as well, and if that weren't enough of a hallmark of quality, the lead actress provides an absolute guarantee. She is none other than Kim Sae-ron, who was exactly nine years old at the time of filming—the same age as the protagonist, Jin-hee, whom she brings to life.

The film's Korean title is Journey, referring to the "merciful" lie Jin-hee’s father uses to mislead her, hiding the fact that the beautiful clothes and the cake brought as a gift serve a journey that is strictly one-way. Due to the father’s new marriage, Jin-hee has become superfluous; therefore, he drops her off at a church-run orphanage, where the goal is for children to find a "brand new life" with adoptive families, primarily from abroad.

Kim Sae-ron guides us through every stage of the young girl’s psychological drama with perfect immersion and authentic honesty. Her performance possesses a thousand emotional nuances, allowing her to cover the vast arc from initial angry protest and stubborn resistance to the eventual understanding and acceptance of her situation. Possessing realizations that would burden even an adult, Jin-hee finally boards a plane (just as the film's director did in real life) to land, after a solitary journey, with her new French parents, who await their unknown adopted child at the airport with hopeful curiosity. It is chilling to consider the weight of the life experiences Jin-hee and children with similar fates already possess as they reach the threshold of their new lives.

The portrayal of the orphanage residents is richly detailed, and the film glimpses into the fates of several children, bringing either disappointment or the fulfillment of childhood hopes. The relationships between the children are simultaneously sources of survival and new trauma; they help each other integrate into this temporary community, but since this is only a transitional phase in all their lives, each parting brings fresh pain. The director also senses with great delicacy the participation of the adult caregivers in this process—a role that is not unloving, but rather consciously and wisely restrained, yet emotional bonds inevitably emerge.

Ounie Lecomte’s subsequent private life story followed an interesting path. In her new French family, her father held a ministerial post; Lecomte graduated as a fashion designer and also took on several film roles. She returned to Korea in 1991 to star in a story about an adopted child searching for their roots, but the film was never completed. However, in reality, she managed to establish contact with her biological parents. Later, she participated in a screenwriting workshop, during which she eventually wrote the script for A Brand New Life in 2006.

The film received numerous accolades, winning the Best Asian Film award at the 22nd Tokyo International Film Festival and the Jury Prize in 2009 at the Cinekid Festival in Amsterdam.

Ahn Sun-kyoung: A BLIND RIVER (2009)

안선경: 귀향

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 * Warning: This post contains spoilers! *

A Blind River:
An Absurd Journey into
the Trauma of Motherhood

There are days when one misses the mark twice (though luckily, not by much). I felt that a good film could compensate for the sense of void left in me by Kim Ki-duk’s Amen. For some reason, fate led me to A Blind River, and regarding the theme, I found myself jumping from the frying pan into the fire. While Kim Ki-duk wavered around the acceptance of motherhood, director Ahn Sun-kyoung’s film chooses the torture of a young mother’s cesarean section as its opening, immediately presenting a rather direct message: the girl is stretched across the operating table like Christ on the cross.

We learn little about how this introductory sequence connects to the main plot, which follows a young man adopted by Australian parents thirty years ago. Our protagonist, played by Park Sang-hun, tries to find his biological mother with the help of his Korean girlfriend. The boy has struggled with serious identity problems since childhood; thus, searching for his roots is also a path toward inner peace. He cannot accept his girlfriend’s offer to start a family together, even rejecting her help. Following the only existing, uncertain lead, he sets out alone to the place recorded in the documents as his birthplace.

Director Ahn Sun-kyoung

However, the story unexpectedly shifts dimensions, and we suddenly find ourselves in another universe. We receive little help from director Ahn Sun-kyoung as to what is actually happening; she treats the subplots of her film as if she were assembling a mosaic whose pieces refuse to fit together. Yet, one can sense the intention to form a grand tableau, primarily about the vulnerability of women, but she fails to find the appropriate tools for it.

Lucas Fedora (born Seong-chan) dismisses his girlfriend by saying he needs sleep. This sentence could suggest that the story of his upcoming journey is dreamlike, though we receive no further clues for interpretation until the very end. At the same time, the director was clearly captivated by Albert Camus’ tragedy The Misunderstanding, which she squeezed into the film without any scruples. Our protagonist arrives at a rather grim and run-down motel at the edge of the world, which, similar to Camus’ story, is operated by two lonely women. Behind the past and the hallucinations of the exhausted mother and her psychologically burdened daughter lurks some dark secret tied to a child. We have fallen into the world of the absurd, where we lose our real-world anchors: can all that is happening before our eyes truly occur? Lucas, though he does not reveal himself to the women, believes he has found his mother and sister, who do not recognize their lost relative in him. The boy cannot know that no male guest’s life is safe in the hands of these women. Furthermore, parallel to the ominous atmosphere of the motel, we follow—in an absolutely realistic portrayal—the story of another young mother giving birth in a different motel, yet there is no precise indication of its temporal or causal relationship to the absurd tale. Are we watching the story of Lucas’s birth unfolding simultaneously? The motel narrative is filled with symbolism that is at times too direct, at times difficult to decipher, and at times completely lacking any foothold for unraveling. Mystery, mysticism, and the absurd mix but do not blend, resulting in moments that are strikingly effective yet border on the ridiculous.

Ultimately, the film presents a strange, circular portrait of reality in which everyone feels miserable. If the subject is a woman, the exclusive problem is sexual vulnerability, unwanted pregnancy, and the psychological misery following the forced abandonment of a child. If it is a man (and we find none other than the protagonist), he either suffers from a mother complex and an identity crisis, or he abandons the girl he got pregnant, or he receives a brutal, animalistic portrayal—like the man in one unrefined scene who, upon seeing a woman sitting on the street, immediately attacks her with predatory sexual impulse. There is no doubt that the film focuses on a very serious social problem, but it feels more like a compulsion to meet the director's own preconceptions rather than a thorough intent to explore the issue.

The film is essentially a cinematic adaptation of Camus’ tragedy placed within a frame story. Director Ahn clearly unfolds the improbable motel story with great pleasure and a peculiar sensitivity, creating a strong visual world and atmosphere. This is enhanced by the magnificent performance of Park Ji-yeon, who plays the younger, psychologically disturbed woman; almost every moment of her acting is unforgettable. Standing out even among these is her final scene, in which (SPOILER ALERT!) the lighting and smoking of the last cigarette is, without question, Oscar-worthy. In a sense, the actor playing the male lead was in a more difficult position, as he had to navigate both realistic and absurd environments, a hurdle Park Sang-hun cleared well.

The director often gifts the viewers with painterly sequences; the visual composition of the boy leaving the girl in a yellowing field is particularly beautiful, as is the dramatic, soul-painting power of the black rock mountains. Despite its numerous problems, the film does not leave a bad impression—though, admittedly, not a very deep one either.

Kim Ki-duk: AMEN (2011)

김기덕: 아멘

You can find the original article in Hungarian here →

* Warning: This post contains spoilers! *

Amen: Kim Ki-duk’s
Experimental Journey Through Europe

In 2011, Kim Ki-duk returned with two unconventional works: Arirang, a documentary processing his personal and artistic crisis, and Amen, a low-budget, independent drama.

There is likely no director who doesn't wish to experiment or at least strive to hold the entire spectrum of filmmaking in their hands. In Amen, Kim Ki-duk fully indulged this desire. While it is natural for him to work from his own screenplay, in this instance, he also took on the roles of cinematographer and editor, and even stepped into the shoes of the male protagonist himself.

The film deviates from his previous body of work in several respects. The story is set in Europe, with its distinct cultural environment. Although there is no shortage of beautifully composed visuals, the painterly quality of his earlier films is present only in traces. Amen is permeated in every fiber by a spirit of cinematic experimentation, and somehow it is this resolve—paired with a "cinephile" enthusiasm—that makes the film watchable, though no one should expect a lasting, monumental experience.

Kim Ki-duk and Kim Ye-na during the presentation
of the film at the San Sebastian Film Festival

The protagonist is a Korean girl who arrives in Paris. She is presumably looking for her lover, whom she cannot find at the given address. From that point on, following information gathered through intercoms, she sets off on the trail of a male street painter, traveling across several iconic European tourist destinations (Venice, Avignon). The search itself—though a primary motif—becomes almost secondary; the focus is much more on the girl’s solitary journey and isolated struggle. It is very difficult to determine whether the events are real or merely projections of her internal fears. The story, which begins as a romantic drama or a study of isolation in a foreign culture, soon reveals itself as a crime story when the girl, sleeping in a train carriage, is robbed and raped by a strange man wearing a gas mask. Her reaction—or rather, a reaction that does not follow the logic of real life—pushes the narrative into an irrational plane. The "silent" protagonist is not unusual in Kim Ki-duk’s films, and we encounter one here as well. The girl can clearly speak, as she cries out her lover's name several times into the un-echoing spaces of the cities, and we hear her speak in multiple languages during intercom conversations. The renunciation of communication is part of the directorial concept, exacerbated here by the fact that, aside from her mysterious follower, the girl interacts with almost no one throughout the film. There is also a strong reflection on certain cinematic precursors, such as Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, built almost exclusively on close-ups.

Her gas-masked attacker, however, follows in her footsteps, and the camera becomes subjective; from then on, we see the girl mostly through the eyes—or rather, the "peeping"—of the gas-masked man. A bit of playfulness fits into this voyeuristic observation through the intentionally "amateurish" use of a handheld camera, evoking moods typical of horror films. At the same time, the attacker transforms from a frightening figure into a protective one, smoothing the girl’s path toward her final decision. We circle through several stations of this journey, occasionally with self-repeating sequences, and finally, European Catholicism appears as a terminal element, leading our heroes to a statue of the Virgin Mary and Child. The film, which until this point worked only with ambient soundscapes, receives a powerful musical score from here on. The symbolism of the story is difficult to follow, not because of its complexity, but because of its lack of refinement; like the film as a whole, it is characterized mostly by inconsistency. The movie gets stuck somewhere on the border between the rational and the irrational. Its characters are annoyingly unrealistic in the real world, yet not abstract enough to be interpreted within a purely symbolic field. Consequently, the film often turns into self-indulgent "artistry" and irritating navel-gazing, remaining the director's private affair.

Although the lead actress tries to realize the director’s visions with great sensitivity—and without Kim Ye-na’s tension-filled performance, the film would be simply unwatchable—even she cannot quite handle the problematic interpretations of love and motherhood presented in the story. It remains on the side of the contrived and the fabricated, much like the film itself.

Overall, I recommend Amen to those who wish to fully possess the entire Kim Ki-duk filmography, or to "insiders" who are intrigued by how a brilliant director consciously takes the risk of making "professionally amateur" steps into territories he wishes to explore, creating the "student film" of his life.