Cho Jung-rae: SPIRITS' HOMECOMING (2016)

조정래: 귀향

You can find the original article in Hungarian here →

Spirits' Homecoming:
75,200 Hearts for the Souls of the Lost

75,200.
Let us savor this number for a moment: how vast is it? What scale do we envision when we imagine that many people acting with a single will? In the case of Spirits' Homecoming, this is how many individuals contributed through donations to ensure the completion of a film that had been halted several times due to financial difficulties.

Following World War II, one had to wait until the 1980s for one of the darkest secrets afflicting the civilian population to come to light. This did not happen overnight; rather, as a long, drawn-out process, the details were revealed, and from the mosaics of stories provided by women testifying about their past, the full picture finally emerged.

By 2015, the story of the "comfort women"—abducted women taken to the military's secret brothels to satisfy the sexual desires of Japanese soldiers—had become known not only to Koreans but also on an international level. Many were still mere children, young girls—perhaps the most vulnerable on the blood-soaked tactical table of men's war games.

The greatest treasure of any nation is its generation of children. What emotions, what intensities of passion must have driven the fathers and mothers of the adult generation to do everything in their power—in hopes of creating a memorial and seeking restitution through film—for those victims who lived generations ago, yet remained forever the collective children of them all? Even the premiere did not go smoothly, as distributors were reluctant to screen the film. However, people wrote petitions and paid for tickets in advance so that on March 1, 2016—Independence Movement Day—the film would finally reach theaters, immediately hitting box-office records during its opening weekend.

I do not know how the public sensed that an exceptionally important film was in the making. For Cho Jung-rae’s film is a work that undertakes an almost impossible task, yet fulfills its commitment entirely.

Director Cho Jung-rae

Those who have seen the film Snowy Road know what a "light" treatment of this same subject entails—one adjusted merely to the tolerance levels of television screens, rather than easing the emotional burden of the viewers. In Homecoming, there is no such refinement; the events are presented with naturalistic ruthlessness. The screenplay tangibly reconstructs the past reality from the details of the victims' testimonies and does not turn its gaze away from any horror. Thus, we too become acquainted with the structures of brothels reminiscent of pens or paddocks, and the no less animalistic activities taking place within them. The film summons and puts on public display all that the Japanese military first wanted to conceal and later wished to erase forever from the sequence of events. Those who vanished without a trace are brought to life, for having been treated as objects, they were simply destroyed once they were no longer of use.

Various estimates exist regarding the percentage of abducted women who perished, and this figure hovers around 80–90 percent. The few survivors were unable to report what had happened to them. Because of shame, fear of contempt, and ostracization—the consequences of which would have cost them even the slightest chance of living a normal life. What remained was secrecy; even if they managed to marry and start a family, they had to lie about the true reason they were unable to bear children. And those were the happier stories. For many, due to the traumas endured, chose suicide or required treatment for severe psychological problems.

The film sets the foul world of wartime brothels in sharp contrast with the peaceful, though struggling, lives of the young girls' lost homes and families, which feel almost idyllic in the light of the ensuing horror. At the same time, life lives and wants to live; the girls cherish the hope of returning home, and in their rare moments granted without harassment, they are able to transform back into beings reminiscent of their former selves, who can still smile and even sing.

The two protagonist girls are also guided by magical faith, for they carry a protective amulet made by the mother of one of them. With this element, the film bridges the timelines of the past and the present. We see one of the girls as an elderly survivor living in solitude, sewing amulets for her friend, who happens to be a shaman.

It is an extraordinary feat of screenwriting how the layers of the realistic and spiritual worlds slide into one another, utilizing the archaic belief system of Koreans—which exists to this day—in the most natural way. While in the film Snowy Road the thread connecting generations resulted in a didactic outcome, here we encounter a completely different trajectory. The shaman woman believes she recognizes the signs of a born shaman in a girl with a peculiar backstory. This girl is also a victim of violence and happens upon the company of the elderly survivor by chance. The touch of the amulet turns her into a medium, who from that point on can mediate between the former friends, only one of whom returned home alive. The experience of death serves simultaneously as an initiation for the girl into becoming a true shaman, who subsequently uses her powers—unfolding in their full strength—to conduct the ritual for summoning the souls home.

We witness a sublime scene in which the souls set out across mountains and waters to their homeland to find peace and rest (the film’s original title is simply Homecoming). The wheel of time turns back; families become whole again. And the national body also becomes whole, understanding and embracing the souls of the long-suffering victims. Simultaneously, the connection between generations is realized, as a young person becomes capable of experiencing the sufferings of those who went before her, and through her, redemption arrives for the elderly.

The symbolism used by the director to represent the moral losers and victors is particularly beautiful: we see the trembling hand of the Japanese military official, who pins butterflies to a board, break the wing of one of the butterflies. Yet despite the murderous intent, the butterflies come to life and, flying freely at the shaman’s call, set out toward home.

The film thus achieves a double triumph: it gives birth once more to a forgotten, denied history into reality, memorializes it, and simultaneously brings a balm to the suffering. It reveals the perpetrators in their bottomless malice but does not seek a scapegoat. It is also magnanimous, as it allows for the realization that there were better people among the enemy as well, who suffered and died just as the innocent victims did.

The film does not forgive the perpetrators, but neither does it seek revenge on anyone. It rises above this from a much higher perspective, in the hope of reconciliation.

I do not know if we shall see another film like this, whose story ends ten minutes before its conclusion. But only the story, not the film itself. During these ten minutes, the names of the supporters form an endless stream across the frames. In the upper band, drawings and paintings appear—the naive works of those former comfort women who, having survived hell on earth, required psychiatric help, and for whom drawing out what happened to them formed part of their therapy.

Allegedly, one such artwork prompted director Cho Jung-rae to write the screenplay and produce the film. Gratitude is owed to him for being able to create a soul-lifting, profoundly human work out of one of the darkest stories.

The film even inspired its producer, Jo Company, to take an unusual step: they launched the "Let's Hug Together" campaign, primarily to heal the spiritual wounds of the former comfort women, but also recognizing that many of our contemporaries are in need of a healing embrace.

I shall refrain from praising the actors individually for now, as almost every character's portrayal is worthy of highlight—authentic, deeply felt performances.

Finally, the visual quality of the film must be mentioned; its picturesqueness despite the horrors depicted. In places, it emphasizes the inexpressible with peculiar visual ingenuity—the sight of the brothel shown from above, operating at full capacity, will surely never be forgotten by anyone who has seen those frames.

Lee Na-jeong: SNOWY ROAD (2015)

이나정: 눈길

You can find the original article in Hungarian here →

Snowy Road:
History’s Ruthless Path Over Human Lives

It took me several days of contemplation to decide how to write this review. I kept thinking about the difficult position of a director who undertakes to interpret the history of the "comfort women"—the network of institutions established by the Japanese army between 1932 and 1945 to serve the sexual needs of soldiers, and the women who became its victims. How many perspectives must be considered, how many sensitivities respected, while simultaneously satisfying the commissioner's requirements and expressing one's own artistic viewpoint?

This subject is among the most sensitive. Primarily, because it encompasses individual tragedies that are unalterable realities. Secondly, because these singular stories weave into a profound fabric that inflicts a serious, slow-healing wound on the entire national body. Thirdly, because the healing of these wounds depends solely on the concerted, insight-based efforts of formerly hostile nation-states—and as such, is profoundly vulnerable to the current power dynamics of the geopolitical region and the internal political situations of the respective countries.

A further problem is the difficulty of speaking authentically about a phenomenon for which remarkably little reliable information exists. Naturally, the prostitution network was not among the best-documented chapters of military records. Our knowledge stems fundamentally from two sources: the accounts of a few survivors provided forty to fifty years later, and sporadic facts or remarks dropped in military or civilian documents and the press during the war. Based on these, researchers have mostly been limited to estimates regarding the number of those involved and the scale of the brothel network; these estimates vary across an extremely wide range, placing the number of victims between 20,000 and 410,000, and estimating the number of brothels at 125. [1] Since the network spanned from Japan all the way to Southeast Asia, the abducted women were of many different nationalities.

The complexity of this investigation is signaled by the fact that while Korean collective memory holds that most victims were Korean, the scant documentation available suggests that the majority of the women were of Japanese nationality. At the same time, we know that during the Japanese occupation of Korea, Korean citizens were given new Japanese names or were registered as such at birth. From all this, it is evident that tracing the true origins of the abducted women is an almost impossible task.

These circumstances warn us to hold in the highest respect those works created with the intent of historical revelation and the desire to provide restitution to the victims. Yet, intent is not everything, as these are, after all, conveyed through artistic works. Thus, we cannot overlook the necessity of viewing a film essentially as a cinematic creation.

Director Lee Na-jeong

Although the Snowy Road review should finally follow this long introduction, I first recommend that those interested consider its virtues and weaknesses by comparing it with another film: Spirits' Homecoming, directed by Cho Jung-rae.

The main plot of Snowy Road is assembled from the mosaics of survivors' life stories. The "peacetime" lives of the two lead girls are remarkably nuanced; their social differences, family lives, personal desires, and their relationship with one another are presented with a wealth of detail and emotion. Two motifs deserve special mention: the mother of the poorer girl worries that the dangers of war primarily threaten men, never truly considering that she should fear for her daughter, who is still almost a child. The wealthier family appears to collaborate perfectly with the Japanese occupiers; their daughter speaks Japanese and plans a Japanese future for herself. However, it unexpectedly emerges that the father is likely a resistance fighter—and the consequences of this strike the family members with tempestuous speed. Such a turn is not inconceivable in real life, but for some reason, this was the first moment when a dissonant note was struck in the otherwise beautifully performing film. It felt as though this motif was written into the story primarily to absolve a kind of national guilty conscience. An additional layer is placed upon this by the resignation with which the news of the father's contemporary decoration is received by those involved.

With a short jump, we soon find ourselves in the midst of the nightmare: the girls' arrival at the military brothel. The presumably brutal events, however, remain un-depicted; we see only suggestive imagery. In a certain sense, Korean society is characterized by a form of prudery, so I attributed this extremely "soft" mode of representation to that, despite the fact that in numerous other cinematic works, the quite explicit portrayal of sexuality is not absent. In the context of presenting this particular story, however, this choice felt somewhat false and resulted in further dissonance, as it distanced the audience from the reality intended to be shown in its full truth through a kind of narrative—I hesitate to say beautifying or fairytale-like—obscurity.

I found an explanation for this peculiarity upon learning the film's production history. Snowy Road was originally a two-part television drama, which was shortened and re-edited for theatrical release. Obviously, the age-rating regulations of television made a more overt depiction of the horrors impossible.

The story takes place across two timelines; alongside the girls of that era, we see the elderly self of one of them in the present. The lonely elderly lady grows closer to the also lonely young girl living next to her. The approach of these two individuals initially presents another promising thread of the story. One of the film's highlights is the cigarette scene, where we see the two women sitting side by side. It is an unforgettable sequence of images, but afterward, the film suddenly shifts into narrative over-emphasis. It no longer shows; instead, it narrates through words—and unfortunately, in rather didactic sentences.

Of course, one cannot overlook the sad fact that out of tens of thousands of "comfort women," only a few are still alive; therefore, it is extremely important for younger generations to learn their story and represent their aspirations once they are gone. Ultimately, it seems that the relationship between the elderly and the young woman in the film serves this purpose most of all, shifting from its initial natural dynamics to placing a clumsily formulated, heavy-handed summary into the young girl's mouth: the victim should not feel shame for the villainy of others.

After their stories became public, the primary aim of the former "comfort women" was to compel a proper apology from the Japanese leadership. The nature of a worthy apology is perhaps a function of several factors that are more difficult for us to overlook. It cannot be exhausted by superficially tossed words or thrust monetary compensation. All of this is understandable and commendable. At the same time, it is difficult to see when the national soul living with "han" will achieve satisfaction—a soul that is sometimes inclined to intensify the spiritual pain felt over experienced injustices to the extreme. This is more of a theoretical interjection, as I do not believe it should apply to the case of the abducted girls and women, only a fraction of whom returned alive. Their lives thereafter were anything but normal, filled with secrets, and mental and physical problems. The reason the question arises nonetheless is due to the much broader, rippling problematic. Warring armies have always been accompanied by violence against women; it was no different in Europe. Not even in Vietnam, where the soldiers of the Korean forces were no more innocent. And as a further irony, brothels continued to operate in Korea after World War II until 1946, now serving the American military. An apology becomes a relative concept within this force field, because what may seem like too much to the one apologizing may not be satisfying at all to the one awaiting the apology.

The film attempts to bring the peace of resolution and letting go in a final, lyrical circle, yet it runs headlong into the brutal bluntness of the closing titles, which thrusts the determined pursuit of compelling a Japanese apology into the viewers' eyes. This does not question the correctness of the intent; clearly, every person of good feeling agrees with it. However, it reacts upon the film as a whole: it damages the inherent power of the story, which would be capable of evoking a much stronger resonance in the viewers than this slightly agit-prop-toned conclusion, presented as a pre-digested inference.

Yet, the film by director Lee Na-jeong is much more than that. Strong acting performances make the characters memorable, specifically highlighting the once again magnificent performance of Kim Sae-ron, who is joined with equal power by Kim Hyang-gi, portraying the younger self of the other girl, and Kim Young-ok, playing her wise, elderly present-day self. Even Cho Soo-hyang receives memorable moments in the role of the girl next door.

The storytelling in the vast majority of the film is fluid and lyrical, at times not even lacking in humor. The visual world sometimes paints a childhood idyll, at other times projects emotions into natural imagery. The camera angles and the lighting serve the experience of loneliness, confinement, vulnerability, and helplessness with great power throughout, giving us the feeling that history is relentlessly charging through our lives. Both through the lives of those we are watching and through ours as viewers.

But we breathe, and we try not to worry.

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[1]
Digital Museum
The Comfort Women Issue and the Asian Women's Fund
Japanese Military and Comfort Women - Number of Comfort Stations and Comfort Women