윤제균: 국제시장
Ode to My Father:
A Small Man in the Giant Gears of History
My encounter with this film began with a perplexing difficulty; despite its sterling reputation, my initial interest was dampened several times by the opening scenes. It took three attempts to push past the cliché of the intro and the fact that the film starts with an actor masked as an elderly man in an exceptionally unconvincing way. Even during the first flashback, I had the lingering feeling that I was looking at a poorly concealed miniature model, but fortunately, this sensation soon vanished as the story swept me away.
This is a story where the true protagonist is History itself, and its hero is the "small man" whose life bears its weight. The term "hero" is no exaggeration, for the true heroes of the 20th century were the average people who managed to simply survive it. This is particularly true for Korea and Koreans, who received the most concentrated dose of this soul-testing era.
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| Director JK Youn |
The film presents the events of a life like a grand tableau. Who wouldn't want to leaf through a picture book, even if the images depict tragic events? This characteristic is both the film's strength and its weakness. Since it is built on the protagonist’s memories, it possesses a certain lack of "stakes"—we know that our hero (along with the main supporting cast) is among the lucky survivors of every situation. This takes away much of the suspense regarding his fate, which the director had to compensate for somehow. What keeps the audience's attention awake is the rhythm with which the film alternates between private life and the recreated historical dioramas embedded within. It walks a tightrope between family drama and over-heroized war cinema, but it never falls off. The overflowing sentimentality of the historical stations is balanced by the humor accompanying the fumbling steps of their private lives.
The screenplay selects events that represent profound generational experiences and plunges us into them like the circles of Dante’s Inferno. One scene is more grandiose than the last, though in different ways. We begin in the 1950s, and the first great tableau—refugees fleeing the Chinese occupation of the north—is a striking piece of cinematic crowd choreography. Every frame of the exodus carries elemental power, and since we are talking about film, I must mention that every extra is present with such conviction that it lends the sequence a documentary-like feel.
The 1960s tableau set in Germany is no less powerful, depicting the lives of those who migrated to distant, unknown lands for any work to make a living. The black hell of the coal miners and the tears falling on ebony-black skin glistening with sweat and coal dust are unforgettable, proving even stronger than the images of the ensuing mining accident.
The Vietnam War of the 70s is the next great station, showing—as if in a Korean mirror—the two extremes that M.A.S.H. and Platoon have represented for us until now. The screenwriter weaves these threads together with extraordinary skill, reflecting the overarching motifs of the story in the actions of the now-adult protagonist.
If anyone thinks it finally ends there—that the arrival of quasi-peacetime brings no more suffering—they are mistaken. The film is only just rushing into its most harrowing tableau, whose emotional charge would blow even the strongest fuses. Yet, "only" this happens: they recall the hopeful search for family members scattered to the winds by the division of Korea, the emotional nihilism of frequent failure, and the indescribable euphoria of rare, lucky reunions. The protagonist is made a participant in the 1983 live television broadcast that documented these events. This "reality show" is so intense that it pins the stunned viewer’s gaze to the screen. Meanwhile, we certainly sense the tools the film uses to trigger the tear-jerking effect of re-living this emotional cataclysm, but one would have to be very jaded to hold this against the filmmakers.
At the same time, it is undeniable that the film as a whole plays on the Korean audience’s tendency to feel sentimental about their own fate, using overt heroization and exaggerated melodramatic musical devices. This is heightened by compressing all these historical stations into the life of a single hero, who thus becomes a symbolic figure of the nation’s recent past. Symbolically, the story is dominated by the lost father, to whose noble self-sacrifice the narrative bows, even if the protagonist lived his life under the oppressive burden of it all. The film concludes with a gesture of understanding, reconciliation, and moving forward after enduring to the very end.
All things considered, JK Youn’s attempt to create a new piece of the national cinematic epic can be called a success, especially considering that national identity seems to periodically require such summarizing works.
Hwang Jeong-min, who has already delivered remarkable performances (including roles in the great A Bittersweet Life and My 11th Mother), successfully navigates the challenge of portraying an entire lifespan. His acting is restrained even in heroic scenes, and he heartwarmingly portrays the awkwardness of courtship as well as all the scenes involving his relationship and family members. In the role of his wife, we see Kim Yoon-jin (known to the world from the TV series Lost), whose presence and acting excitingly enrich the usual repertoire of Korean performance.
The film also subtly carries on the tradition of the mandatory humorous character. Oh Dal-soo is the "secret weapon," appearing like a true chameleon as the protagonist's friend throughout different eras, with every scene of his possessing exciting flavors. In many cases, his figure also embodies generational fantasies.
The film uses very small and authentic moments to convey changes in society, sometimes even highlighting them from the spontaneous narrative. Such is the "different kind of Korean" wife, who is almost like a foreigner, or the inclusion of the first actually mixed Korean-Vietnamese marriage in the script. Likewise, we see unexpected cameos: the founder of Hyundai, Jung Ju-young; the first world-famous Korean fashion designer, Andre Kim; and the ssireum wrestler Lee Man-ki—as if to sense that the wheel of history keeps turning, and one should not fear unusual developments.
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