Some of the best films I have seen in my capacity as a member of the New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO) are those shown at the yearly New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF), and among those Korean films rank the highest. One in particular—”Save the Green Planet!”—was impressive enough for me to nominate as Best Film at NYFCO’s award ceremony in 2005. That was enough to raise eyebrows among my colleagues to astral levels, a function no doubt of their unaccountable preference for “The Squid and the Whale”. My advice to Netflix members is to rent “Save the Green Planet!“ right away to see what you’ve been missing. If you don’t love this film, then clearly something is wrong with you.
Although there was the usual embarrassment of riches at this year’s NYAFF, time constraints and personal preferences persuaded me to focus on Korean film offerings. In no particular order of preference, here goes:
1. Battlefield Heroes:
Imagine one of Shakespeare’s history plays written from the viewpoint of the lowliest of soldiers and you get an idea of what this raucous costume drama is about. Set in the seventh century, it pits the Silla kingdom allied with the Chinese Tang dynasty against its larger Korean rival, the Goguryeo (the same word as Korea) kingdom. If you’ll recall Henry V’s speech to his assembled army that was about to take on a much larger French force, you’ll get an idea of exactly what “Battlefield Heroes” was about:
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Instead, director Lee Jun-Ik’s “heroes” do everything they can not to shed blood. They are peasants dragooned into the army who are promised land and money to fight for Silla’s glory. It becomes obvious from the start that they would be much happier at home with less land and less money in exchange for their lives.
“Battlefield Heroes” is a debunking of a powerful tradition in Asian film that treats the battlefield as hallowed ground. The frightened peasants forced to don armor do everything in their power to escape the fighting, relying on the experience of one peasant who has served in an earlier and just as senseless battle. He urges his comrades to keep a low profile and run from the fighting on the first opportunity.
This is the kind of war movie we need more of–an antiwar film actually—something in the spirit of “Catch 22″ or “MASH”.
2. Haunters
If you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s “Scanners”, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what this film is about. The “scanners” are human beings who have the power to compel other people to carry out criminal or violent acts through mind control. As much as I like Cronenberg’s debut film, it can’t hold a candle to director Kim Min-suk’s movie which takes itself far less seriously. If Korean humor is an acquired taste, then I can assure you that five minutes is all it takes to get in the groove.
The mind-controlling “haunter” is one Cho-in, who we meet as a child in the opening moments. He has been blindfolded by his mother who understands that his power to control people comes from his eyes. When his abusive father (a character found frequently in Korean film as we shall see in the next film under review) begins beating his mother for no good reason, Cho-in removes the blindfold and compels his father to go out into the street and break his own neck.
Years later Cho-in has become a thief, using his mind-control powers to get pawn shop owners to open their safe, his favorite modus operandi. This time he has chosen the shop whose owner has just hired Kyu-nam, a junior high school drop-out whose last job was in a junk yard. For reasons never explained (and there was no need to given the film’s supple subversion of logic), Kyu-nam cannot be controlled. When Cho-in kills the owner of the shop for no good reason, Kyu-nam resolves to track his nemesis down and defeat him.
The spirit of this film owes a lot to Tim Burton’s Batman movie with all sorts of wacky sight gags and over-the-top characters. Particularly likeable among them are Ai and Bubba, Kyu-nam’s friends from his last job at the junkyard. These are a Turk and a Ghanaian whose Korean is flawless, a delight one can be sure for local audiences—as well as me.
3. Bedevilled
In 1964, a young woman named Kitty Genovese was murdered on the streets of Queens. When neighbors ignored her screams, the case became a symbol of urban alienation and inhumanity. This pattern appears to exist in Korea as well, if the opening scene in “Bedevilled” has any relationship to current realities, which I fear it does.
Hae-won, a female loan officer at a Seoul bank, would have been the last person to come to Kitty Genovese’s aid. In the beginning of the film, she is seen observing a rape but when called upon to identify the assailants to the cops, she refuses. She is also hostile to an old woman applying for a loan, a touch that would hit home with audiences impacted by the current financial crisis which has likely had some impact on Korea. When Hae-won discovers that another loan officer, like her a female, has granted the loan, she goes ballistic and slaps her in the face in full view of the staff.
After her boss orders her to take a leave of absence, she decides to go to a remote island where she used to visit her grandfather when young. On the island she is greeted by her childhood friend Kim Bok-nam who is thrilled to have a visitor from the outside, all the more so since just about everybody who lives there abuses her in a kind of grand guignol version of Cinderella. Bok-nam is driven like a mule, forced to pick potatoes all day long and put up with abuse from her husband in the evening, including sexual.
The film is a relentless and horrifying depiction of sexism that is similar to what I have seen in other Korean movies, but ratcheted up to the point where you feel like screaming. Eventually Bok-nam takes action against her tormentors in a style that evokes slasher films. However, this is not really a horror movie in a conventional sense. It is much more about the failure of one woman to bond with another who once meant very much to her. This lack of human solidarity is much more frightening than Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth.
4. The Unjust
This is a film about crooked cops who conspire with corporate bigwigs to victimize a hapless sex offender for a crime he did not commit. The moral rot of the society depicted in this movie is like that of Kurosawa’s “The Bad Sleep Well” and American film noir of the immediate post-WWII period. There are no heroes to speak of, only men whose flaws are less pronounced than others’.
An epidemic of child murders has created a political crisis in Korea. Failing to catch the perpetrator, the authorities decide to pick a scapegoat. The job of organizing the miscarriage of justice falls on the shoulders of detective Choi Cheol-Gi, who is bitterly resentful over having been bypassed for a top post only because he has not graduated from the prestigious police academy. He decides to pin the rap on Lee Dong-Suk, a sex offender who has an air-tight alibi. To get Dong-Suk to confess, he enlists the aid of Jang Suk-Gu, a heavily tattooed gangster (a Korean yakuza in effect) who has sunk his tentacles in the construction industry.
Their alliance is countered by that of a prosecutor named Joo-Yang who has corrupt ties to a powerful company that is Jang’s rival. Joo-Yang suspects detective Choi Cheol-Gi of criminal activity on the side and is anxious to get the goods on him. The film consists of a steadily mounting conflict between the two rotten blocs until they are resolved in the end in a bloody climax that will leave you emotionally and psychologically drained. No country in the world is capable of making such powerful policiers today, including the United States where Martin Scorsese could learn a thing or two by watching such a film.
5. City of Violence
This was directed by Ryoo Seung-Wan, who also directed “The Unjust”. It is a vengeance tale that the Koreans are so good at, embodied in works like “Old Boy”.
It is the story of a group of high school buddies who reunite in their home town after one of their band, a tough ex-con, has been murdered outside of the beer joint he runs. At his ceremony, one of them—a cop from Seoul—decides to team up with another former gangster to track down their buddy’s killer. He turns out to be the sole remaining member of their band, a man named Pil-Ho who exudes evil and who has the city in a vice-like grip. To make room for a gambling casino, he is evicting working people from their homes, a plot element that no doubt rings true with Korean audiences. Unlike “The Unjust”, this is an old-fashioned story of good versus evil.
If it is old-fashioned in its plot elements, it is certainly quite forward looking in its cinematic vision. The city where the action takes place is overrun by gangs, who in a set piece do battle with the cop and his ex-gangster comrade. One gang is dressed in baseball uniforms and uses their bats as weapons. While one can never tell how much a Korean film-maker has absorbed from Hollywood, this is exactly what you can see in Walter Hill’s 1979 film “The Warriors”, which was based on Sol Yurick’s novel. Yurick, for what it is worth, was one of the country’s most respected Marxist writers of fiction and who is still going strong at the age of 86, god bless him.
New York Asian Film Festival information is here.
