Movie Review: Korean Films

February was cold and depressing, even more so for the Valentine’s haters amongst us. Fortunately heading into March we can see the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, spring is stirring its sleepy head, soon to be followed by summer, and what do the warmer months mean? Why, putting away the kotatsu and heading off on your travels of course!

Proximity to KIX and its marvelous budget airlines make South Korea a great mini-break destination; so bag some bargain transport and whilst you count down the days till your departure why not try these Korean films to get you in the mood.

The Host (2006)

Director: Joon-Ho Bong

The rights for Bong Joon-Ho’s internationally acclaimed Monster Movie have been snapped up by Hollywood, but originals are always better. With action, melodrama and slapstick this film keeps you on the edge of your seat; shocked laughter interspersed with squeaks of fear.

We open in 2000 with an American army doctor ordering his Korean subordinate to pour toxic chemicals down a sink. Two years later two fishermen encounter an aggressive mutant in Seoul’s Han River. The scene is set for 2004, when a giant amphibious monster hogs 110 minutes of camera time rampaging around Seoul.

In a spectacularly chaotic riverside scene we first see the bus-sized mutant emerge from the river to terrorize Seoulites perambulating peacefully by the waterside. Amongst this chaos, we meet Park Gang-du, the anti-leading man, whose uselessness sees him let go of his daughter’s hand, allowing the monster to swallow her up and dive back into the murky river.

After a mourning scene that you know you shouldn’t laugh at but can’t quite help, Gang-du receives a call from his presumed-dead daughter: the monster has her in its lair, a snack for later. Appealing to the authorities for help only to be taken for a mental patient and suffer an invasive brain exam, deadbeat Gang-du has no alternative but to lead the hunt for the monster himself. The dysfunctional Park family finally begins to work as a unit when they come together for the rescue mission. They must fight not only the monster, but also overcome family issues over Gang-du’s inadequacy, whilst the bureaucratic Korean government and American military’s cover-up plans hamper them at every turn in a shrewd reflection of post-9/11 and SARS institutional alarm.

Bong’s genre twists reinforce his tongue in cheek take on 50s and 60s horror films. It is effortlessly comic and wonderfully extreme, and, as Tarantino said when listing his top 20 films “Only director Joon-Ho Bong could make a monster movie as creepy and loveable as ‘The Host’.”

Poetry (2010)

Director: Lee Chang-Dong

Without a hint of melodrama the opening scene encapsulates the film; the corpse of a young girl floats down a beautifully framed river, the film’s title (in Korean and English) superimposed on her body. Lee Chang-Dong immediately introduces the discomfiting parallel between beauty and death which will drive this powerful and heart-rending film.

Coming out of a 16 year retirement, Korean treasure Yun Jung-Hee gives the performance of a lifetime; we watch 66 year old Mija be transformed as the film’s situations strip the layers of her personality back.

Initially the flighty, ageing beauty living in her own world is not a sympathetic character. Two developments change this dramatically; joining a poetry class and the discovery of her grandson Wook’s disturbing connection to the young suicide of the film’s opening.

In the third grade Mija was told she had the heart of a poet, but she has not once written a poem. Following a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, Mija joins a poetry class in a bid to find a way to describe beauty before language fails her. To do this she follows her poetry teacher’s advice to take notes on the world around her, to see it in order to feel. Whilst desperately struggling to experience life fully in order to write a single poem, the discovery of her grandson’s involvement in the girl’s suicide exposes Mija to the horror and corruption of the world around her. Rather than blinding her to beauty though, the unnerving realisation seems to drive her quest for purity and poetry, and it is this struggle to come to terms with everything she learns that drives the movie.

Lee develops his plot and themes slowly, allowing the audience as much time as Mija to consider both the beautiful and the traumatic aspects of life and human nature. He neither seeks to present answers, nor to exploit the strong emotional currents of the film, but puzzles over the mysteries of human behaviour for a remarkably subtle character study.

Dealing with beauty, truth and mortality, the film’s elliptical style rightfully won Lee best screenplay honours at Cannes.