no other choice (w&d park chan-wook, w. donald e. westlake, lee kyoung-mi)

11am on a Friday morning is a great time to watch a film which questions the new world order we are all subject to. Chan-wook’s film has enough highways and byways for the viewer to undergo their own personal journey down its highways and byways. After the set up, with Man-su losing his job and embarking on his dastardly scheme to become re-employed, there were moments when the film teeters on the edge of self-indulgence, in the style of a Jacobean tragedy which becomes obliged to go through its revenge story beats. (With some gratuitous comedy beats thrown in). Yet, as the narrative starts to swirl towards its centrifugal conclusion, the investment of director and audience is rewarded. Chan-wook’s meditations on the diabolical nature of a world given over to dehumanised capital, aided and abetted by AI, comes into flower in a darkened lights-out factory. The dedication to Costa Gavras in the closing credits feels like game recognising game. 

mickey 17 (w&d bong joon-ho)

What happens when success catches up with you and you can make all your dreams come true? You go big budget and make a sci-fi parody. Bong Jung-ho’s bloated extravaganza is leaden, pacey, and permits Pattinson to execute some bravura acting. It’s like a train ride which slows down and speeds up. Thinking specifically of  a train we took in Bolivia, through the Chaco, where sometimes we were rolling merrily along and at others we were stuck, gazing at a few bushes, twigs, a suspicion of life. Looking back on the journey it was, all-in-all, enjoyable, albeit with moments of frustration. I don’t know if there’s anything much to take away from Mickey 17. The premise is Phillip K Dick lite, (Dostoyevsky lite?) and never quite extracts the full potential of the idea of a one person (soul?), inhabiting two bodies. It’s played for laughs, which is fair enough, but works against any pretension to actually have any underpinning philosophy. There is the constant sense of a project that has had money thrown at it, seeing what sticks. Fortunately in Pattinson the film has a protagonist who is charismatic enough to just about hold the whole thing together. 

parasite (w&d bong joon-ho, w. han jin-won)

Parasite escaped me when it emerged to a smorgasbord of acclaim. There’s a chutzpah to the direction which anchors the movie as it goes through various phases. The build-up, the takeover, the long night, the catastrophe, the coda. Perhaps something Shakespearian in this structure, and the film is rangy, shifting focus, with scope for surprises and new characters. Evidently the Upstairs Downstairs thematic is present, but at times it feels as though the film is too mired in narrative and humour to really get to grips with what it means to be poor in South Korea. It might be said that this is encapsulated by the way the deluge floods the Kim family home, but equally this could be a metaphor for a sinking planet (and has strong echoes of Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness with their mutual exploding toilets). The film’s humour and the warmth of this family unit clearly help to explain why Parasite became such a break-out hit. Bong Joon-ho’s direction is assured: he knows exactly which buttons to push to maintain the pace and keep the audience on-side.

walk up (w&d hong sang-soo)

Hong Sang-soo is a big lacuna in my film viewing, but I suspect that Walk Up isn’t the ideal place to start to get a handle on his work. Clearly a stocking filler, the film takes place in the same house which doubles as a restaurant. A film director visits an old friend with his daughter, and she offers to let him stay. Some time later, having not taken up the offer, he returns to the restaurant part of the house, where he hangs out with the friend and her friend, the restauranteur. At this point the director reveals that a big project has fallen through. He starts a relationship with the restauranteur, moving in to the house. He starts smoking heavily and drinking heavily. He gets depressed. He falls out with his friend who has now become his landlady, and doesn’t mend the leak in the roof. His daughter comes to visit. The film ends. The film is split into several long narrative sequences, which revolve around the use of the house and the steady deterioration of the gnomic film director. It’s languidly paced, with long talky scenes. In many ways it feels more like a stage play than a work of cinema, split into its various acts. Whilst there’s an undeniable charm, the film seems in danger of drowning in (self-referential?) whimsy. It provokes a hunger to see what happens beyond the walls of this hidden-away building, out there on the streets of Seoul. Whilst this is clearly intentional, Walk Up remains a charming but frustrating watch. Hopefully I will get a chance to see more of the director’s work, the films that didn’t get the rug pulled from them by the financiers. 

da-eum so-hee/ next sohee - (w&d july jung)

Jung’s film, whilst never radical, is a great example of how cinema acts as a portal to other parts of this small world. South Korea’s education system is frequently lauded in the West as a progressive example of the quest for excellence and the advantages of conformity. Next Sohee is a heartfelt corrective to this vision. Sohee, a bright but assertive student, is sent as part of her education to work in a call centre, where the female agents are expected to operate in as mechanical a fashion possible, convincing people who want to cancel their internet subscription to renew. Sonhee, whose secret dream is to be a dancer, rebels against the malfeasance of the company. She complains that it exploits the trainees, as well as protesting against the inhumanity of its commercial practices. But her protest comes at a terrible cost and leads to suicide. The second half of the film switches focus, with the female detective, Oh Yoo-jin, investigating the circumstances of Sonhee’s death. Her investigation takes her to the heart of a system that is both corrupt and inhumane. When her superior criticises her, saying that if they investigated every suicide they would be swamped, Oh Yoo-jin says that this is exactly what the police are for: to find out why and how society is flawed, and how that leads to tragedy. Whilst there is something discursive about all of this, the film is held together by the striking performances of its two female leads, Kim Si-Eun and Bae Doona who put raw flesh on the conceptual bones. Whilst never being a radical piece of filmmaking, Next Sohee succeeds in offering a telling portrayal of a society on the other side of the world, revealing the cracks in the South Korean economic miracle, reminding us that every society has its demons.

It is also, for anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work in a call centre, a telling reminder of the stultifying nature of that particular means of employment.

reason to leave (w&d park chan wook, w. chung seo-kyung)

Park Chan Wook’s latest is both a sludgy police melodrama and a minor masterpiece. You can have both in the same can. The story is pure B-movie: Policeman falls for chief suspect femme fatale with predictable results. But there are so many elements of this film which are brilliant that the banality of the narrative is irrelevant. Firstly there’s the construction of the narrative, split into two parts framed around two different cities, which somehow gels perfectly. Secondly there’s the use of edit and photography, with the director frequently placing a character in a scene where they are not present. Somehow these scenes add to the texture of the film creating a filmic universe where the camera’s all-seeing-eye maps onto that of the characters. In a way this feels truer to life than a mere physical representation of the scene. We are present in other people’s lives when they are not there. We may not have a physical presence, but we exist in the mind. Wook directs with such confidence that these metaphysical ideas are allowed to permeate the film, constantly propelling it on to another layer. There are moments where the edit is baffling, as a character trips between reality and imagination, but gradually this all stacks up and the film gathers power as it roars towards its high-peak melodrama finale. Finally, it is fascinating to see how the film succeeds in incorporating technology into the everyday, in a way that it feels as though Western cinema constantly struggles to do, still fighting to leave the twentieth century. Technology in the film (smart watches, cellphones) is more than a tool, it is another limb, something that permits the characters to deepen their relationship with their own interaction and consciousness.  

time (w&d kim ki duk)

Another offering from the late South Korean director, one with the fascinating premise of people recreating themselves through plastic surgery. If the face changes, is the soul still the same? A woman, See-Hee, believing her lover, Ji-woo, to be bored of her, decides to recreate herself, taking on a new appearance, then returning to haunt him. He falls in love with this new woman, who then finds herself questioning him: has he ditched her former self? In loving her new identity, is he betraying his love for the woman she used to be? There’s a lot of twists and turns to be negotiated, far too many in fact. Time ends up feeling like an obscure Marivaux play or a Shakespeare identity drama which got left on the shelf. For all the fascinating material, the script starts to run away from the characters, who desperately try to catch up. The scenes become more and more absurd, and the film is a soufflé which, for all its great ideas, eventually falls flat. Duk’s themes and concerns are evident, and have echoes of Address Unknown, (when Eunok places a cut-out of an eye from a magazine over her blind eye), but he can’t sustain the conceit. All the same, the early instance of technology in the film (Ji-woo is editing with final cut) suggests that perhaps there is a connection to a film like Face Off. Themes of appearance and identity which the internet increasingly puts in doubt, beginning to surface at the turn of the last century, when the soul you believed you were communicating with on-line is nothing like the soul you meet in the flesh. As Shakespeare also noted: “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.”

address unknown (w&d kim ki duk)

At one point in the film, Eunok the one-eyed beauty, takes an LSD pill which her GI suitor has hidden in her bag. She starts to trip, staggering forwards, the world turned wavy. Duk doesn’t develop the trip, the effects are over before they’ve begun and in a later scene, when the GI forces her to take another pill, the action cuts before we get to see what effect it has on her. You can see why, having introduced the trope of the trip, Duk then backs off from it. Because the reality is that the whole film is a trip, one that becomes increasingly and dangerously delirious. 

Address Unknown is set on the edge of a US military base (Camp Eagle) in South Korea. Planes roar overhead and soldiers in full camo gear practice their excercises in the fields whilst the locals go about their business. The presence of the Americans distorts reality and facilitates a latent violence which becomes more and more overt as the film progresses. One of the key characters is Chang-guk, a mixed race, Korean-Black American. His mother still writes letters to the GI who has long since disappeared from their lives, whilst Chang-guk suffers from racial discrimination. They are just two characters whose interaction with the US forces has lead to tragedy. Eunok and her admirer, Jihum, will be two more, as the rogue GI turns on Eunok. Stamping on the ground, Jihum realises it’s hollow. He stamps again, and falls through into a makeshift hidden graveyard, a hidden relic of the Korean war his father fought in. The skeletons are very near the surface, wanting to get out.

The violence is embodied by Jae-hyeon Jo, the dog catcher, who brutally kills dogs before selling them to a local restaurant by the kilo. This violence finally overflows, consuming everyone in an increasingly gothic denouement. At times the film, with its vivid editing and extended cast reminded me of early Kustirica, his near contemporary. A portrait of a society which is out there, subject to the forces of a foreign military, on the edge of madness. Like Kustirica’s early films, there’s also something affectionate about this portrayal of everyday people trying to get along in a world that doesn’t seem to want to give them a chance.  

psychopolitics: neoliberalism and new technologies of power [byung chul han]

Once upon a time, the theory goes, there was an Orwellian big brother who sought to scare his subjects into submission. He was a twentieth century phenomenon. He ruled with gulags and execution squads and ford falcons and martial law. He strode around the world shaking his fist and some called him fascist and others communist and an old Etonian wrote a book about him, a book that defined him as a bogeyman who would haunt the dreams of little children and old age pensioners alike. There was only one problem: big brother’s tactics were scary but in the end they weren’t that effective. People resisted. Dictatorships were overthrown. People don’t enjoy living in fear and they got so sick of it that they tore down the walls and the statues and installed something known as democracy. Which meant big brother needed to find another way to get people to do what he wanted. He had to do it under the rubric of choice. And also around this time, the start of the 21st century, a phenomenon known as the internet began to invade people’s lives. In a much more effective way than anything big brother had dreamed of. And the interaction of the internet and the people created data. Which could be processed, manipulated, used to understand and control the subjects. It was done not by threatening them, but by asking them what they liked. And what they didn’t like. And promising to deliver these wishes. It created, in the words of Han, “a dictatorship of emotion”. Which also served the purpose of making people more stupid. Because stupid people are docile. They don’t think, they feel. Feelings can be manipulated and satiated. Thoughts are harder. People weren’t really worried about whether or not the information big brother was feeding them was true or false: the point was that it felt good to receive it. Like children being given sweets. And because the data had been studied, big bother always knew which people liked which sweets, and it was no skin off big brother’s nose to give them those sweets. And make them pliant and happy at the same time. 

Byung Chul Han’s text is indeed a text for the age of Cummings, the age of digital data manipulation, the age that we live in. It’s not always an easy read, but it ought to be a compulsory one.  Should you have any interest in understanding why you are thinking what you are currently thinking….

the handmaiden (w&d chan-wook park & w seo-kyeong jeong)

There are quite a few things that confused me about The Handmaiden. Firstly I went into the cinema thinking this was an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ve read about but never actually read. From what I have read about that book, rather than having read it, I take it to be a quite serious post-apocalyptic tale, with, perhaps, an eco-friendly subtext, along with a feminist, or at least female orientated narrative. (It might have none of these things, as I say, I’ve never read it.) The opening scene, where Japanese troops marched through a Korean village, felt as though it fitted into Park Chan-Wook’s reimagining of Atwood’s tale. Although from then on it seemed to veer further and further away. There is nothing post-apocalyptic about The Handmaiden, nothing eco-friendly either, and I’d be really interested to hear anyone try to defend it as a feminist text, in spite of the fact that the narrative might be construed that way. 

As it it, the film is actually based on Sarah Walter’s Fingersmith, which is, as they say, nada que ver. I haven’t read that either so the issue of the adaptation can now be dismissed. However, the second thing that confused me concerned the dichotomy between the film’s narrative and Chan-Wook’s direction of said narrative. The narrative is in large part constructed around the story of an old man who collects classic obscene literature (’Is that Sade?’ someone asks at one point), and invites selected men to come and listen to these rare classics being read by his fetching niece. That same niece is also the object of a scurrilous plan hatched by one of the men who visits and befriends her uncle. He hatches a plan to marry her and claim her fortune, and enlists a young Korean servant girl to work as the niece’s handmaiden. The handmaiden and the niece end up in a frisky relationship. My confusion arose because as the narrative develops it’s made very clear that the uncle is essentially a dirty old man whose pornographic collection is viewed as an object of scorn. The logic here is that pornography is bad. On the other hand, the director more than makes the most of the two women’s lesbian relationship. With shades of Blue is the Warmest Colour, Chan-Wook documents their intercourse with a degree of relish which ultimately, especially in the closing shots, ends up feeling like soft porn. The film appears to be arguing that porn is the stuff of dirty old men, unless it’s being filmed by the director, in which case it’s artistically valid. Maybe there’s a subtlety I missed. 

Having said all that, the storytelling is great, and although there’s little of the edge or dramatic tension that was present in his earlier works, there’s still a considerable amount of cinematic flair in evidence. The narrative structure is presumably lifted from the book, but Chan-Wook nevertheless makes it feel fresh and clever in a way so little cinematic storytelling tends to be. (Unlike in fiction, where structural ingenuity is far more common.) There’s a charm to the director’s use of period and the acting has a slightly operatic quality which seems entirely appropriate. It’s an entertaining yarn. Albeit a confusing one. Perhaps Park Chan-Wook is poking fun at the novelist’s feminism? Wiser heads than mine will no doubt be able to explain what exactly his intentions were.