The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20130509150536/http://daily.greencine.com/archives/002620.html

October 16, 2006

Busan Dispatch. 2.

Koreanfilm.org contributor Adam Hartzell reviews several shorts, two features and a couple of worthwhile conversations at the Pusan International Film Festival.

Pusan International Film Festival So far the best film I've seen is a short, BomBomBomB!!! by the dynamic directing duo of Kim Gok and Kim Sun. You may have caught University of Irvine Professor Kyung Hyun Kim writing a bit back about these guys in his contribution to the Film Comment issue focusing on South Korean Cinema. The Kims did a fascinatingly weird film titled Capitalist Manifesto: Working Men of All Countries, Accumulate! (They seem to like exclamation points in their titles!), a film of repeating motifs that's available on DVD if you're curious. BomBomBomB!!! is their contribution to the third installment of the If You Were Me series. (Actually, there have been four in the series, but one featured animators, so, technically, this is the third live action installment.) Commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, the series asks directors of note to create a short film around various human rights issues.

If You Were Me 3

This year the shorts focused on illegal immigrants, teen-headed households, unequal labor between married partners, racism, Queer rights, and contract workers. (The latter was a topic of two films in If You Were Me 2 which screened at last year's PIFF. Obviously the treatment of these workers - poor pay, little leverage for time off, job insecurity, and other exploitative practices - is a heightened concern these days amongst Koreans and I'm curious to find out what changes are being made to better their conditions.) Jung Yoon-chul's short on illegal immigrants, Mohammed, the Diving King, was an inspired contribution with a nice performance by Chaiyan Koolsak as the illegal Thai immigrant who is capable of holding his metaphorical breath throughout his entire journey of dangerous labor conditions. Unfortunately it fails where Kim Hyun-phil's The Girl Bitten By Mosquito (about teen-headed households) and Hong Ki-seon's An Ephemeral Life (contract workers) fail, including too much didactic dialogue that diminishes the power the statements could have.

Lee Mi-yeon's GaP appears to know of the disempowering nature of didactic dialogue, because she brings it in at the end of GaP (about unequal labor between married partners) in the purposely humorous, kitschy style of a public service announcement, helped along in its effect by the performance of the PIFF-ubiquitous Kim Tae-woo (his third appearance on screen at PIFF this year, performing in Woman on the Beach and Sa-kwa as well). Noh Dong-seok's A Tough Life tackles Korean prejudices towards people of the African diaspora. (Thankfully, this topic received a greatly needed public discussion when Hines Ward made his appearance in South Korea following the Steelers' Super Bowl win. Ward's mom was quick to take Koreans to task for the racism her son would have faced had she stayed in South Korea to raise Ward.) Noh provided his child actors with some witty dialogue within a clever structure, but it falters a bit due to the need to direct too many child actors who aren't completely up to the task.

BomBomBomB!!!

BomBomBomB!!! is definitely the short to write home about. Centered around a teen who begins to feel for his classmate, a gay teen who is the object of ridicule, threats and other verbal tortures, the film depicts this teen's solidarity (or love, it's never really clear nor need it be) shifting back and forth with regard to this fellow outcast. The Kims orchestrate a tight short that never drags as it drives towards a wonderful crescendo that rocks out like any teenage dream beyond the wasteland in which teens often find themselves stuck.

Director Noh Dong-seok didn't just contribute a short to If You Were Me 3 this year, but also had a feature screened, his second, Boys of Tomorrow. His first feature, the black and white My Generation, was one of the few films that impressed me from South Korea in 2004, leading me to hope that Noh might be yet another director to watch in a widening field.

Boys of Tomorrow

I can't say I was disappointed, but the day after seeing Boys of Tomorrow, I realized I will come to Noh's next film with less anticipation. Venturing into color, the story follows another brother taking care of his brother, although in My Generation it was a younger brother financially saving an older brother, whereas the roles are reversed here, an older brother swooping in to rescue his younger brother from further physical harm. This younger brother has a penchant for getting himself in trouble. This has something to do with the younger brother having lost a testicle, but I'm not really sure about that. And speaking of lacking testicles, Noh is showing himself as someone who might have some trouble with developing stronger female characters, because the mother is caricatured in her craziness and the other female character is presented even more meekly than Noh's female protagonist from My Generation.

Hopefully this will simply be a wrong turn on Noh's part, similar to director Lee Yoon-ki's trajectory. After his lovingly crafted This Charming Girl, deservedly winning that year's New Currents Award at PIFF, Lee appeared to rush too fast into an awkward film about the Korean ex-pat community in Los Angeles, Love Talk, screened at last year's festival. This PIFF feature by Lee isn't a full return to the competent character study of his debut, but Ad Lib Night shows the possibility for a return to form.

Ad Lib Night

An excellent incident of mistaken identity begins this film based on a Japanese novel. A young woman named Bo-kyoung is approached by two strange men who think she is someone from their past, a schoolmate whom they are trying to locate since her father, from whom she's been estranged, is on his death bed. Realizing they are mistaken, they continue to push for Bo-kyoung to come anyway since, well, she resembles the woman and the father is so far gone on morphine, why not pay her to pose as the long lost daughter they haven't found. The highlight of Love Talk was the bitching session that arose during the obligatory (for a Korean film) drinking session. Such re-appears in Ad Lib Night as well, but isn't the highlight since there is much more to see here, too, such as the delightfully feisty dialogue when Bo-kyoung resists propositions from the family's representatives. I'm back in Lee's corner with this effort, hoping Love Talk was the fluke in his quickly emerging oeuvre (three films in three years at three consecutive PIFFs).

These all night drinking sessions carry over from the screen into the non-diegetic spaces of the bars and restaurants at the Haeundae beach area and Nampo-dong commercial strip, for these scenes in the films reflect a reality that exists in South Korea itself. But it's not all drunken banter and dishing. My own drinking time with friends has been tempered in libations, instead fully drunk in the discussions of film. Saturday night I stayed up until 4 am with my friend and her friends talking passionately about the films and filmmakers we admire and those we don't. It all proved for me how much film is not just an escape but can be as much a social lubricant as alcohol.

What was great about this conversation, besides the fact that it gave me pleasant flashbacks of college years gone too far by, is that none of us made false claims about the other's preferences, setting up straw points to blow down again. One woman couldn't stand one of my favorite films (Hong Sang-soo's The Power of Kangwon Province) and another woman was a strong advocate for oeuvre of Kim Ki-duk, a director I can't stand. The discussion took as many different turns as one finds one taking in the Haeundae beach area to get back and forth from the Megabox multiplex to one's hotel to the non-stop parties (of which I've attended barely ten minutes' worth) and events without forgetting to stop by the beach for a spell. But each direction was taken with a respect for each individual present. See, like I said, for the most part, I can't stand Kim Ki-duk's films. I only watch them because I have to, having committed myself to South Korean cinema. But this new friend sees so much to praise in his work. I don't agree with her viewpoint, but I don't have to hate on her to challenge her arguments. Nor does the woman who'd be hard pressed to check out another Hong Sang-soo film feel a need to ridicule me for finding treasure in the roughness of Hong's characterizations. She and I would find out later as the conversation rolled on, including yet another conversation Sunday night, this time until 2 am, that she hates a lot of the films I like. But we could still talk fully engaged in the interests of the other without a need for fusillades of personal attacks on the other's preferences.

I guess this is important to me because, after six years of focusing my writing on film, I've been getting a little jaded. There's a necessary asocial slant to writing about film, and it can lead to anti-social perspectives where we forget about the real people in the audiences. The commercial conditions that seek out the witty pull-quote for the poster parallel a critical condition that enables the clever put-down. Sometimes such is warranted on both ends; the film inspires us to sincere poster-worthy praise or demands harsh, principled responses. But sometimes it seems to be more of that alpha-male mounting in verbal or written form that has always made it difficult for me to connect with many of my fellow males. Most writers about film are, like me, men, and these fascinating conversations I'm having here in Busan are with women, a point that can't be ignored. Thankfully, there are some men with whom I can have such conversations but there often seem to be more with whom I can't.

Again, it may be because I've gotten a little jaded over the years. But just as there are films like those by Kim Gok and Kim Sun that make the time inside the theater worthwhile, there are the new friends and conversations with them that give me hope about the world outside.



Bookmark and Share

Posted by dwhudson at October 16, 2006 9:21 AM
Comments

Adam -- These posts are great, keep 'em coming. I'm sure I don't have to add that I'm terribly envious.

Posted by: Filmbrain at October 16, 2006 11:31 AM

adam, your honesty here deserves wholehearted applause. keep it up.

Posted by: ed at October 19, 2006 12:08 AM