One hates to eulogise about foreign film-makers (you invariably sound like a pubescent teenager rebelling against his parents traditions) but South Korea has been consistently producing the most challenging films for the last few decades. Chang-dong Lee’s Peppermint Candy and Hae-sung Song’s Failan are as fine examples of this blooming movement as any. What is with this obsession with messing with chronology in your movies anyway? Is every film director some kind of A.N. Whitehead time-sceptic? Ever since Memento popularised the idea, its never quite been enough to just run a plot from beginning to end. Peppermint Candy gives the game away from the offset as an apparently well-balanced pillar of society, following a particularly bombastic karaoke recital (NB: Korea loves its karaoke, bless them) inexplicably offs himself by jumping in front of a train. Initially disorientating, it then proceeds through its tale backwards which makes for a compelling explanatory device of the unavoidable forces of Karma that loom over all our lives. How some seriously well-worn clichéd emotional symbolism (the train journey as life; the titular sweeties as physical representations of emotion) do not, as would no doubt be the case in most Western hands, descend sentimentalism and nostalgia but attain a true poignancy that isnt fully revealed until the very end (the beginning, that is) is Lees most remarkable achievement. This lack of slushy drippiness is in part achieved by a combination of some memorably undrippy violence with a couple of brilliant performances, but also by the peculiar (at least to my Hollywood-engineered eyes) approach to storytelling that runs through so much Eastern cinema.
As with any strongly politicised nation, the machinations of successive governments have been absorbed into its artists consciousness like a particularly acidic sponge. Like Japans nuclear holocaust fixation, Korean films have been, more often than not, overlaid with a mindful examination of (il)legitimate authority and power structures, both political and personal. This idée fix is, of course, a common device (our protagonists travails serve as an allegory for the past few decades of national history) but it is rarely done this well. And Korea is certainly a region with a history to tell. Quick South Korean history 101: After some seriously nasty subjugation by a colonially ambitious Japan, the Korean people have been the target of relentless attacks on their freedom and culture. WWII, the Cold War, a schizophrenia-inducing Korean War, its a region defined by successive dictatorships.
Our lead also appears to be a character worthy of special antipathy: A vindictive man who gets his kicks from beating his pets and general feats of unpleasantness. Gradually, as the film rewinds, though, we see the outside influences beyond his control that have created this monster, a perfect mirror for the Korean peoples loss of innocence through systematic oppression. By the end, we come to realise that this angry, evil man was not always such but has been made so by a sadistic state and police force, unrelenting in its brutality. Violence has become commonplace; an ordinary, quotidian part of daily life to the extent that its hardly noticed.
It makes for an unsettling – but much more revelatory by its novelty – examination of the results of our actions that none of us may avoid. Here we see cause follow effect, only subsequently realising the external forces that shape the future. Violence breeds further violence in a degenerative quagmire as our anti-hero has his hope and ambition sucked from him like anti-matter from a black hole rented out as a cheap whore (ie. It really sucks hard).
The man we see beating his pet dog at the beginning travels back in time to the ugly police beatings he deals out like a 1950s public schoolmaster whos read too much yakuza literature. Contrast this with the naïve, idealistic student lost amid the kind of tense, fearsome army scene that Spielberg would sell his mother, granny, dog and right testicle for and the unpleasant nature of his character becomes understandable if not any more palatable. A man that incites only disgust in us at the start now we feel pity for. Its a remarkable and disturbing transformation that hammers home with poignancy how even the most good-hearted soul can and will become corrupted by The System. Like the Korean people, he is stripped of his humanity by a government and police force that relentlessly brutalises and oppresses its subjects. Power, and who has it, is key. The victims of its subjugation only go on to search out weaker creatures to vent their subordinate frustration.
Failan similarly has a food chain fuelling its mechanics. Regular movie-buffs will recognise Choi Min-Sik from other excellent Korean exports such as Oldboy, Taegukgi and, recently, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. His appearance alone is probably enough to seal the deal for many film-goers but Chois performance here is every bit as powerful as anything else on his CV. Cool is like acne: You either have it or you dont and despite the repulsiveness of the man he plays, Choi is still coming out in a rash like an oily teenager during a Clearasil shortage. Here looms the ghost of Travis Bickle, Leon or even Lolitas Humbert Humbert: An almost ugly lack of personal sensibilities. Pathetic but all the more pitiful for it. He is lifes toilet duck: condemned forver to lick under the rim of society. The first half hour concentrates on Chois criminal, porn-peddling slob. But, like an abused dog, his violence stems only from that he experiences at the hands of his social highers-and-betters.
Just as Peppermint Candys young student photographer with a penchant for humbugs could never have foreseen the cruel incarnation he would later become, the transformation that our hate-worthy mafia dogsbody undergoes is equally astonishing. If film is an escapist journey, no traveller could foresee this destination as, by the final climactic scene (which is, perhaps, the most tragic committed to film in the last decade so I wont ruin it with spoilers), heart-renderingly plays out our disgust for the degenerate wasteroid is reversed sharper than an Italian tuxedo cut with a metal-vapour laser.
The plot: In need of a quick buck, an organised criminal enters into a marriage of convenience with a Korean immigrant he has never seen nor wants to. His new wife, Failan, gets to stay and work like a slave; he covers a Mafioso debt. An unpromising romantic premise you might think? Not after this delicate portrayal of two star-crossed lovers has run its delicate course through your innards you wont. Now, Im not the type to get sentimental over overt romanticism (believe me, I just drowned a bag of puppies on the way here). However, Failan had me reduced to the kind of blubbering wreck you only find in group therapy sessions for acting-like-a-blubbering-wreck addicts.
Cecilia Cheung gives the performance of her life as Failan: quite simply, an angel. The most harrowing embodiment of purity, innocence, love and other girly things committed (barely) to the flicker of moving pictures. An ethereal seraph, more enchanting than a Cocteau beauty, her naïve love for a man she does not know would wrench the heart-strings of the most embittered of us (and Im proud to rank myself pretty highly on that list). If this doesnt have you reduced to a blubbering mess you need to be in a grave.
Bladder Flask once released an album entitled One Day I Was So Sad the Corners of My Mouth Met and Everybody Thought I Was Whistling (surely the greatest title ever) and that is how this film made me feel. A bittersweet tragedy that one could easily come away from with a somewhat sickly taste, but this is an illusion of cynicism over an underlying belief in the power of (cue strings) Love. Like sweet marmalade masking a potentially bitter, but nevertheless real zest.
As honestly as an embittered, 23-year old philosophy undergraduate can be about suspension of belief and emotional empathy with fictional characters I say this intimate, immeasurably subtle tale would reduce Michelangelos David to torrents of gushing tears (and thats not easy. I once told him about the time my ex sat on my hamster – not a flicker). As with so much recent Korean cinema, the poignancy of the script is matched only by the beauty of the direction. With a colour-palette so clear and vibrant it makes Pollock look positively monochromatic, each shot seems picked from the dreams of Aphrodite. Truly awesome (in the biblical, not the surfer-dude sense) and with the ability to evoke feelings that will persist in the mind long after the individual landscapes have dissipated. All this from a tale of two people who never even meet! A revolution in the Romance genre. Stick that on your adverts and smoke em.
Korea has had a tough time of late, but if anything positive has come out of decades of oppression it is the artistic fuel it has given its film-makers. Not just Politics with a big ‘P’ but in the expression and examination of the very personal affairs that communicate universally across all national and political boundaries. Political unrest has often been a catalyst for the arts but fascist government too often prohibits its dissemination. Eventually, though, film of this power cannot be suppressed. Ideas, as Alan Moore’s V proclaimed, are bulletproof.
