For fans of world cinema, the radar seems to be hovering around South Korea a lot these days. And for a very good reason, too. It will not be an exaggeration to state that over the last decade or so not only has the country given us some exciting new talents, who have turned many a genre on their head by rewriting the rules, but has also given birth to a few new genres of filmmaking, as well. The ever-growing list of luminaries that include Chan-wook Park (The Vengeance Trilogy), Joon-ho Bong (Memories of Murder), Jee-woon Kim (I Saw the Devil), and Hong-jin Na (The Chaser) now includes the name of Jeong-Beom Lee.
Lee burst into the scene in 2006 with Cruel Winter Blues, a slow-burn, bleak, gangster-flick-meets-revenge-drama. Those who were impressed with his directorial debut had to wait four long years for Lee’s next: Ajeossi (a.k.a. The Man from Nowhere).
These two offerings from this young director share a lot in common, but are also quite dissimilar in certain other respects. Both have two central characters between whom an unlikely relationship develops; a large dollop of gangsters; and an underlying theme of revenge. However, while the action in Cruel Winter Blues was subdued, it got ratcheted up quite a few notches in Ajeossi. If the element of revenge in the former was low key, it explodes in the latter. And, if the crime bit in his first feature was understated, Lee more than made up for it in his second outing.
At its core, Ajeossi is about a bond that ties two individuals—Cha Tae-Sik (Bin Won, who in 2009 played the role of the simpleton son in Joon-ho Bong’s brilliant Mother), a pawnshop owner, who has rejected society because of a tragic incident that occurred three years ago, which left him both physically wounded and mentally shattered; and his neighbour, a little girl So-Mi Jeon (Kim Sae-ron), who is nicknamed ‘Garbage’ and is treated likewise by her schoolmates. Like a flicker of a lit cigarette in darkness, So-Mi brings light into Tae-Sik’s bleak existence. Like the cactus plant that Tae-Sik waters everyday, So-Mi seems to have seen through the thorns of his gruff exterior. Tae-Sik, too, responds to So-Mi, but in his own subtle way. Aware of her fondness for sausages he buys a roll and then keeps it near his pawnshop window so that when So-Mi arrives to borrow a portable music player from him, she can spot the roll.
When we are introduced to Tae-Sik, we see his ragged knuckles first, foreshadowing a struggle that is forthcoming. Similarly, we get the first glimpse of So-Mi as she emerges from the darkness underneath a flight of stairs, when Tae-Sik calls out to her. This, too, is nothing but portending to the dark world that the little girl will be thrown into as the film progresses, and presaging the fact that it will be in Tae-Sik’s hand to rescue her from a murky fate.
Ignored by her drug addict mother, Hyo-Jeong (Kim Hyo-Seo) who works as a dancer in a nightclub, So-Mi spends as much time as she can with Tae-Sik, the only person in this world who she confesses to like; turning a deaf ear both to the gossiping neighbours who think Tae-Sik is in hiding because he had done something bad, and the warnings of her own mother, who believes the pawnshop owner is a child molester. Desperate to attract attention, the little girl, who used to steal things before now seems to be slowly stealing the brooding man’s heart by leaving behind notes and doing nail art on his finger while he is asleep.
But when Hyo-Jeong steals a consignment of drugs that belongs to a ruthless gang and puts it under Tae-Sik’s safekeeping without his knowledge, things get from bad to worse. The gang tracks her down, kidnaps both mother and daughter, and tells Tae-Sik that if he wants to see So-Mi alive he must do the gang a favour first. Although, earlier Tae-Sik had refused to play along when So-Mi had wanted her to don the role of her father to get out of a sticky situation, this time round Tae-Sik assumes the responsibility of a father figure and relents to the gangsters’ request only to find himself turned into a pawn in a feud between a gang leader and one of his scorned associates.
Pushed into a corner, as the secret behind Tae-Sik’s real identity comes tumbling out, the police chase after him as he embarks on a mission to save little So-Mi from drug peddlers, organ-traffickers, and a Vietnamese assassin, in whom Tae-Sik finds a formidable adversary.
Intermixing dark humour with awesomely choreographed action scenes (the climactic knife fight between Tae-Sik and the aforementioned assassin is an instant classic) and some brilliant camerawork (a particular shot of a jump through the window would have put a smile on Stanley Kubrick’s face), the crux of Ajeossi does remind us of films like Leon: The Professional (1994) and Man on Fire (2004), but it desists from being derivative. Lee has interwoven a lot of Oriental tradition and culture in his second feature—and by that one does not imply portraying Filipino martial arts, though it is present, but the depiction of a sense of respect that one individual has towards another with a better skill set and the notion of instilling a desire to excel in the upbringing of individuals.
Korea’s highest grossing film of 2010, Ajeossi is much more than a vehicle for a handsome leading man, who has shaken off his soap opera roots. It goes beyond being just another tale of retribution by showing not once, but twice, that an effort made towards redemption is never a lost cause no matter when it is attempted.
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