Rejection, Responsibility, and Redemption

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. 

A Horrible Homage to Hollywood

   
The pithily titled Korean thriller H (2002) begins with the decapitated body of a schoolgirl being discovered in an unnamed city’s landfill. What looks like a young life wasted and dumped takes a turn towards the gruesome when an unborn foetus is also accidentally found amidst the mounds of waste. Four days later, on February 14, it is bloody Valentine for an unmarried mother, when she is brutally slain inside a city bus before it arrives at the terminus. Here, too, when a still twitching arm of a foetus is found half ripped out of the womb, detectives Kim Mi Yun (Yeom Jeong-ah, who acted in the following year’s horror hit A Tale of Two Sisters) and her partner Kang Tae Hyun (debutant Ji Jin-hee) notice an eerie similarity in the modus operandi of the now-confirmed serial killer with that of another convicted mass murderer, Shin Hyun (Cho Seung-woo).

The only problem is that ten months ago Shin Hyun had voluntarily walked into a police station, carrying with him in a bag the body of his latest victim. On confessing to six horrific murders of women, he is now on death row, counting down the last few days of his life. Evidently, there is a copycat killer on the loose. To obtain information that might help solve the case and stop further murders from occurring, detectives Kim and Kang decide to pay Shin Hyun a visit.

While what puts the two detectives on Shin Hyun’s trail are the obvious similarities between the recent spate of murders to those committed by him, ironically, it is resemblance of a different kind that puts us—the viewers—off, the moment the scheming, calculating, Nietzsche-quoting killer-on-death-row enters the scene. The setting, the sequence, and the situation all hark back to Jonathan Demme’s multiple Oscar winner The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Granted, the ode is not as blatant as the Christian Alvart (Pandorum, Case 39) directed German film Antibodies (2005), where another serial killer named Gabriel Engel (played by André Hennicke) had proudly proclaimed ‘What did you expect? Hannibal Lecter?’, but the likeness to that classic thriller is all too obvious to be ignored.

As discerning film-watchers, we all know that it is impossible to steer clear of all clichés, no matter which genre a filmmaker is trying to explore. That is the reason we were willing to forego the hackneyed characterisation of an expressionless detective, who has still not come to terms with a personal tragedy; her greenhorn brash, over-enthusiastic, impatient partner, who is diametrically opposite to her in character traits; the portly policeman, whose sole existence in the film is centred around providing some ill-advised comic relief; and the incessant chimney-like smoking by the two protagonists that reveal that the screenplay writers were in a haze while penning the detective duo, rather than express any depth of character.

These missteps aside, if there is one image that summarises this stillborn effort at crafting an effective thriller, it is that of the unborn foetus. It is nothing but an allegory of how Korean filmmaking was being prevented from evolving beyond an embryonic stage by Hollywood, before directors like Chan-wook Park, Joon-ho Bong, and Jee-woon Kim resuscitated it to life. In this context, it might be pointed out that the first of Park’s riveting revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002)—the second film of the trilogy being Oldboy (2003) that single-handedly put South Korea firmly back on the firmament of filmdom—was released almost exactly nine months before H.

Coming back to H, the intentions of the filmmaker, akin to those of Shin Hyun, were noble, at least to themselves. One need not be a semiotician to read the anti-abortion subtext running throughout the film. But both first-time writer-director Jong-hyuk Lee and the character of Shin Hyun committed a similar error. Both got embroiled in the word ‘copycat’.

The initial interest aroused to try and figure out how a behind-the-bars serial killer is pulling the strings gets diluted by the red herrings thrown at us. The number of suspects is just too many, which, in most cases keeps us involved, but in this particular instance causes confusion. Moreover, it seems, the director, in his fervent enthusiasm to depict the tussle between the heart—(as portrayed by Detective Kang, who seems to take every atrocity around him—from a torn umbilical cord to a traffic jam—to heart)—and the mind (the ice-cold exterior of Detective Kim, who smiles exactly three times during the entire film) has thrown the entire volume of Psychology 101 at us. So, we have a doctor specialising in neuro-psychiatry, who has this curious habit of flashing a mysterious smile whenever she is in the company of cops; a patient, who suffers from a recurring horrible nightmare, which, supposedly, lies at the root of his psychotic behaviour; an abstract painter, who appears like the proverbial dues ex machine, and is proclaimed to be suffering from a multiple personality disorder; and last but not least, the prevalent belief among Koreans that a foetus becomes aware even when inside the womb, and the information gathered therein remains latent throughout one’s life as suppressed, unconscious memories.

After 106 minutes of mishmash that involves prostitutes and psychology; honour and horror; nicotine and Nietzsche, one is almost tempted to project Shin Hyun’s paraphrasing the German philosopher’s popular quote: ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’ on to the film and brand it as ‘abysmal’.

And as far as the elaboration of ‘H’ provided at the conclusion of the film is concerned, no matter what the director has depicted, it will take a lot to dissuade us from believing that it did not stand for ‘Homage’—an homage to Hollywood, and not a highly-recommended one at that!

Reinventing the ‘Re’ in Revenge

In the fourth season of the TV series Lost, the antagonist Benjamin Linus tells the former Iraqi National Guard Sayid Jarrah: ‘When you let your grief turn into anger, it will never leave you’. In South Korean director Jee-woon Kim’s latest offering Akmareul boatda (I Saw the Devil), Kim Soo-hyeon (played by Byung-hun Lee; who some of us might remember as Storm Shadow in the awful GI Joe: Rise of Cobra), who works for the National Intelligence Service, has every reason to be aggrieved. His fiancée, Joo-yeon, with whom he got engaged just a month ago, has been found hacked to pieces by an unknown assailant, while she was waiting by the roadside for a tow truck.

Soo-hyeon, like his innumerable precedents on celluloid who had been wronged, promises to avenge Joo-yeon’s murder by ‘inflicting 10,000 times more pain’ on the assailant—a claim or its variant that, too, has been made time and again on the silver screen. Till then, ‘I Saw the Devil’ follows a tried-and-tested formula that lies at the core of any revenge flick. And if it had been just another entry in this sub-genre of films, it would have ended at around the 55-minute mark. Because that is when, Soo-hyeon lays his hands upon the dastardly serial killer Kyung-Chul (another bravura performance by one of the most well-known actors ever to emerge from South Korea, Min-sik Choi), after staking out three more suspects.

The evidence that Kyung-Chul is, in fact, Joo-yeon’s—and several other equally unfortunate women’s—murderer is irrefutable; the dastardliness of Kyung-Chul, irredeemable; the fury of Soo-hyeon, as he lifts a large boulder to snuff out Kyung-Chul’s life, inconsolable. So, when the passed out Kyung-Chul regains consciousness to find that all he has lost is a pint-odd of blood and the functionality of his left wrist, and has, in fact, gained a wad of currency notes left behind in an envelope, he is as surprised as us, the viewer.

That is also the precise point, when Akmareul boatda (2010) begins to deviate from other run-of-the-mill revenge flicks.

Mildly flabbergasted but largely condescending of what he deems to be his unknown attacker’s foolhardiness, it does not take the psychopathic Kyung-Chul long to pick up, from where he had left off, when it comes to hunting down women. But to his utter astonishment, whenever he finds himself a new prey, Soo-hyeon arrives out of the blue, again and again, almost on cue, and inflicts pain on Kyung-Chul that keeps getting worse.

But Kyung-Chul is no ordinary psychopath. His proclamations that others are nothing but ‘retards’ are not boastful claims, but a statement of fact. It is only a matter of time before he figures out exactly how Soo-hyeon is managing to appear at precisely the same place where Kyung-Chul is planning to devour another hapless human.

And when he does figure out, Soo-hyeon finds that in this particular psychopath, the answer to ‘Who do you think won? You or me?’ is not as simple and straightforward as it sounds.

‘Violent thriller’ is a sub-genre that has found itself resuscitated by new Korean cinema. Chan-wook Park, Jee-woon Kim, and Hong-jin Na are just three of the new breed of film directors, who have firmly put Korea onto the map of world cinema, resulting in that classic knee-jerk reaction from Hollywood—churning out remakes.

Among these three, Park maybe the most famous—after all, his Oldboy (2003) re-introduced modern Korean cinema to the world—but it is Kim, who has the most diverse filmography. His previous three films were an action-adventure (The Good, the Bad, the Weird), a crime drama (A Bittersweet Life) and a top-notch horror (A Tale of Two Sisters; remade in Hollywood in 2009 as The Uninvited). And with Akmareul boatda, Kim has broken new ground. Not only has he carried on the creative acumen that he has ostentatiously displayed in his earlier works, but has also managed to push the envelope, so much so that Akmareul boatda, because of its violent content, became the first instance in entire Korean film history to be restricted twice by the authorities. Considering the amount of violence that has perpetuated the current crop of Korean films—that tells a lot.

However, there is a lot that separates Akmareul boatda from the violent trash, tripe, and travesty that Hollywood keeps churning out on a regular basis. To begin with, Kim has made it abundantly clear that there is not much of a difference between the avenging Soo-hyeon and the atrocious Kyung-Chul. From the latter using a hammer to mercilessly dispose of Joo-hyeon, to Soo-hyeon using the same weapon on a sex-offender; from Kyung-Chul using a vehicle to pick up his unfortunate victims, to Soo-hyeon using his car to incapacitate one of his targets; from the remorseless manner in which Kyung-Chul chops off one of his preys, to the inability of Soo-hyeon to break down when he learns about his fiancée’s fate; from the instantaneous movement of Kyung-Chul’s chopper on a woman’s body, to the split-second stomping of Kyung-Chul’s wrist by Soo-hyeon; from Kyung-Chul using a dumbbell to bludgeon a guy, to Soo-hyeon bashing Kyung-Chul  with a fire extinguisher; Soo-hyeon—initially unknowingly, and then consciously—emulating a coda followed by the serial killer regarding the manner in which body parts are cut off; and last, but not least, the sweeping panning of the camera that directly connects a distraught Soo-hyeon to Kyung-Chul prowling the streets in search of his next victim—the instances are many.

While the gore is almost unbearable, the violence unapologetic, and the fierceness of both the protagonist and the antagonist unflinching, the film has its own share of dark humour, evident in the two instances when the battered Kyung-Chul tries to hitch a ride or when a psychopath calls his victims ‘crazy’.

Refreshingly, the supporting characters in Akmareul boatda do not condone Soo-hyeon’s actions. On several occasions, we hear them imploring that the path he is following will not bring back the dead, nor is it necessary to become a monster to fight one—a feature inconspicuous by its absence in the plethora of revenge films that we encounter every year.

The other interesting aspect of the film is how it has subverted a number of cinematic tropes. How often do we find a psychopath in a situation where he has to fight for his life fending off two more of his kin; the handle of a screwdriver coming off when someone tries to dislodge it from his palm; or the audience finding their sympathy being inadvertently swaying towards an immoral individual?

It is this ingenuity that is present even in the title of the film itself. The Korean phrase Akmareul boatda simply means ‘Saw the Devil’, without any subject, which can imply the devil being either Kyung-Chul or the evil that lay hidden inside Soo-hyeon, only to emerge as the film progressed.

All in all, while breathing new life into this catatonic sub-genre, the Koreans have shown that unlike the Chinese, who like to eat the dish of revenge cold, they prefer to have a second helping, and a third, and a fourth….  

A Mother, Murder, and Memories

In a pivotal moment in Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong’s recent film, the superb Madeo (2009), a police officer, while referring to the forensic team collecting evidence at a murder scene, tells his colleague “Cops these days…CSI and all that TV!”

While serials like the aforementioned CSI and its various spin-offs focus on the science behind solving terrible crimes, it is films like Madeo (Mother) that, in contrast, have at their heart the dynamics of the individuals involved therein—the victim, the accused, and their friends and family.

The eponymous Mother (she is not mentioned by her name throughout the film’s 128-minute duration), played impeccably by Hye-ja Kim, lives a forlorn life in a town in the outskirts of Seoul with her intellectually challenged son Yoon Do-joon. She tries to make both ends meet by selling herbs and medicines and by providing acupuncture sessions to the neighbours, though she does not have a valid licence to ply that particular trade.

Mother treats Do-joon as a child, helping him eat, asking him to tuck in his shirt, and advising him not to mix with his friend Jin-tae, who she considers as ‘bad seed’. Knowing that they have ‘only got each other’, she shares an exceptionally strong bond with her son, who besides lacking in intellectual capacity also has problems remembering things. A harmless and gullible guy, who is as innocent of the nitty-gritty of life as he is of the man-woman equation, the only time Do-joon reacts violently is when anyone calls him a ‘retard’.

The occasional visit to the neighbourhood police station—where the guards and the higher officials are all known to Mother from their childhood—when her son gets involved in minor scuffles, takes a turn for the worst when Do-joon is taken into custody by officer Je-mun as the prime suspect in the murder of a young girl Moon Ah-jung. Knowing fully well that her son cannot ‘even harm a water-bug’, Mother starts running from pillar to post—trying to bribe Je-mun with camphor ginseng (‘which helped you when you were a child’) and getting hold of the most well-known public defender of the area, the karaoke-loving Gong Suk-ho, to prove her son’s innocence. But when she finds herself shunned by the police, who have an incriminating piece of evidence at their disposal that links Do-joon directly to the crime; and betrayed by the lawyer, who suggests sending Do-joon away to a mental asylum for four years, Mother takes it upon herself to acquit her son. She starts collecting evidence, distributing pamphlets proclaiming her son’s innocence, and starts talking to kids who knew Moon Ah-jung, who, she finds during her investigations was quite opposite to her own son—being a girl who grew up far beyond her chronological age. In her quest, she finds two allies—a neigbour who runs a photo studio and Jin-tae, Do-joon’s friend.

Her efforts at trying to make Do-joon remember the incidents of the fateful night face a curious resistance. In trying to remember, Do-joon inadvertently unlocks various suppressed memories that rather than helping mother find a ray of hope, makes her come face to face with incidents in her and Do-joon’s lives that she never thought he would recollect.

In the same manner, as Mother proceeds in her search for truth, dark secrets of the small town—a town that had not seen a murder in years—start rising to the surface, till we reach a dénouement that throws both Mother and we, the viewer, off-balance.

Joon-ho Bong, alongside Chan-wook Park (of Oldboy and Thirst fame), belongs to an exciting generation of Korean directors, who have ushered in a new era of filmmaking. Bong made quite a splash in Hollywood with his 2006 creature feature Gwoemul (The Host). However, the film with which one can draw parallels with his most-recent work is his film of 2003, Salinui chueok (Memories of murder). In that film, two police officers, one from a small town and the other from the city try to solve a series of grisly killings in the South Korean province of Gyunggi. In both the films, the peace and quite of a small town are ruptured by violent crime. In both cases, a mentally-challenged individual is accused of the misdeed. In both instances, though the cases were apparently solved, one character was found to be carrying the burden of truth for the rest of their lives.

In the course of Madeo, Mother asserts twice that she, and only she, knows of an acupuncture technique that when applied to ‘the meridian point’ can ‘loosen the knots in the heart and clear all horrible memories from the mind’. In the climax of the film, which harks back to the conclusion of Oldboy, Mother found out that the same acupuncture needles that she claims can have such a therapeutic effect, can also be the harbinger of unimaginable pain.