The Road to the Race Track

Cinema is a cerebral art form. Great cinema is not passive; it requires the active participation of the viewer to succeed. No matter how beautiful, or clever, or breathtaking a movie is, if it doesn't engage your mind, it may be great entertainment, but it can not be called a success on an artistic level. While The Road to the Race Track (경마장 가는길, 1991) has a number of flaws that keep me from being able to declare it a great work, one of them is not that it fails to stimulate the grey matter, and it can be recommended on that basis.

The plot, to the extent that this film has one, can be summarized quite easily. Having spent the last five years studying in France, "R" (Moon Sung-keun) returns to his native Korea, and is met at the airport by "J" (Kang Su-yeon) who seems somewhat less than excited to see him. R and J were lovers in France, having lived together for three and a half years until J's own return to Korea a year earlier. R clearly wants to dive back into what clearly was an intensely sexual relationship, but J is resistant. Confused and angered by her reaction, R dutifully treks to Daegu to visit his family, which we are surprised to learn includes a wife (Kim Bo-yeon) and two small children, but evinces little interest in remaining there. R quickly returns to Seoul and to J, and spends the remainder of the film attempting to rekindle their relationship. His methods, which range from smarmy to brutal, are at all times emotionally abusive, raising the question of why J keeps coming back for more. One reason is that R, who both parties agree ghost-wrote J's doctoral dissertation, has published a piece of literary criticism in Korea under her own name that was actually R's work. When he finds this out, R wastes no time in devising ways to use this fact as blackmail. R's wife refuses to grant R his divorce, a fact which J uses as an excuse to maintain a distance; R's marital status was not an issue when they were in France, but "this is Korea." J goes so far as to agree to marry another man who she has been seeing since her own return to Korea, but whether this is a serious relationship or just a threat to hold over R's head is an open question, the answer to which seems to change from moment to moment.

That this warring couple seems to be moving in circles, both emotionally and temporally, is not unintentional. Writer Ha Il-ji and director Jang Seon-woo attempted to express what they saw as a crisis of values in postmodern Korean society, and the circularity (or lack of progress) is a result of that moral breakdown. (For more analysis along these lines, see the KOFA page on this film, part of the "100 Korean Films" series.) It can be hard to know how much circularity is enough, however, and as a result I think this film could have survived about 20 minutes of judicious cuts. One scene in particular, involving R's attempts to remove a sash around J's waist, is both much too long and clumsily arranged.

This film perhaps could be seen as a Hong Sang-soo film with a much darker tone, and it comes as no surprise to learn that Hong was influenced by it. (KOFA) A more tangible connection to Hong's films is in the casting of Moon, who will be familiar to many viewers from his performance in Hong's Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors. Here he brings to life a character that is at once charming, reprehensible, and sympathetic, no mean feat. Across the table from Moon is Kang Su-yeon, one of the greatest actresses of her era and among the very first Korean performers to achieve international recognition; she won Best Actress awards for her roles in Im Kwon-taek's films The Surrogate Womb (Venice, 1987) and Come, Come, Come Upward (Moscow 1989).

The film is presented in a 16x9 enhanced 1.85:1 (really 1:78) format, with a stereo soundtrack in the original Korean, and both are fine. Subtitles are at about the same level as the previous few discs in this series; an example is provided at left. When he says "look me down," he means "look down on me." Similar problems with idiomatic expressions crop up with relative frequency (her response is "When the hack did I look you down?"), but they are easily overcome. Extra features are restricted to a trailer, poster, photo gallery, and a (Korean) filmography for the director and two leads. The disc is produced by Spectrum DVD, whereas the others in this series are all Taewon, but this doesn't seem to matter to the generally high quality of the presentations.

Portrait of Youth

"Find the substance of your nihility."
This bit of wisdom is given to the hero of Portrait of Youth (젊은 날의 초상; aka Portrait of the Days of Youth) as he nears the completion of his quest for...for...for whatever the hell it is he's been questing for the previous two hours. It also might as well have been the order of the day for director Kwak Ji-kyun (Plum Blossom) and writer Jang Hyeon-su (who later directed Everybody Has Secrets) in this, the 1990 installment of the Korean Movie Classic Collection 1975-1994.

Jung Bo-seog (Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors) plays Young-hoon, a young man whose character is so sketchily laid out that I could describe him equally well as an aimless drifter, a lovelorn poet, or a radical in search of a cause. He's taciturn and introspective, speaking only rarely, which is a real handicap to the understanding of the film, given that he's the narrator. He drifts first to his brother's house, where he collects a little money from his mother's estate and is informed that he's "the hope of the family," then to a coal mine for no apparent reason, and thence to a college, where he takes up with two revolutionaries and courts a pretty but completely bourgeois co-ed. The relationship ends badly, and both of his radical friends die tragically. Driven by his demons, Young-hoon drifts away from the (now-closed) college into the countryside. He's haunted, but as it turns out not by any of the foregoing events, but rather by his having witnessed, as a boy, some illicit sex between his teacher and a local girl he had a crush on. He next has a chance encounter with this paramour at her father's funeral, but she escapes before Young-hoon has a chance to speak with her. He spends the next six hours of screen time (feels that way, anyway) trying to locate locating her. Along the way he encounters the Hooker With a Heart of Gold as well as an itinerant knife sharpener who seems to have wandered out of another century (and who provides the great advice quoted above), and together the three of them...well, they wander around for a while. Finally tracking down his puppy love, Young-hoon tearfully admits to her "I really don't know what's what." Brother, you said a mouthful!

The picture (1.85:1 anamorphic) and sound (Dolby 2.0) are fine; the cinematography by frequent Im Kwon-tael collaborator Jung Il-sung matches the mood of the film with lots of long shots in gray skies or darkness, rain or snow. The disc is graced with the usual not-so-special features: trailer, poster, and photo gallery. With each film in this series, moving forward chronologically, it seems that the subtitling gets a little worse. There were more obvious mistakes here, but as before it's not something that will harm your understanding of the film. Of course, I have exactly zero understanding of this film; the subtitled dialogue may as well have been from another movie for all the good it did me. (After 45 minutes had elapsed, I was so lost that I actually skipped backwards chapter by chapter, hoping that the disc might have skipped one somehow. It hadn't.) It's not that uncommon for a film to be so wrapped up in symbolism and metaphor that its deeper meaning entirely escapes me; for all I know, Young-hoon represents Man's Inhumanity to Man, while the hooker Miss Yoon is The Plight of the Korean People. Somebody obviously appreciates it; KOFA thought it should be part of this series of "classics," and it did win a Best Film award at a festival (the 1991 "Grand Bell Awards"). So although this film may not exactly run to my tastes, your mileage may vary.

[WARNING--POTENTIAL SPOILER]
Maybe this will help clear things up: towards the end of the film, Jung-hoon leans up against a tree and (as the narrator) says "It's time to end the play. Existence doesn't exist without continuation. A glass of wine should be emptied. Despair is the real start of existence."

I dunno; maybe it's just that my nihility is too substanceless.

The Eel Sea

After two days of steady, hard rain, the usually insignificant Eel River looks like an inland sea. Note the standing water even in the pasture on this side of the river's edge. And we have rain forecast every day for the rest of the week, courtesy of El Niño. Time to start building that ark!

Gagman

Gagman (개그맨), Lee Myeong-se's directorial debut of 1988 (or 1989, depends on who you ask; I'm trusting KOFA on this one), is the next feature in the Korean Movie Classics Collection. As noted above, this is a second collaboration of Lee, co-writer (and, here, co-star) Bae Chang-ho, and actors Ahn Sung-ki and Hwang Shin-hye, following but entirely unrelated to the 1987 melodrama Our Joyful Young Days. It's difficult to find just one little box in which to classify this action-comedy-gangster-Hollywood tribute-fantasy film. At least for 1988 in South Korea, it was one of a kind, and a terrific film (that, evidently, nobody saw.)

Ahn plays Lee Jong-sae, a nightclub comic/emcee who has based his act on Chaplin's Little Tramp to such a degree that his own personality has become subsumed into it. Despite taking on the outward appearance, and some of the mannerisms, of the Tramp, he does not aspire to the stardom of his idol. Instead, he sees himself as a director, a true genius of the cinema in an age that has forgotten what genius looks like. (This, despite the fact that his film career consists of having sent one script to one studio, without response.) While performing his silent Chaplin-homage routine on stage, his internal monologue is lamenting that "this great world of ours [has] come to value wads of cash over true feeling and romance" becoming a "barren, lifeless, and emotionless wasteland. What can a genius like myself do for times like these?" he asks himself while twirling an imaginary cane and mugging for his not-very-attentive audience. Lee, the film's narrator, occupies a world that is a mixture of reality and fantasy, and as he can no longer clearly discern the dividing line, neither can we.

His barber, Moon Do-seok (Bae), quickly falls into Lee's mixed-up world when Lee suggests that Moon should star in his next picture. Moon, who wants nothing more than to be a movie star ("I started watching movies from the time I was conceived," he says), immediately sells his shop, has eyelid surgery, and places himself completely at Lee's disposal. Moon's main talent, apart from shaving Lee's forehead, appears to be bathroom-going. It can be inferred that, shall we say, he does not possess a complete supply of hot towels.

Unable to make any headway at the studio (where he is viewed as a trespasser), Lee takes refuge in a cinema one afternoon to enjoy a screening of Coppola's The Cotton Club, when the beautiful Oh Sun-young (Hwang) literally drops into his lap. She is on the run from her gangster boyfriends, and cajoles Lee into letting her come home with him. Once there, she takes up residence among the many movie posters and pieces of Chaplin memorabilia, agrees that she should star in his picture, and generally starts minxing her way around like, well, like a fantasy.

One evening when Lee is rehearsing his routine in the closed nightclub, he is interrupted by a deserting soldier who gives him his weapons and ammunition before disappearing (literally, exiting, stage right.) Back at the apartment, Sun-young discovers the firearms and suggests that he should use them to rob a bank, thereby acquiring the capital to finance his film which will make her a star. At this point, the film swings from a broad comedy to a gangster picture, albeit a comedic one, seeing as they are a terrifically inept gang. We follow their criminal career to its end, which I won't spoil for you here.

Overall, the film is great fun from start to finish, and the final scene contains a twist that makes you reconsider everything that went on before it in a new light. The performances are first rate. Ahn is consigned to playing a character who is playing a character, never an easy task, but after a while you stop seeing Chaplin and start seeing Lee, and that is tough to do. Hwang is excellent as the young gangster's moll who is also the brains of the outfit. Bae, in one of just three on-screen appearances of his career, is riotous in his role as the village idiot.

Lee Myeong-se has gone on to direct a total of eight features, one every few years or so, including 1999's critically acclaimed Nowhere to Hide (again with Ahn). Gagman is presented in an anamorphically enhanced 1.85:1 ratio, with a Dolby Digital stereo track, and both are excellent. Less good are the subtitles, which are complete and well-timed but exhibit a fair number of typos. Not Panorama-bad, mind you--there was an Anglophone involved somewhere in the process--but they are a little distracting. Unlike the first two DVDs in the box, here there is no commentary track, as the extra features are limited to a trailer, poster, and small photo gallery.

Our Joyful Young Days

The second film in the series is entitled Our Sweet Days or Our Joyful Young Days (기쁜 우리 젊은 날, Gippeun wuri jeolmeun-nal), a 1987 film directed and co-written by Bae Chang-ho (배창호). Maybe there was something novel about this script in 1987 (I doubt it), but it's certainly been made a thousand or more times since then. It goes like this: Pathetic Loser falls in love with Dream Girl, and starts Stalking her. DG, who really should get a Restraining Order, instead is Gently Standoffish. PL persists. DG Goes Away, and PL is crushed. DG returns, and PL runs into her Quite by Accident. It turns out that DG Has Issues of Her Own. And so forth. Believe me, if you've ever seen a Korean melodrama, you know exactly where this is going, and even if you haven't, when it reaches what seems like a relatively happy ending point and there's still a half-hour to go, well, consider yourself warned.

The Pathetic Loser is played by the always reliable Ahn Sung-ki, veteran of more films than I can count, including some of Im Kwon-taek's better films (Festival, The Taebaek Mountains), huge hits like Lee Jang-ho's Eoudong, and classics like The Housemaid (made when he was 8) and Chilsu and Mansu. Ahn is still active today, taking elder statesman roles in such films as Im's Chihwaseon and Kang Woo-suk's Hanbando. Here, Ahn is asked to be the emotionally stunted, unsure and klutzy Young-min, and he doesn't do much with this thankless role. It might have been nice to see some emotional growth over the two hour running time; nowadays that would be expected from this genre, as it makes the emotional payoff in the final scene either richer or more sappy, depending on your tastes. Ahn, who is now and was then a better actor than he shows here, instead just mugs and cries his way to the inevitable conclusion. Opposite Ahn is the positively luminous Hwang Cine (or Hwang Shin-hye, 황신혜) in her film debut. Hwang was, for a time, Park Chul-soo's muse, appearing in five of his films in the 1990s, and while still active today, is perhaps better known for having a line of lingerie named for her. Here, she is mostly required to look both beautiful and unapproachable, and she has no trouble whatsoever with these requirements. Her role should actually have been the more interesting of the two (as I said above, she Has Issues), but her character is one-dimensional, existing just so Young-min has something to react to. Had this film been written from Hye-rin's POV, it would have doubtless been a better, or at least more interesting, film. Ah, well.

It's not a terrible film, and is certainly well made with some very good compositions here and there. If I had seen this in 1987, before I grew bone-weary of this genre, I'm sure I would have liked it a lot better than I do today. I wouldn't buy the box solely for this film, but it wouldn't keep me from buying it, either. And anyway, there's really nothing wrong with looking at Hwang Cine, "the most perfect face in Korea," for two hours, now is there?*

All the major players here (Bae, Ahn, Hwang, and co-screenwriter Lee Myung-se) will reunite the following year for Gagman, Lee's directorial debut and the next film in this series. I'm somewhat less than breathless in anticipation.

The film is presented in its original 1.85:1 ratio, sort of; it's enhanced for 16x9, making the display ratio actually 1.78:1, but I won't quibble. The print, apart from a few speckles, looks very good. Audio (Dolby Digital stereo) has a hiss, but it is also quite good. Subtitles are also good; perhaps not quite as good as those in Yeong-ja's Heydays; "in" and "on" get mixed up occasionally, and there's a laugh-out-loud moment when the name Lee Strasberg shows up as 'Lee Streetsbourg', but these are minor issues. Again there is an unsubbed director's commentary track, as well as a trailer, poster, and photo gallery.

*Most of this background information on Hwang is taken from Darcy Paquet's brief profile of her at the indispensible koreanfilm.org, which is also the source of the photo of Hwang used above. Now excuse me while I go buy a Hwang Cine thong...

Yeong-ja's Heydays

One of my original intentions when starting this blog was to dabble in film reviews. I've started to review the contents of a box set of "Korean Movie Classics" for another site, and decided that I should cross-post them here as a way of fulfilling that original goal.

The first title is from 1975 and is variously titled Young ja: On the Loose (that's what the keepcase says) or Yeong-ja's Heydays (the name I commonly find on the internet); the Korean title is "영자의 전성시대" (Yeongja-ui jeonseongsidae). It was written and directed by KIM Ho-seon (김호선); according to KMDb, it was his second feature as a director in a career that ran to 15 films over 22 years; I admit I've never heard of him or any of his films. However, according to Darcy Paquet, this was the fourth biggest box-office hit of the 1970s in Korea. I'm not surprised, as it is quite salacious considering what South Korea ca. 1975 was like. (Kim was also responsible for the biggest hit of the 1970s, 1977's Winter Woman [겨울여자]).

We first meet Yeong-ja as she is being dragged in in yet another roundup of prostitutes from one of the seedier neighborhoods of Seoul. In the police station, by chance she encounters Chang-su, her would-be boyfriend of three years ago, who is just back from serving in Vietnam. We quickly embark on a lengthy flashback, tracing Yeong-ja's long strange trip from fresh-faced maid to sweatshop seamstress to bar hostess and finally to bus conductress, where tragedy strikes as it so often does in Korean melodrama. Left with no other choice, pretty but maimed Yeong-ja succumbs to the vortex of prostitution that has been tugging at her sleeve ever since she got fired from her housemaid job (for being wanton; i.e. the no-good son of the manor raped her.) The rest of the film chronicles first Chang-su's and then Yeong-ja's attempts to make a better life for themselves. It's a pretty standard story, although it does produce a somewhat non-standard ending; but for me, the story is not the appeal of the film.

The appeal is chiefly in the performance of Yeom Bok-sun (염복순), who is superb as Yeong-ja. She is asked to play any number of emotional registers, ranging from naif to slut to suicide to determined woman, and most of the time she has to feign a handicap to boot. Despite the intense scenery-chewing going on all around her all the time, she manages to keep all of the manifestations of Yeong-ja's changing personality under control and delivers a nuanced performance. In those two opening scenes, for example, she first appears as a foul-mouthed hooker in the hoosegow, and then (in the flashback) as an angel-faced fawn suddenly out of the woods and in the Big City, and it wasn't until it the second scene was over that I realized that it was the same actress playing both parts. I can't find much online about Yeom, except that it seems that her short career had come to an end by 1979 after making about 10 films in five years.

The film is presented in the OAR of 2.35:1, enhanced for widescreen. The print was in reasonably good condition; some damage shows up, most especially in outdoor shots near the end of the film, when the print is so speckled that you momentarily wonder if Yeong-ja is going to have to endure a plague of crows on top of everything else she's been through. Similarly the mono track will disappoint the audiophiles, as there's an ever-present hiss and some cracks and pops, and seems to sit a little too far forward, but none of this bothered me; in fact, I might not have noticed them were I not planning to write this review. Full disclosure: I don't give two hoots about this sort of stuff.

There is a director's commentary track, which is unsubtitled; all the more reason to learn Korean. Apart from that, there's no other extras.

One film in, and I'm already glad I got this set.

More on this film from KOFA (warning: spoilers).