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).