★★★★★

30 October 2018

A movie review of ​BURNING.

Seen at the London Film Festival 2018. (For more information, click here.)

By Hemanth Kissoon

“To me, the world is a mystery,” Jong-su (Ah-In Yoo)
 
Six for six from director Lee Chang-dong. 148 minutes of gripping, creeping emotional devastation. Class and gender discourse are mixed into a story concerning crushing loneliness. BURNING’s skill is being both despondently contemporary as well as perennial. It was a long wait since the filmmaker’s previous, POETRY (2010), and it was worth it, delivering perhaps his best so far, rivalling PEPPERMINT CANDY (1999). If you haven’t already, do yourself a favour and treat yo self to his back catalogue.
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​News on television within the film: Trump and high youth unemployment. No cinematic prevarication. The question to ask ourselves: Is this the first generation in 70 years to be worse off than their parents? Jong-su is a deliveryman dreaming of being a novelist. He studied creative writing. Jong-su is taciturn. Not the quietness of contentment or disdain, but one where he does not want to take up space. There is a lifetime of deep frustration that two characters will bring to the surface.
 
Jong-su states his father has a “rage disorder”. Is that everyone in this world who is being oppressed/exploited? Anger will touch him profoundly too. Pater is in custody while on trial for injuring a government employee. Not his first offence. Jong-su discovers a lot of disturbing knives at his father’s farm. A cinephile audience will nervously await their use, like the proverbial loaded gun. The strata of unease are layered adroitly. The landline keeps ringing at the farm without anyone speaking. There is just one calf. His father appears to have the driven business into the ground. Jong-su’s mother abandoned them 16 years ago. Why not take him too? Jong-su is continually being let down. The film is about how we are not meant to be alone as a species. Solitide makes us vulnerable.

​Immediately Jong-su meets Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jeon), who is the total opposite to him. He is completely smitten. They supposedly went to school together. She mentions things good and bad that he does not remember. One wonders about his long-term memory. Has emotional trauma erased large swathes of it? One also wonders if she is even telling the truth. Still, Hae-mi is extremely winsome. She is funny. Self-aware. Frank. Refreshing. Honesty as aphrodisiac. Planning on going on a trip, Hae-mi mentions two types of hunger:
- Little hunger – for food, and
- Great hunger – an existential crisis.
 
Making love, him and us thinking this is the start of something very romantic, Hae-mi asks Jong-su to take care of her cat, Boil, who him and we never meet. Schrödinger’s cat. Epitomising the film. Is what we are witnessing real? Every scene has Jong-su in it. As his heartbreak solidifies, one wonders about his objective view. Either way, the film packs an emotional wallop.
 
On returning from abroad, Hae-mi brings back someone who destroys them. Steven Yeun’s performance as Ben is in sharp contrast to his turn in THE WALKING DEAD. Here, there is a creepy malevolence of the wealthy that don’t know constraint. He is a predator. He collects working class women. Ben talks of metaphor. Meta. His mention of a hobby of burning abandoned greenhouses comes to haunt the lead. “There are so many Gatsbys in Korea,” Jong-su opines. Ben does not say what he does. That is arguably a sign of illegality or immorality or inherited wealth. Ben says he can’t ever remember shedding a tear.
 
It is as if all those around him are torturing Jong-su. When Hae-mi goes missing, something in him snaps. BURNING is suffused with pain.