2010
28 November 2010
Korean and French cinema, let’s face it, are probably the best in the world. The three most exciting directors right now are from those countries (Bong Joon-ho, Jacques Audiard and Park Chan-wook). Nuff said. I caught four films at this year’s Fest, here they are:
The Man from Nowhere
The Opening Night Gala starring Won Bin (Mother) is a revenge film and rescue movie rolled into one. It has echoes of Leon and Man on Fire, as a taciturn ex-army intelligence soldier, Tae-Sik, now working in a pawn shop, befriends his polar opposite - a loquacious, precocious little girl, So-Mi. Her mother is a drug addict and dancer in a club, who not very wisely decides to steal narcotics from some gangsters. She is killed and her daughter taken in reprisal. The gangsters establish that Tae-Sik cares about So-Mi and forces him to do a job for them to get her back. He is then sucked into a gang war, with the police hunting him thrown into the mix. Little does anyone realise how lethal Tae-Sik is.
Won Bin is virtually unrecognisable from the awesome Mother. It shows how great his performance was in that. Here he is not stretched very much, just having to look cool and mysterious with various stylish haircuts. The fights are entertaining but edited a bit too fast for full enjoyment (contrast the fisticuffs in French sci-fi move Chrysalis), and it is structured like a computer game. A far superior thriller is the magnificent The Chaser, a lesson on how to do a kidnap thriller. Don’t get me wrong The Man from Nowhere is cheesy fun, where I guess the filmmakers are going for satisfying the audience blood-lust, rather than taking an original spin, as Tae-Sik tears apart the Korean underworld tracking down So-Mi.
There are some neat touches too. You know Tae-Sik is going to be a badass, though instead of showing it straight away, his first take down is of a large guy off camera that took the police a whole stakeout to do at the beginning of the movie, which of course builds our excitement. As a thriller it is generic but nicely made.
I Saw the Devil
First off. Wow! I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t make my Top 10 by the end of the year. From Kim Jee-Woon, director of the quite frankly brilliant The Good, the Bad, the Weird, and starring Lee Byung-hun (A Bittersweet Life) and Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy), this is the most violent picture I’ve seen this year. We watched the uncut version. Do not let that put you off, as there is a point to it. I Saw the Devil is an intelligent and biting take on the revenge flick.
Choi Min-Sik’s Kyung-chul is up there with Magua (from The Last of the Mohicans) and The Tooth Fairy (from Manhunter) as one of the scariest bad guys of modern cinema. Kyung-chul is a sadist and serial killer, without it any ounce of mercy or morality. The film opens with him brutally killing a woman, who is the fiancé of Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun). Soo-hyun is a secret service agent and takes two weeks leave to track down her murderer. He quickly finds out the identity of Kyung-chul, but instead of dealing with him there and then, and/or turning him in, Soo-hyun takes a different tack – he decides to punish him slowly to make Kyung-chul suffer fear. It seems Kyung-chul won’t learn his lesson, and Soo-hyun does things like hamstring him (that is a particularly vivid scene to say the least!). This is up there with two best revenge films: Oldboy and Kill Bill; but instead of going for the catharsis of just desserts, it is all the more intelligent and goes down the road of The Dark Knight and demonstrates the futility and hollowing out of vengeance, and the unplanned/unforeseen consequences.
The film has stayed me with me ever since I watched it. It is powerful and disturbing and interesting. The atmosphere is constantly tense as the stakes and desperation get higher. The set-pieces are stunning, for instance, after Soo-hyun has punished Kyung-chul for the first time, the latter manages to get a taxi in the middle of nowhere, and inside the car are two serial killers, and he takes them on with a broken wrist and a knife. (A couple in the audience walked out after that.) Kim Jee-woon shows with bravura how weird the true underbelly of society is. When this gets released this must surely be on your list to watch. The original Korean title is a translation of Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. The director said after the screening that the devil in the English-language title could be either of the leads, or the audience. You decide.
The Man from Nowhere
The Opening Night Gala starring Won Bin (Mother) is a revenge film and rescue movie rolled into one. It has echoes of Leon and Man on Fire, as a taciturn ex-army intelligence soldier, Tae-Sik, now working in a pawn shop, befriends his polar opposite - a loquacious, precocious little girl, So-Mi. Her mother is a drug addict and dancer in a club, who not very wisely decides to steal narcotics from some gangsters. She is killed and her daughter taken in reprisal. The gangsters establish that Tae-Sik cares about So-Mi and forces him to do a job for them to get her back. He is then sucked into a gang war, with the police hunting him thrown into the mix. Little does anyone realise how lethal Tae-Sik is.
Won Bin is virtually unrecognisable from the awesome Mother. It shows how great his performance was in that. Here he is not stretched very much, just having to look cool and mysterious with various stylish haircuts. The fights are entertaining but edited a bit too fast for full enjoyment (contrast the fisticuffs in French sci-fi move Chrysalis), and it is structured like a computer game. A far superior thriller is the magnificent The Chaser, a lesson on how to do a kidnap thriller. Don’t get me wrong The Man from Nowhere is cheesy fun, where I guess the filmmakers are going for satisfying the audience blood-lust, rather than taking an original spin, as Tae-Sik tears apart the Korean underworld tracking down So-Mi.
There are some neat touches too. You know Tae-Sik is going to be a badass, though instead of showing it straight away, his first take down is of a large guy off camera that took the police a whole stakeout to do at the beginning of the movie, which of course builds our excitement. As a thriller it is generic but nicely made.
I Saw the Devil
First off. Wow! I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t make my Top 10 by the end of the year. From Kim Jee-Woon, director of the quite frankly brilliant The Good, the Bad, the Weird, and starring Lee Byung-hun (A Bittersweet Life) and Choi Min-Sik (Oldboy), this is the most violent picture I’ve seen this year. We watched the uncut version. Do not let that put you off, as there is a point to it. I Saw the Devil is an intelligent and biting take on the revenge flick.
Choi Min-Sik’s Kyung-chul is up there with Magua (from The Last of the Mohicans) and The Tooth Fairy (from Manhunter) as one of the scariest bad guys of modern cinema. Kyung-chul is a sadist and serial killer, without it any ounce of mercy or morality. The film opens with him brutally killing a woman, who is the fiancé of Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun). Soo-hyun is a secret service agent and takes two weeks leave to track down her murderer. He quickly finds out the identity of Kyung-chul, but instead of dealing with him there and then, and/or turning him in, Soo-hyun takes a different tack – he decides to punish him slowly to make Kyung-chul suffer fear. It seems Kyung-chul won’t learn his lesson, and Soo-hyun does things like hamstring him (that is a particularly vivid scene to say the least!). This is up there with two best revenge films: Oldboy and Kill Bill; but instead of going for the catharsis of just desserts, it is all the more intelligent and goes down the road of The Dark Knight and demonstrates the futility and hollowing out of vengeance, and the unplanned/unforeseen consequences.
The film has stayed me with me ever since I watched it. It is powerful and disturbing and interesting. The atmosphere is constantly tense as the stakes and desperation get higher. The set-pieces are stunning, for instance, after Soo-hyun has punished Kyung-chul for the first time, the latter manages to get a taxi in the middle of nowhere, and inside the car are two serial killers, and he takes them on with a broken wrist and a knife. (A couple in the audience walked out after that.) Kim Jee-woon shows with bravura how weird the true underbelly of society is. When this gets released this must surely be on your list to watch. The original Korean title is a translation of Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. The director said after the screening that the devil in the English-language title could be either of the leads, or the audience. You decide.
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Guns & Talk
As part of this year’s mini-retrospective a selection of the films of director Jang Jin were shown. I caught Guns & Talk (2001). It is meant to be a hitman comedy, except it isn’t very funny; or perhaps the jokes are lost in translation? It follows a quartet of hitmen (two of whom are brothers, and all are friends) who carry out various jobs. There seems to be no introspection on their part, apparently indifferent to killing women and maiming people. I don’t have a problem with an amoral film but it just seemed weird that there was no self-analysis among the characters, while everyone in Guns & Talk seemed self-consciously “quirky” – which made them grate. I didn’t care about them or their predicaments. The film just felt very silly and boring. It says nothing of interest, nor was it engaging. Added to this is the tortuous twee music that accompanies proceedings.
The closest analogy to Guns & Talk is probably Mark Wahlberg’s clunky The Big Hit. The director said as an intro that he didn’t want his film to be tacky 10 years on. Was he being serious? How was this not tacky on its original release? This is like a crummy hitman sitcom. Compare this to a lovely and fun crime caper called Au Revoir Taipai. The only saving grace for Guns & Talk is that appears to strive for novelty, which should be applauded, and it is different. It also seems to have been influenced by Tarantino’s self-reflexive oeuvre, but with little of his success unfortunately.
The Housemaid
The Closing Night Gala was a remake of a 1960 Korean classic. This is a modern update by director Im Sang-soo, about a woman who joins an extremely wealthy family as a nanny and housemaid. There are just four other people in the house: the husband, the heavily pregnant (with twins) wife, their young daughter, and an older maid. The husband then starts having an affair with the maid and all sorts of repercussions ensue.
I know this is meant to be a commentary on class, privilege and gender, and the film is handsomely made with good performances, but this all feels bit pointless and out of touch. Why bother making a tale about capitalism and power about the master-servant relationship? Who is this aimed at? While an audience can sympathise, it is difficult to empathise. Had this been about a different era, fair enough, it could have been a historical dissection, but it is a contemporary tale. Not many people have servants anymore, or are servants (unless the filmmaker is being extremely allegorical). Why not analyse the impact of the rich on, say, office workers? I was never bored in The Housemaid, but I kept wondering if the director had turned his sights on more relevant targets, this would have been better use of resources. Im Sang-soo stated in the Q&A that he plans on expanding the themes started here on capitalism. I look forward to seeing what he does.
Overall, this was an enjoyable Festival, roll on next year’s LKFF!
