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MONTAGE (right) is an edge-of-the-seat police procedural thriller directed by Jeong Keun-seob, and focusing on two cases of child abduction, 15 years apart, but with remarkable similarities. The main cop, Cheong-ho has all but abandoned the first case, but it still haunts him and the child’s mother is crippled by constantly reliving it. Just as the statute of limitations is running out on this first case, the second happens, and feels like the same perpetrator, or maybe a copycat crime. When a couple of anomalies make Cheong-ho uneasy, he continues to pursue the truth. But what he eventually finds is totally unexpected and shocking to both him and the audience – especially as the director constantly moves back and forth in the timeline, unsettling and loosening our convictions about the possible felon.
With nods to Donna Tartt’s novel, The Secret History, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, plus echoes of Eton and the Bullingdon Club’s ‘high jinks’, PLUTO is a cautionary tale of what happens when you hot-house academic adolescents. Trying to be cool and geeky at the same time, a bunch of privileged pupils dominate their peers through bullying, cheating and exclusion. When June – aka Pluto – joins their academy and seeks to make his way to the top, he gets drawn into their deeply unpleasant world and teeters on the brink of becoming just like them. Elitism has rarely seemed so brutal.
Making films about contagious diseases seems to be catching. And the latest is THE FLU (below), directed by Kim Sung-woo. Inspired by a recent foot and mouth epidemic, this is set in the very near future, when the people being trafficked into Korea bring a lethal virus that spreads at frightening speed. We see coughed, sneezed droplets being transported and transferred through the air, people dropping like flies, rats emerging from the trafficked container with mutated H5N1… So, should the entire city of Bundang be shut down? The medics say yes. The politicians say no. And we have a classic melodrama triangle to focus on in the midst of the contagion, as a doctor, Kim, knows her daughter, Mirre, has become infected, but is determined not to have her taken away.
Meanwhile, a brave rescue worker, Jigu, has fallen for the doctor. Other individuals are only out for their own personal gain, especially when it’s suspected that someone is carrying the anti-virus. Sung-woo builds the tension and excitement to almost unbearable levels, and it approaches a dystopian vision, as football stadia fill with dead and dying bodies like so much landfill, yet the trio’s struggle pulls us through. So, as the director explained in an insightful Q&A session afterwards, the casting of Mirre was key; and he saw 300 girls before making his decision. She had to be a typical Korean girl, it was the first role he cast, and she’s now apparently very famous. But the eternally restless Sung-woo won’t be making any further disaster movies, but his many fans will be relieved to hear that he might just do some more action films…
Based on a true story from 2008, HOPE is also the name of the main character, the 8-year-old daughter of a busy, working couple with ordinary lives, just striving to get by. And when Hope is brutally assaulted one day and left marked forever, all their worlds turn upside down. Life-saving surgery on Hope means she’s eventually able to go back home, but despite lots of therapy, she’s now wary of her own father, and her mother is expecting. What gives the film an extra depth is not only the performances of all three family members, including Sol Kyung-gu as the doting dad, but also the subtle shifting of everyone’s characters after the attack, and the feeling of their community gathering strength to help them in their healing. Tenderly and touchingly directed by Lee Joon-ik.
FATAL (right), from Lee Don-ku, seems to be heading in a restorative, yet redemptive direction throughout the narrative, until the final frames. A young man, Sung-gong, seeks to right the wrong he was involved in 10 years earlier. Still bullied by his friends, he’s never moved on from that day, and the girl, Jang-mi, has been emotionally crippled by what happened. So when he meets Jang-mi, and they become fast friends, he’s not only inexorably drawn to her, but wants to avenge her. But as he’s consumed by a mixture of love and guilt, can he own up to his own part in what happened – to himself, and to Jang-mi?
Ending the entire festival, BOOMERANG FAMILY, from Song Hae-sung, is based on a novel about grown-up children returning to live with their elderly mother. The premise might seem preposterous, yet this is what’s happening all over the world right now, as empty-nesters see their brood come back. One son is a failing movie director. The other is a large layabout, besotted with the local hairdresser and involved with some unsavoury criminals. The daughter is feckless and brings her own precocious daughter along. They all fight each other, all the time. But when disaster strikes, the family close ranks and come to each other’s aid. Dipping into the underworld, laced with romance and spiced with comedy, this is a chance for some of Korea’s finest character actors to let rip, including Youn Yuh-jung (of Housemaid fame) as the matriarch and Yoon Je-moon as the layabout.
It’s been a blast. And it was over too quickly. But if you wanted to dip your toe into the very best of this year’s London Korean Film Festival, then I’d recommend you sample HIDE AND SEEK, BHIKKHUNI, FLU, MONTAGE and maybe MIRACLE IN CELL NO 7 (if you don’t mind having a little cry). And, of course, there’s always next year’s festival in November 2014 – just keep on eye on these websites: http://london.korean-culture.org and http://koreanfilm.co.uk
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.