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Rapidly becoming one of my favourite film festivals, The London Korean Film Festival 2013 easily lived up to the high standards set by its predecessors. And it could not have got off to a better start.
HIDE AND SEEK (right), directed by debutant Huh Jung, is simply the best thriller I’ve seen all year, and couldn’t have been a more exciting opening film. We all like the odd twist and turn in our thrillers, and the massive twists towards the end are as breathtaking and unexpected as the best that Hitchcock mustered. Indeed, the packed audience spent the entire film on a constant wave of screams, gasps and sudden releases of laughter.
It stars Sun Hyun-joo as a distracted father, Sung-soo, carrying considerable guilt about the way he treated his brother back when they were children. And as Sung-soo and his family are haunted by a violent, black-clad motorcycle courier, their paranoia rises. Strong on atmosphere, and featuring three fine child actors, this will keep you guessing and peeping through your fingers until the end. Huh Jung made this on a shoestring, and will surely prove himself one to watch when given a bigger budget.
Almost uncategorisable, but I’m going to call it a “rom-com-trag-dram”, MAI RAITIMA from Yoo Ji-tae, starts by focusing on Mai, brought across to Korea as an unwilling bride from Thailand and trapped in a loveless marriage. She is justifiably miserable, unpaid while working at her lecherous brother-in-law’s factory, and verbally assaulted by her mother-in-law. When Soo-young, a chancer, leaps in to help her out, she makes her own leap of faith and flees to Seoul with him. They’re an odd couple, foraging, clad in purple hues, but buoyed up by their passion. It all goes wrong though, when they fall in with some dodgy characters, the plot gets pitch-black, and it almost seems like two films in one.
CODE NAME: JACKAL (right) resembles nothing so much as those creaky old movie vehicles for Elvis and Cliff, by giving leading K-Pop star, Hero Jaejoong, a chance to pout and flex his muscles and puff out his chest while crazed, obsessive fans lust after him. The plot is wafer thin, with Hero playing a heart-throb celebrity with a merciless contract killer on his tail. But despite the best efforts of some reliable character actors and a vaguely Stockholm syndrome twist, this is flimsy, farcical fare, directed by Bae Hyoung-jun.
ROUGH PLAY is also rather underwhelming, featuring a slightly unhinged actor, Young, whose art and life are inseparable. When his career takes off and he becomes an arrogant star, you know those chickens are coming home to roost… eventually. Basically this is the plot of A Star Is Born, but with added violence and lacking any of its redeeming features.
Much more like it is the huge hit movie MIRACLE IN CELL NO 7, directed by Lee Hwan-kyung. Both heartwarming and tearjerking, it flashes back to a case of child abduction and murder from 1997 with the simple soul, Yong-gu as the fall guy. Flashing forward to the present, Yong-gu’s daughter, now a lawyer, seeks to overturn the guilty verdict imposed on her unworldly father. But that only tells a tiny part of the story, as it’s the action in the prison, with fellow felons of all backgrounds and crimes – and the prison warden – getting together to help father and daughter. Not a dry eye in the house. Guaranteed.
You’ll find insight in abundance in the remarkable documentary BHIKKHUNI, from Lee Chang-jae. This follows a group of young women who have decided to become Buddhist nuns in a remote temple, and the director has got the most amazing access into their world. It’s hard and emotional for these aspirants, giving up their worldly lives, family and friends. Sangwook wonders if she’s doing the right thing, as they chant, bow and fast as part of their commitment and sacrifice. But there are sudden flashes of wicked humour in the midst of their work and journeying, and as they progress within the monastery’s tight structure. You’re left to conclude that life is possibly even harder for those they’ve left behind, including Sangwook’s parents, who want their daughter back.
Falling within the same ‘Critic’s Choice’ section of the festival, SOUTH BOUND (right) is a sharp comedy-drama with a political message, from Yim Soon-rye. The back story is of a ‘subversive’ family with surveillance on their every move, who are meanwhile monitoring a rich family, but this soon evolves into a far more involving plot. Known as ‘Choi Guevara’, the ex-movie director and rabble-rouser is married to a woman who used to be known as Joan of Arc, and they are a constant embarrassment to all three of their kids. When they all up sticks and sail to an idyllic, isolated island, it seems they can make a fresh start. Until they’re tracked down, and a massive development on their ancestors’ land threatens to tear down everyone’s homes, handing Choi the chance to become a hero. It’s David versus Goliath. It’s stopping your paradise being paved for a parking lot. It’s standing up to The Man. And it’s very funny too.
Go to page 2 for more of The London Korean Film Festival 2013.
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.
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