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The London Korean Film Festival 2015 marks an incredible ten years since the first one started with just 11 movies, while the 2015 festival boasted 52, many of which were sold out.
So what better way to start what’s become one of my favourite festivals, than with the second highest grossing Korean feature of all time, JK Youn‘s Ode To My Father, With Hwang Jung-min in the lead role. This ambitious movie more than lives up to expectations, charting his character ageing from his twenties up to his seventies. We see his family fleeing their homeland in 1950 when he is just a child, becoming refugees, and being split up in the melee. Then, the young man seeks his fortune down the mines in West Germany – where he meets his eventual spouse – and we see him find work in Vietnam while the war is raging. Both are typical events in Korean family history, and Hwang says his character is “symbolic of all Korean fathers”. In fact, Hwang prepared for the role by going to parks for the elderly, and filming them from head to toe to get the movement right. In addition, the director says that he’s based on his own father, which meant bringing back memories. Where the film really hits home is the section where Hwang’s character is trying to find the father and sister he lost decades earlier, even appearing on a TV reunion show in the vain hope that he can turn back time. We can now look forward to the director and star’s next film together, Himalaya.
Described as “Korea’s Tom Hardy”, it’s satisfying to see Hwang Jung-min take on a very different, hard-hitting action role in Veteran. He plays a cop, Do-cheol, investigating some unpleasant criminal activity that’s being covered up. But can he beat the corruption that leads directly to the young, rich, powerful, violent and amoral Tae-oh, played brilliantly by Yoo Ah-in? Beaten up, beaten down but relentless, Do-cheol is the knight in shining armour in increasingly dark and seedy scenes.
A bold choice as the closing film, Chinese Korean director Zhang Lu‘s Love And… couldn’t be more different from Hwang’s action-filled, big budget features. Previously a novelist, Zhang expanded this 70-minute film from a short, and it is basically four shorts bolted together, shot over three days with actors and on two more without. Chapter One starts in black and white, with a European feel, set in a hospital ward where a grandfather is infatuated with a cleaner; Chapter Two feels like an art installation about absence and disappearance; Chapter Three is about the actors and cuts the audio altogether; and, finally, Chapter Four replays the ‘action’ of the first chapter, but without the actors, just showing the scenes, settings and dialogue – until there are suddenly lots of patients. And patient is what you have to be, as this is very much a film about film-making.
Not that Love And… is the only film about film-making. There’s a whole tranche of them coming out of Korea now. Hong Sang-Soo is the prime mover in this, but he has many dedicated followers.
We Will Be Ok, aka They Vanished, from Baek Jae-Ho, is a film within a film. The main character is a filmmaker whose work poses questions like – What’s real? What’s wishful thinking? What’s his script? Is this the end of days? Baek says that he originally wanted to be an actor himself, but couldn’t get the parts, so he made this film with his friends in order to play a secondary role in the film (as the director). Furthermore, they made it in a particular way to save money: getting the camera on direct debit, then selling that equipment to get the next batch of stuff they needed… until they’d finished!
A veritable Russian Doll in structure, Lee Kwang-Kuk‘s Romance Joe is a film within a film… within a film? Narratives start, pause and restart once the main narrative takes over. Lee’s more recent A Matter Of Interpretation is more sophisticated, and takes its cue from Freudian dream analysis – something that intrigues the director, who found he had a blurred distinction between reality and dreams after looking after his own ailing father. So we watch an out-of-work actress telling a detective about her dreams, then Lee messes with time and storyline on a loop. Everyone – even a small boy – is dreaming, and characters don’t hold back in speaking harsh truths to each other, though there’s ample gentle humour here too. And there’s an interesting exploration in here about the stifling of art in the pursuit of financial gain in Korea right now.
The very indie A Midsummer’s Fantasia (right) from Jang Kun-jae is partly in Japanese and is in two chapters, the first on First Love, where a director and actor are scouting a location and characters, and shot in Gojo City in Americana-style. Chapter Two is very Jim Jarmusch, and is supposedly the film they were scouting for, in which two young people flirt, chat and explore together. According to Jang, he had no idea what to do in the second chapter, but the film was based on his own experience of script development and came to fruition when he shared a crew with a Japanese director. Jang’s previous, more autobiographical, Sleepless Night, centres on a couple and their domesticity, intimacy, work and commuting, making a gentle portrait of a young marriage and love. Filmed in his own house, Jung deliberately opted for a 4:3 ratio as the actors were intimate together, with empty space at the sides, so he cut it to that format.
At the other extreme, Twenty, from Lee Byeong-Heon is basically The Inbetweeners, but starring three Korean lads. A coming-of-age comedy, there’s tension between the rich, spoiled lad, the poor lad, and the college lad. Will any of them be lucky in love – or lust? Don’t go looking for insightful profundity here, just relax and enjoy the fun!
Go to page 2 for more from The London Korean Film Festival 2015.