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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.
Female director Kim Dong-Myung‘s The Liar (right) casts the wonderful Kim Kkobbi as Ah-Young, a compulsive liar, a Walter Mitty-type chancer, who lives a parallel fantasy life to compensate for her own dire reality. Dressing and acting exactly as she’d like to be, she’s constantly brought down to earth by the pressure of supporting her slacker brother and alcoholic sister. And she’s not only lying to them, but also to her colleagues, her boyfriend, everyone. But surely it will all eventually catch up with her and fall apart? Or can she sustain the fiction?
A mix of Midnight Cowboy and Ken Loach, Wild Flowers is hard-hitting in its content, but also poignant. Park Suk-Young‘s look at those on the fringes of society and on the edge of crime won Actress of the Year at the Busan International Film Festival for Cho Soo-hyang, but in truth any of the main three actresses could win this award. Starting with jolting, hand-held scenes of two feral young women on the run, who take a third under their wing – the Wild Flowers – they soon find they’re plucked out of the wilderness and coerced into a shocking life of prostitution. The threat of violence is always there, but with help from a deaf, dumb electrician they try to make their escape. But can they appeal to the conscience of the one ‘good pimp’ who finds them, even though he himself is pursued by his violent boss?
Starting as an awkward comedy of manners, End of Winter from Kim Dae-Hwan, centres on a family gathering to mark the retirement of the academic patriarch. But the dad is disinterested and drinking heavily, the mum is bossy and rude (and steals every single scene), the daughter-in-law is eager to please, one son is constantly on the phone and the other is a completely spoilt mother’s boy. Dad drops a bit of a bombshell when he says he’s getting a divorce, and as the family falls apart, the snow falls heavily around them, cutting them off, so they’re stranded together, seething with resentment. Tongues loosen, tempers rise and some priceless scenes ensue.
Finally, two of the best, most intriguing and satisfying films of the festival. The Classified File (right) from Kwak Kyung-Taek is based on a real kidnapping case from 1978, and stars Kim Yun-seok as cop Gil-Yong. The brilliant, full-tilt opening sequence introduces all the characters and plunges us into the action. The mother is distraught and consults a succession of mystics, the father doesn’t want the police prying too much into his affairs. They’re able to pay off the media and keep the story of their daughter’s abduction suppressed, and the cops similarly headquarter their investigation in a basement, much like The Wire. But things head in a different direction once Gil-Yong is forced to team up with a guru, and the search for the kidnapped girl is relocated to Busan, with two rival police forces on the case together. Can the odd couple deal hack through the corruption that stands in the way of finding the kidnapped girl?
Uncategorisable, but larger-than-life, Alice In Earnestland is the promising debut feature from Ahn Gooc-jin. Lead actress Lee Jeong-hyun is Su-nam, a young woman who never gets the rub of the green. We start in the present, with Su-nam holding a psychotherapist hostage in her own office. But what’s driven her to this crime? Flipping right back to the start of the story – accompanied by an excellent, tense soundtrack – we see that everything that could go wrong always does. When she finds a man who loves her, she cannot help hurting him. She holds down multiple jobs, trying to keep their home; and when there’s one tiny ray of hope, and she might get a big payday from redevelopment, she’s determined not to let it be extinguished by those who are trying to get their piece of the property pie. In amongst the slings and arrows of her outrageous fortune, there’s an interesting sideswipe at the current worship of development and inflated property prices, not to mention an exploration of the idea and politics of deafness. But at the end you’ll remember the gory, sudden, almost comic-book violence and the incredible performance of Lee.
I can’t wait until next year’s festival.
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