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Korean Pop Culture is Flooding Asia! Expert opinions on the Korean Film Festival. The Newest Tiger: 60 Years of South Korean Film Opening night at Walter Reade’s South Korean film fest, the Korean ambassador was on hand to announce that Korean popular culture was flooding Asia, and the streaky-haired Korean hipsters were in the audience to applaud unironically. Admittedly, it’s the triumphs of Korean trendiness that brought me to the theater myself, but there was something really odd about the nationalist boosterism over documentaries on jailed political dissidents, gangster flicks and Dadaist explorations of sexual desire. I thought to myself, you can’t even épater les bourgeois any more without your work becoming part of a bourgeois sales pitch ― and bourgeoification turned out to be one of the themes of the of the festival. Low Life Impetuous but loyal Tae-wong (Cho Seung-Woo) is a juvenile delinquent who gets adopted into a middle-class family after being stabbed by its student son (!). The father of the family is a liberal politician, and when he’s attacked by a gang associated with the ruling party, Tae-wong fights back and wins. This success draws him into a rival gang, and for the rest of the movie, he struggles fitfully to make something of himself, in the underworld or in the “regular” world of contracting for the American military. Meanwhile, there are student demonstrations, corrupt politicians, military coups, struggles for democracy, changes of regime announced over loudspeaker, pamphlets dropped from planes, cops picking up drunks who dis the regime, curfews, moral policing, relatives jailed for activism, cops firing on demonstrators, the tremors of public political life to which Tae-wong pays almost no attention in his journey toward bourgeoification. If I say Low Life is about the gangster discovery of capitalism, you’d think it was a South Korean Threepenny Opera. Low Life is more interested in individuals, but there’s a Brechtian staginess to the way the movie doesn’t bother to collapse the distance between its gangster protagonist and the larger political movements that surround him. I can understand why some viewers, disappointed with the lack of integration and the abrupt ending, might think the gangster story is padded out with politics to seem more meaningful than it is, but I’m inclined to give the movie the benefit of the doubt on its intentions, and I’ll tell you why. This is a movie with superbly shot, visceral fight sequences that will make you feel the shock of every blow, but there’s no balleticism, gore, cartoonishness, slo-mo, nothing extraneous to the story. The direction is crisply attentive to the mise-en-scène, with some beautiful compositions, but there’s never any lingering in which you can feel the director nudging you in the ribs and saying, “Look! Pretty picture! Clever symbolism!” Low Life takes its narrative seriously enough not to be self-indulgent about its artistry, which made me take its narrative seriously too. Peppermint Candy Yongho’s rise from army to factory to the police force to small business success, and his financial wrecking in the late 90s, is an allegory of South Korean capitalism, and his experiences as a soldier and as a cop embroil him in the dirty work of political repression. But the political context that shapes Yongho is only lightly sketched in, the foreground is given to Yongho’s daily life and the chaos of his experiences. Peppermint Candy acutely observes the strange ways inarticulate, isolated people express themselves ― odd noises, odd silences, bursts of attention-demanding odd behavior, flagrant coldness ― and how the normal people cling to their normality by pretending nothing strange has just happened. It’s much less skilful in depicting youthful inexperience, and some might find the ending a sentimental cliché. Peppermint Candy is also a Guy Movie about romantic love. Yongho’s edged rejection of women’s inobservant affection, the self-denying coldness with which he rewards oblivious sentimentality, said enough about the limits of love for me to need a drink. The devotion shown by the husband of Yongho’s first love looked heroic by the end. For boatloads of information on Korean Film Jumpoffs and other cinematic thrills, check Lincoln Center's website. Read more articles in Arts » |
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