Two surprising things might strike you during the first half-hour or so of Kim Jee-woon‘s epic, exciting, extraordinary period spy thriller “The Age of Shadows” (which has recently been selected as Korea’s entry for the Oscars). Firstly, you may very well be a bit confused, at sea amid the plethora of characters you meet in media res and the rapid flow of scene on setpiece on scene, unsure at any one moment if you’re in a flashback or on some place along a linear timeline, unclear about who is betraying whom. The second is that you really don’t care. Conventional wisdom dictates that, certainly in a genre exercise like this, clarity is king and confusion, of even the mildest kind, is the enemy of engagement. But the conventionally wise part of your brain is way too busy being seduced by the moment-to-moment elegance of DP Kim Ji-yong‘s scoop-it-into-my-eyes-please photography, and Kim Jee-woon’s scintillating directorial assurance to get a look in. It really doesn’t matter that the overarching shape of the movie doesn’t reveal itself until later. In “The Age of Shadows” every scene is a movie.
It starts with an ending: in 1920s Japanese-occupied Seoul, a showdown occurs between a hunted man, Korean resistance fighter Kim Jan-ok (Park Hee-soon) and his pursuer Captain Lee Jung-chool, played by Song Kang-ho, now iconically recognisable from (deep breath) Bong Joon-ho‘s “Snowpiercer,” “The Host,” and “Memories of Murder,” Park Chan-wook‘s “Thirst,” “Sympathy for Mr Vengeance” and “Joint Security Area,” and Kim Jee-woon’s own “The Good, The Bad, The Weird.” (It’s a resume that serves to remind us that God, we love this golden age of Korean genre cinema, and that ‘Age of Shadows,’ for his excellent performance as well as for many other reasons, sits easily in this pantheon). Anyway, the Captain has some rather trigger-happy troops at his disposal but is anxious to catch his quarry alive, pursuing him on foot through the complex in which he’s gone to ground, while behind him in a wide, moonlit shot, soldiers flow across the rooftops like liquid and already, though you may know nothing of the context or the history of this drama, you feel yourself lean forward into the breathtaking image, while also relaxing back into the storytelling embrace of a director who knows exactly what he’s doing. It culminates in a face-off between the two men, which has one of the film’s goriest scenes (and there will be a few of those) but which also explains Jung-chool’s insistence on claiming Jan-ok alive: they were once friends. Jung-chool was once a resistance fighter himself, before turning traitor and joining the ranks of the Japanese authorities.
From this event the film spins into a clever, twisty double agent plot as the conflicted Jung-chool is tasked with running the rest of Jan-ok’s cell to ground, with his eyes really on the prize of the main resistance leader, Jeong Chae-san (played in a cameo role by Kim Jee-woon regular and star of this month’s ‘Magnificent Seven‘ remake Lee Byung-hun). But the main mouse to Jung-chool’s cat (or is it the other way around) is Kim Woo-jin (“Train to Busan“‘s Gong Yoo), a local photographer who leads Jan-ok’s covert resistance cell, and who must also find out which of his cohorts is the rat who sold out Jan-ok in the first place. Further complicating matters is the fact that Jung-chool’s Korean heritage makes him less than wholly trustworthy to his Japanese superiors, and so he’s “teamed” with the oleaginous and scheming Hashimoto (Um Tae-goo) to keep an eye on him.
Got all that? Again, doesn’t matter, because as soon as the plot gets underway, the unstoppable verve of Kim Jee-woon’s filmmaking takes over: in terms as crude as his film is elegant, he directs the shit out of every single scene. There is a quality of consideration that goes into every shot, every edit, every composition, every camera placement that is completely remarkable: most genre exercises operate on a setpiece-filler-exposition rhythm, but Kim Jee-woon shoots even throwaway incidental dialogue as though this were the single moment he was most excited about delivering. It’s not showy or distracting, it’s simply immaculate, as though every beat were the Platonic ideal of what it could be.
He is helped, of course, by every below-the-line department bringing its A-game — the costumes and locations are richly imagined, and even the props and vehicles all have that wonderful lustre of antiquity, but also of use. The dull metal-gray barrels of the policemen’s pistols are scuffed and worn, shop windows are streaked with grime and condensation, and there’s no outdoor location shot so luxuriant that there isn’t room for the squalid detail of a ripped poster or a mottled, crumbling wall. These glorious noir-influenced images have a glamor that, unlike the work of fellow Korean stylist Park Chan-wook, for example, has nothing of the erotic in it — it is as sexless as the arthouse pulp of “The Handmaiden” is drenched in sensuality. Kim Jee-woon instead uses these fetishizably delicious images to create a highly unusual action movie aesthetic, one that dignifies an often slapdash genre.
Because this is an action movie and no mistake, the only difference being that where most films so described usually build to a single massive setpiece, “The Age of Shadows” has about seven — maybe ten, if you consider that the whole train section (and of course there’s a train section) is a setpiece that contains about three other setpieces inside itself. Each one of these sequences is delivered like the climax to a Brian de Palma movie (indeed there’s a shootout in a train station that seems to deliberately echo “The Untouchables“) but there’s also such knotty spy-jinks intrigue going on that at other times it plays like “Betrayal on the Orient Express.”
Though inspired by real events and real incidents (the resistance fighters are using a complicated trade in black-market artifacts to conceal their purchase of explosives from Hungarian anarchists, which, as nuts as it sounds, is plausible for that era in Korean history) and hopping from Seoul to Shanghai and back again, “The Age of Shadows” has no pretensions to being a particularly deep or politically resonant piece of filmmaking. Its more that Kim Jee-woon has found in this era and this milieu the perfect inspiration for a blisteringly entertaining and exquisite genre exercise, one that may not be recognised as such only because we we have never expected genre films to be this good. [A-]
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