Park Chan-Wook‘s “Vengeance Trilogy” (2002, 2003 & 2005)
It would be pretty sacrilegious to compile a list of Korean New Wave cinema and not include its most iconic and influential film to date “Oldboy,” and yet last year’s ill-conceived remake, plus the fact it’s a frequent touchpoint for revenge movies in general, and contains one of our favorite extended take sequences ever, has seen us writing about it a great deal lately. And so we’re cheating with this spot and giving it to three films, Park Chan-wook’s so-called “Vengeance Trilogy” of which “Oldboy” is the middle entry. The definition of a thematic trilogy, (characters and setting all change, but the stories share ideas, motifs and arcs) it starts off with 2002’s “Sympathy for Mister Vengeance” which stars Song Kang-ho as the rich father of a girl who drowns during a botched kidnapping. Already here the stylish violence and inventively twisty morals are in evidence as your sympathy, appropriately enough, teeters between the grieving father and the kidnappers who had their own moral justifications for their crime. It’s maybe the more complete film but it has been largely eclipsed by its slicker, blacker, more keep’em guessing follow-up (‘Sympathy’ only got a small retrospective international release after the success of “Oldboy”). And then, two years after “Oldboy” (these were consecutive features from Park) came “Lady Vengeance” which did get an international theatrical release, and while it never got quite the same kudos as its predecessor, arguably holds up just as well (if not better) to repeat viewings. It’s also refreshing, if maybe not hugely progressive, to have the protagonist be a woman, especially as women are so often, rather worrisomely, the victims of violent crime in New Wave Korean genre filmmaking. And with its deliberate pacing, set pieces that are perhaps less graphic than the previous entries, but often more psychologically vicious, surprising dark humor and constant switchbacks that build to a trademark twist climax, it may be the most muted of the trilogy, but it is also arguably the most complex and layered.
“The Host” (2006)
Having had a huge local hit and come to international attention with “Memories Of Murder,” all eyes were on Bong Joon-Ho’s next move, and the director didn’t remotely disappoint when “The Host” premiered three years later: becoming the biggest box office hit in the nation’s history, the film also quickly gained a reputation internationally as maybe the best monster movie since “Jaws,” and confirmed Bong as one of the most exciting filmmakers around. Very loosely based on a real-life incident where a mortician working for the U.S. disposed of a large quantity of formaldehyde into the water system, it’s a very local take on the genre, focusing on a single family in Seoul who are caught up in an attack by a strange tentacled monster, seemingly created by U.S-aided pollution in the river. Not wildly innovative on paper, there’s as much Ken Loach as Spielberg in Bong’s approach, keeping the focus tight on this raucous blue-collar family as they search for their missing youngest member, despite the incompetencies and bureaucracies of the people supposedly in charge (rewatching the film recently, it’s sadly reminiscent of the response and aftermath of the recent ferry disaster in the country that killed 300 people, mostly children), and that sharp political edge is part of what elevates the film. The other part is that it’s a terrific, terrifying, hugely entertaining monster movie: Bong showed that he could deliver CGI-aided thrills that could compete with Hollywood’s best (the daylight sequence that first reveals the monster is a goddamn masterclass), and the borderline sorcery of the way that he can switch between tones, finding genuinely hilarious moments among the realistic devastation, building up a group of truly loveable, if deeply flawed heroes. Bong’s subsequent work (2009’s Hitchcockian thriller “Mother,” and the imminent “Snowpiercer”) have been incredibly thrilling too, but between them, “Memories Of Murder” and “The Host” are twin peaks that any filmmaker would be hard pushed to match again.
“I Saw The Devil” (2010)
While we hope we’ve listed a few alternatives to the fetishized violence of the Korean take on the revenge movie, there is a reason it’s probably become the most recognisable and iconic territory that Hallyuwood films have claimed, at least in the international consciousness. And that’s because it’s a genre that not just Park Chan-wook is fascinated by, but that many of the others have worked in too, most notably Kim Ji-woon, whose horror entry “A Tale of Two Sisters” is also on this list. Genre polyglot Kim’s take on the vengeance thriller is fully as sick, slick and inventively disturbing in its violence as “Oldboy” and the comparison is doubly apt as it also stars “Oldboy” icon Choi Min-sik. But here Choi plays not the perpetrator of revenge, but its object, a deranged, utterly conscienceless serial rapist and murderer who becomes the prey of the boyfriend of one of his victims (Lee Byung-hun). It’s astoundingly gory stuff, and the graphic portrayal of the killer’s crimes against women makes for some queasy, deeply discomfiting viewing. And yet, there’s the oddest throughline of almost meditative sadness that runs through the bloodletting and the misogyny like a current, and which, coupled with Kim’s eye for astonishing composition and coloring, saves this lurid, salacious story from all-out exploitation. Though it’s that too. Tracing the boyfriend’s descent to a level of madness that rivals the killer’s in his frantic, empty and ultimately counterproductive pursuit of revenge, the film’s splashy, gross-out credentials are impeccable, but it’s the overarching, incisive portrayal of the futility of revenge, and the unconquerable power of evil over good that is its most chilling and lasting impression.
“Poetry” (2010)
As measured, socially aware and vehemently humanist as some of his compatriots are slick, style-minded and genre-oriented, Lee Chang-dong is probably the introvert of the bunch (we’re talking cinematically, never having met the guy). But after pioneering an early entry in to the New Wave canon with “Peppermint Candy” a film about a suicidal man told in reverse chronology years before “Memento” or “Irreversible” attempted the same trick, Lee has earned his spot at the table, and is one of those gratifying cases where we can see him growing in maturity and sensitivity as a filmmaker from one film to the next. Fittingly, then, it is his most recent film, 2010’s “Poetry” that we want to showcase here: while 2002’s “Oasis” won him the most acclaim with its unflinching portrayal of the relationship between a mentally and socially unbalanced young man and a woman suffering from cerebral palsy, and 2007’s “Secret Sunshine” if anything went even further in terms of the forensic examination of emotional devastation, it was “Poetry” that simply ripped us open. An underseen near-masterpiece of understated, aching empathy, the film centers on Grandmother Mija (the beautiful Yun Jeong-hie) whose teenage grandson is somehow involved in the suicide of a local girl. The aging Mija’s life starts to unravel and she struggles to retain her moral compass just as she finds she’s starting to forget things–even words, which she needs in order to complete an assignment for her poetry class. It’s a film of tender, minutely observed truthfulness from the slow beginning to the impossibly affecting climax which occurs partly at what has to be the most heartbreaking game of badminton ever committed to film. And the central performance is a small wonder all its own; Mija is of an age and a social class that make her an unlikely centerpiece for a film, but Yun embodies her unforgettably as a woman fighting against the encroaching invisibility and irrelevance of old age, even as she feels herself begin to fade away. Sometimes K-wave films find their nearest equivalents in other Asian filmic traditions: it is the highest compliment we can pay that “Poetry” most of all reminds us of Ozu.
“Nobody’s Daughter Haewon” (2013)
Once you’ve seen one of Hong Sang-soo’s films, you’ve seen them all. That would be a very glib and inaccurate way of talking about the director, but it’s easy to take a certain amount of sympathy with that viewpoint: his films (which aren’t widely distributed in the U.S., but are favorites of the festival crowd), often feel like variations on a theme, often tackling similar issues of disconnection, self-absorption and alienation, with a structural playfulness that belies their surface wispiness, and certain recurring elements in each, like a character who is a film director. But it adds up to an increasingly remarkable and beguiling body of work, and last year’s “Nobody’s Daughter Haewon” is as good an entry point to his filmmaking as any other, at once accessible and a little off-putting. The titular Haewon (Jung Eun-chae) is being left alone in Seoul: her father (who appears to not be Korean) is never seen, and her mother moves to Canada at the opening of the film after one final dinner together. She recently broke up with her film studies professor (Lee Sun-kyun), who’s also a movie director, and the ripples of that break-up continue to play out as the film unspools. Those who demand a certain emphasis on plot are never going to adore Hong (despite his narrative playfulness), but there simply isn’t anyone else, in Korea, or in the rest of world cinema, quite like him, this film, like so many of his others, attaining a unique rhythm — in particular, “Nobody’s Daughter Haewon” ends up feeling like that state between dreaming and waking, the state in which Haewon spends much of the film. And it also rewards multiple viewings, initially seeming slight but unpacking itself into a rich and complex take on mortality, history repeating itself and the nature of home. It’s another entry in what’s becoming one of the most beguiling filmographies in contemporary cinema.
Also Worth Checking Out:
Rounding out the leading pack of the Korean New Wave is one director we haven’t covered above: Im Sang-soo whose 2010 film “The Housemaid,” a loose remake of the recently rediscovered 1960 film from veteran director Kim Ki-young played In Competition in Cannes and was widely distributed on the arthouse and festival circuit. An interesting inversion of the social dynamic of the original, in which a conniving unbalanced female servant seduces, blackmails and ultimately destroys a family man, Im’s film switches that around to become a pointed indictment of bourgeois family values in which the housemaid is the innocent and the family her tormentors. Notorious also for its explicit sex scenes and undercurrents of sado-masochism, the lurid and at times overwrought melodrama does reveal Im’s ongoing preoccupation with class and Korean society, which he explored to lesser effect in 2012’s “The Taste of Money” and which got him into hot water back in 2005 when his film “The President’s Last Bang” was the subject of a lawsuit due to its scathing serio-comic portrayal of the real-life 1979 assassination of President Park Chung-hee by his Korean CIA chief.
As we mentioned this is all just a taster of a movement that is growing expanding and travelling further with each year, even spawning its own subgenres and imitators. And there are some major titles we didn’t cover here which are good suggestions for further viewing if this has given you a taste. Other names to look out for include Kang Je-kyu, especially his 2004 brothers-divided-by-war epic “The Brotherhood of War,” Na Hong-jin‘s slick, nasty cop thriller “The Chaser” from 2008, frenetic 1999 action thriller “Nowhere to Hide” from Lee Myung-se, 2001 romance “Failan” from Song Hae-sung, which shows a softer, subtler side to Korean superstar Choi Min-sik (“Oldboy” himself), and Korea’s own biggest homegrown blockbuster 2001’s “My Sassy Girl” from Kwak Jae-wong which has already spawned the ultimate Hollywood compliment in the form of an awful remake starring Elisha Cuthbert.
And of the directors we have covered, there will no doubt be those aghast that we didn’t include Kim Ji-woon’s entertainingly gonzo but wildly uneven “The Good The Bad & The Weird” or 2005’s terrific mob crime film “A Bittersweet Life,” (a U.S. remake of which is currently in the works from Allen Hughes), Hong Sang-soo’s “In Another Country,” “The Woman on the Beach” or “Turning Gate,” and Park Chan-wook’s vampire priest yarn “Thirst,” while Lee Chang-dong’s “Peppermint Candy” (mentioned above) and Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother” and “Barking Dogs Never Bite” are both strong early entries to the canon, the latter starring Bong regular and “Cloud Atlas” standout Bae Doona.
But seriously, this list could be about five times as long and not run out of interesting titles, so let us know if which Korean New Wave films have made the deepest impression on you, and which you’d recommend most as entry-level movies for the neophyte, in the comments section below. –Jessica Kiang & Oli Lyttelton
