Korean

PAST LIVES: a profound and refreshing romance

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Photo caption: Greta Lee, John Magaro and Teo Yoo in PAST LIVES. Courtesy of A24

Past Lives is a profound romance, with one evolving relationship, and then a second, with the lives, loves and obsessions of three decent people swirling between two cultures over 24 years. The character-driven screenplay is a triumph for writer-director Celine Song in her first feature film.

The story of Past Lives begins 24 years ago in Korea, where a girl and a boy, 12-year-old classmates, are childhood best buddies. They have grown up as playmates, and are now each other’s first crush. The girl’s parents permanently relocate the family to Canada, and the two kids lose touch.

Twelve years later, the girl has grown into Nora (Greta Lee), a budding playwright in New York. The boy, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) is an engineering student in Korea. Hae Sung tracks down Nora through social media, and the two have a reunion on Skype. The video calls became more frequent, and they kindle a tender and genuine adult relationship. They are becoming so close that it’s frustrating to not be geographically together, but they each have committed to career plans; she is beginning a writing fellowship in New York, and he’s about to go learn Mandarin in China. Nora recognizes that they are slipping into a love that is impractical and would require a major sacrifice by one of them – and she ends the calls.

Another twelve years pass, and Nora is still living in New York, but with her husband Arthur (John Magaro). Hae Sung is visiting New York and Nora arranges to meet him. When they finally meet again face-to-face, Nora learns what she may have suspected – the sole reason for Hae Sung’s visit is to see her. This meeting, awaited for 24 years, is clearly emotionally loaded for him; is it loaded for her as well?

Photo caption: Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in PAST LIVES. Courtesy of A24.

Now Nora has two men who want her, and she’s married to one of them. To describe Past Lives as a love triangle might be technically correct but would mislead you, because Past Lives is so specific, authentic and refreshing that it defies the conventions of the form. That we are so often surprised by Song’s movie is probably a telling comment on how we have been conditioned by insipid, shallow and inauthentic movie romances.

According to the conventions of Hollywood, Nora would run off with her soulmate – but which guy is that, exactly? It’s not quite the choice between Rick Blaine or Victor Laszlo, either. Each guy can give her something the other cannot. Each guy understand aspects of her that the other cannot. Nora describes Hae Sung to Arthur with “He’s so Korean“, and it’s unclear to what extent Nora see this as a good or bad thing.

There’s nary a false note in either of Nora and Hae Sung’s reunions, and the final dialogue is PERFECT.

Greta Lee in PAST LIVES. Courtesy of A24.

The performances do justice to the superb screenplay. Greta Lee plays Nora, who is the most central character (because she must choose between the others). Lee’s Nora is usually reserved and contained with others, sometimes even a cipher, but Lee is still able to convey Nora’s thinking and feeling.

Teo Yoo’s plays Hae Sung as an obsessive who ultimately evolves the most of any character. To Hae Sung, Nora is an object of fantasy for decades, and then he must see her as a person. There’s a scene at a carousel where Nora wants Hae Sung to speak to his feelings, and heartbreakingly, his cultural upbringing just won’t let him do it.

The most extraordinary performance is by John Magaro, an actor I had seen in The Big Short, The Many Saints of Newark and 18 1/2 without any appreciation that he was capable of work like this. Who wouldn’t be threatened when your partner’s first crush shows up to woo her? And when they are next to you, speaking with each other in a language you can’t understand? Arthur knows that he has played his hand already, and can only wait for the other cards to be revealed to see if he has won or lost. If he acts out, he would only hurt his chances. As he puts on a mask of stoicism and civility, Magaro’s Arthur is practically vibrating with anxiety.

In a clever prologue, Celine Song begins her movie with unseen patrons at a New York City bar trying to figure out the back story between the three people grouped across the room – an Asian man, an Asian woman and a white guy. Indeed, the movie is about who those three people are to each other. Like her character Nora, Song was born in Korea, immigrated to Canada with her parents, and lives in New York City with her American writer husband.

Song seems to be saying that love is more than one’s own feelings of attraction and connection; love also requires knowing who the other person truly is and is not, which demands setting aside one’s own perspective to listen and observe empathetically.

Past Lives is one of the Best Movies of 2023 – So Far, and is currently the best film I’ve seen this year.

THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT: a loveable lug with a gift for the one-punch knockout

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Photo caption: Don Lee as Detective Ma in THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT. Courtesy of Capelight Pictures

Sometimes we just need an unapologetic gene movie, and the Korean action comedy The Roundup: No Way Out is just that. Our burly hero, detective Ma Seok-do (Don Lee), is a loveable lug with a gift for the one-punch knockout. Ma is also the smartest cop on the force and must suffer the fools around him. But it’s his singular physicality that makes for bull-in-the-china shop mayhem when he is forced into violence.

The Roundup: No Way Out is the third movie in the Detective Ma franchise, following The Outlaws (2017) and The Roundup, Korea’s #1 hit film of 2022.

Don Lee (right) as Detective Ma in THE ROUNDUP: NO WAY OUT. Courtesy of Capelight Pictures

I think that much of Detective Ma Seok-do’s appeal is that, as determined as he is to get the bad guys, he doesn’t have any of the meanness, bitterness or alienation of a Dirty Harry-type cop hero. Interestingly, the character’s name resembles Don Lee’s non-stage name, Ma Dong-seok.

The plot of The Roundup: No Way Out involves the interruption of a designer drug deal, which results in two gangs racing the cops to find a missing $30 million drug stash. Each villainous gang leader villains is more ruthless and cruel than the last. This time, for a little added umami, one of the gangs is from Japan.

The charm of The Roundup: No Way Out is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are no deep themes to explore here and no message – just an amiable protagonist, some laughs and almost non-stop action.

RETURN TO SEOUL: brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping

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Photo caption: Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

As the brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping Return to Seoul opens, we meet a free-spirited young woman (Park Ji-min) with the decidedly non-Korean name Frederique Benoit. Freddie is French, having been adopted from Korea by a French couple as an infant. Freddie doesn’t speak Korean, doesn’t know anything about Korean culture, and is only in Korea because of a last minute pivot from some disrupted vacation travel.

Freddie travels for pleasure and loves to party – and party hard. She is certainly NOT prepared for a quest to find her biological parents, but an acquaintance gives her a tip, and she can’t resist following up. What follows is an exceptional and unpredictable personal journey told in four segments – the second five years after the first, the third and fourth just a year or two apart.

Return to Seoul features a screenplay without any hint of cliché and a stunning breakthrough performance by its lead actress.

Freddie is brash, impulsive and unfiltered. Her feelings about the circumstances of her adoption are authentic and complicated. She doesn’t seem either needy or resentful – but what is beneath the surface? After all, she does have a visceral distaste for celebrating her birthday.

Freddie is frequently impolite and often mistreats those who care for her with breathtaking awfulness; she dispatches one boyfriend with a line of staggering cruelty – and then repeats it..

As Freddie, Park Ji-min is a revelation in her FIRST FILM role. She’s on screen in every scene, and we’re always on the edge of our seat wondering how she’ll react – for better or for worse. We ‘re on Freddie’s roller coaster, and Park Ji-min is driving it.

Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Park Ji-min is a visual artist who often paints with latex. Like Freddie, she’s confident enough – in her first filmmaking – to have insisted on eschewing a blonde wig for a black leather wardrobe in the second segment because she saw the character of Freddie as a warrior. After a stunning, sure to be star-making performance in Return to Seoul, she says she’s now deciding whether to accept further acting gigs (and I sure hope she does). In the meantime, she’s become a spokesperson for Dior.

Park Ji-min moved with her Korean parents from Korea to France in her childhood. She heard of this film project from a friend who, like the character of Freddie, was adopted from Korea by French parents.

Writer-director Davy Chou is French-born of Cambodian parents. This is only his second feature, and it’s a near masterpiece primarily because Chou has created an entirety original and complex protagonist.

Freddie’s biological father is played by Oh Kwang-rok, a Korean actor of note, who delivers a heartfelt and sometimes smoldering performance.

I found Return to Seoul to be a thrilling experience, a better film than any of last year’s ten nominees for the Best Picture Oscar. The Wife, while moved by the penultimate scene, was much less impressed. She thought one music-related thread had been ignored for the middle of the film, and was underwhelmed by the ending.

Go see Return to Seoul at your arthouse theater – it’s the first Must See of 2023. I’ll let you know when it streams.

DECISION TO LEAVE: he’s obsessed, and she asks, “Am I so wicked?”

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Photo caption: Park Hae-il and Tang Wei in DECISION TO LEAVE. Courtesy of MUBI.

In the roller coaster neo-noir Decision to Leave, detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is already an obsessive personality, whose agonizing over unclosed cases has given him chronic insomnia, He and his wife have an apartment near her job, but he works in a different city, and the walls of his pied–à–terre  are covered with crime scene photos from the unsolved cases, just so he can stew about them even more. For his wellbeing, this is the very last guy who should be exposed to a mysterious femme fatale.

He investigates a death in the mountains, which could be a mountain climbing accident or suicide – or perhaps a brilliantly configured murder. He suspects the victim’s much younger Chinese wife, Seo-rae (Tang Wei) a woman with a past, but she has an airtight alibi. He interrogates her and surveils her, which she seems to enjoy, and he becomes more and more fascinated with her. He is utterly beguiled, and Decision to Leave becomes ever more the page turner as the sexual tension escalates. This evolves into a perverse battle of wits that Hae-joon may not be destined to win.

Decision to Leave is the work of writer-director Park-chan Wook, who made the brilliantly erotic The Handmaiden. Like The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave doesn’t end when the audience expects it to. And, like in The Handmaiden, not everything is as it seems.

Tang Wei is exceptional as she unpeels the onion that is Seo-rae. When we first meet Seo-rae, the effect is nothing like the stunning introductions of Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Diedrichson, Jane Greer’s Kathie or Rita Hayworth’s Gilda; we underestimate her. We watch as she cleverly and somewhat conventionally captivates Hae-joon. But nothing prepares us for her revealing just how twisted a mastermind she turns out to be. She’s a femme fatale for the ages.

#ALIVE: the ultimate pandemic shelter in place

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Ah-In Yoo in #ALIVE, Photo courtesy of Perspective Pictures.

Just suppose there’s a pandemic and you can’t leave your home. Oh, wait…

In #Alive, a pulmonary affliction is causing people in a Korean metropolis to savagely attack and bite other humans, further spreading the pandemic. The young gamer Jun-woo (Ah-In Yoo) is isolated in his eighth floor apartment, under siege from what are essentially zombies. It’s kind of Home Alone with zombies.

The hook here is that, like in Home Alone, our hero must depend on his ingenuity to survive, both in fighting off the cannibalistic attackers and in harvesting equipment, food and water from the ravaged apartment building. Fortunately, he discovers another, much smarter survivor, a girl (Shin Hye-Park) holed up in the apartment building across the courtyard. There are two surprises in the final 20 minutes.

Ah-In Yoo (wielding golf club) in #ALIVE, Photo courtesy of Perspective Pictures.

This is the first feature for writer-director Il Cho. He peppers #Alive with funny bits, all the more effective because he doesn’t linger on any of them. One example is when Jun-Yoo presses a button to wait for an elevator as a horde of zombies rush toward him.

#Alive contains the requisite amount of throat biting, brain eating, amputations and bloody splatter for a zombie movie. If you don’t like gore, there are better choices for you on my list of Zombie Movies for People Who Don’t Like Zombie Movies.

This isn’t great cinema, but it has its moments. #Alive is streaming on Netflix. On Netflix, the Korean dialogue is both subtitled and dubbed into English.

YOURSELF AND YOURS: Buñuel meets Seinfeld

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YOURSELF AND YOURS
YOURSELF AND YOURS
photo courtesy of SFFILM

The absurdism of Luis Buñuel meets the social awkwardness of Seinfeld in Hong Sang-soo’s Koran comedy Yourself and Yours.

In Yourself and Yours, Minjung (Lee You-young) dumps her boyfriend (Kim Joo-hyuck) after he objects to her heavy drinking (“I’ve stopped drinking – now I stop after only five rounds“). Then another man thinks that he meets Minjung, but she claims that she is Minjung’s identical twin. We’re not so sure about that. And then she meets ANOTHER man, and her identity remains in question. Her original boyfriend is comically bereft, and he’s on the lookout for her, too.

One character says “You men are all pathetic“, and Minjung proves that point at every opportunity. In a deliberate homage to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, Lee You-young plays the role of Minjung and her multiple doppelgängers (unless they are all really Minjung herself).  There are plenty of LOL moments as Yourself and Yours winds its way full circle to a satisfyingly sly finale.

I saw Yourself and Yours (Dangsinjasingwa dangsinui geot) at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM).  In an Only-At-SFFILM moment, I (a Hong Sang-soo newbie) was surrounded in the audience by devoted Hong Sang-soo fans. During its Bay Area virtual run at the Roxie, you can stream Yourself and Yours at Roxie Virtual Cinema.

THE HANDMAIDEN – gorgeous, erotic and a helluva plot

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THE HANDMAIDEN
THE HANDMAIDEN

After a few minutes of The Handmaiden, we learn that it’s a con artist movie. After 100 minutes, we think we’ve watched an excellent con artist movie, but then we’re surprised by a huge PLOT TWIST, and we’re in for two more episodes and lots of surprises in a gripping and absorbing final hour. It’s also one of the most visually beautiful and highly erotic films of the year.

Director and co-writer Chan-wook Park sets the story in 1930s Korea during Japanese occupation (Japanese dialogue is subtitled in yellow and Korean dialogue in white). A young heiress has been secluded from childhood by her guardian uncle, who intends to marry her himself for her fortune. A con man embarks on a campaign to seduce and marry the wealthy young woman to harvest her inheritance himself. The con man enlists a pickpocket to become handmaiden to the heiress – and his mole. I’m not going to tell you more about the plot, but the audience is in for a wild ride.

The Handmaiden takes its time revealing its secrets. Who is conning who? Who is attracted to whom? How naive is the heiress? How loyal is the handmaiden? Who is really Japanese and who is really Korean? What’s in those antique books? What’s in the basement? Is the uncle perverted or REALLY perverted? And what legendary sex toy will show up in the final scene?

THE HANDMAIDEN
THE HANDMAIDEN

Chan-wook Park’s 2003 US art house hit Oldboy is highly sexualized, trippy and disturbing. The Handmaiden is much more mainstream and accessible than Oldboy, but its sexuality packs a punch.

Gorgeous and erotic, The Handmaiden is one of the most gloriously entertaining films of the year. You can order the DVD from Netflix or stream it on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

PARASITE: social inequity – what’s really at stake

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PARASITE

The masterpiece Parasite explores social inequity, with master filmmaker Bong Joo Ho taking us through a series of genres. Parasite opens as a hilarious comedy, then evolves halfway through into a suspense thriller and ends with a shocker and a moment of contemplative heartbreak. This is one of the decade’s best films.

The Kim family lives in a grubby basement apartment, so much on the margins of society that they cadge the neighbors’s wi-fi and even the municipal fumigation. They can’t live on the dad’s sporadic employment in low-end jobs, so the family is always on the hustle. It helps that the Kims, especially the college-age kids, are gifted scoundrels.

The Park family lives in an icon of modern architecture. The dad is a CEO with his own driver, and the mom and two kids are pampered by their live-in housekeeper. They have never had to hustle themselves, and they don’t recognize a hustle when they see it.

The Kim son falls into a job tutoring one of the Park kids. After a series of riotously funny cons, the Kim family positions itself to take advantage of the Parks. The Kims are soon living off the fatted calf, but they must contend with one uncomfortable fact – their newfound fortune is extremely fragile because it all comes at the whims of the rich.

PARASITE. Photo courtesy of Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF) .

The biggest disconnect between the rich and the rest of us is the understanding of capitalism as a meritocracy – or not. Despite capitalist mythology, working hard and taking risks is often not rewarded with wealth. Conversely, just being wealthy is not an indicator of talent or accomplishment, however entitled the rich feel they are.

Mr. and Mrs. Kim are wily, but uneducated. The Kim kids are trapped by the Korean economy economy; they have no realistic pathway to social mobility, no matter how industrious they are. The kids’ college-educated peers are all under- or unemployed.

Mr. Park is successful in business, but he is a drive-by family man and thinks he can identify the working class by their smell. His wife is a neurotic adornment, his daughter is spoiled and his son is a mess.

Why does Bong shock us with some horror? The stakes of social inequity – impacting generations – are very high and as high as life and death. Bong is reminding us of those stakes after reeling us in with all the fun.

Along with comedy, thriller and horror, Bong even gives a couple minutes of the disaster genre. The Kim’s poor neighborhood is afflicted by a pestilence of biblical scale that would be unthinkable for any affluent community. Let’s just say that the poor live in crap.

Song Kang-Ho in PARASITE

Parasite is superbly acted. The poor family’s dad is played masterfully by Song Kang-Ho. It’s his kids who are directing the scam, but it’s the dad whose slow burn resentment finally explodes.

Bong Joo Ho (Memories of Murder, Mother, Snowpiercer and Okja) makes movies so original that it’s been said that he is his own genre. His Memories of Murder, also starring Song Kang-Ho, is, for my money, the very best serial killer movie. Snowpiercer and Okja, like Parasite, also take on the issues of class and corporate greed.

Martin Scorsese recently said that people watch cinema, as opposed to “worldwide audiovisual entertainment”, to be surprised. Indeed, to view the work of Bong Joo Ho is to be surprised every single time.

Bong Joo Ho himself says, “My goal is to have the audience captivated for two hours by subverting their expectations.” Captivation, check. Subversion of expectations, check.

This is a masterwork. Parasite won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and currently has a meteoric Metacritic score of 95. Parasite will win the Best Foreign Language Oscar and is arguably the best movie of 2019.

Stream of the Week: POETRY – troubling, uncomfortable and very, very good

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Jeong-hie Yun in POETRY

Early in his film, Korean writer-director Chang-dong Lee tells us his theme. Holding an apple, the teacher tells his students that, to write poetry, you must first see, really see the world around you. Mija is a 66-year-old pensioner in his class who works part-time as a caregiver for a stroke victim and is raising her sullen slob of a teenage grandson. She struggles with the poetry, but she does begin to see the people in her world with clarity – and it’s not a pretty picture. What she learns to see is human behavior ranging from the venal to the inhumane.

The key to the film’s success is the performance of Jeong-hie Yun as Mija, a protagonist who spends the entire movie observing. Her doctor tells her that her failing memory is the start of something far worse. Sometimes she doesn’t see what we see because she is distracted. But sometimes she doesn’t act like she sees because of denial or avoidance. Sometimes she is disoriented. But she has moments of piercing lucidity, and those moments are unsparing.

This unhurried film is troubling, uncomfortable and very, very good. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2011. You can stream Poetry from Amazon and Vudu.

CLAIRE’S CAMERA: a deadpan human camera observes…

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Min-hee Kim in a scene from Hong Sang-soo’s CLAIRE’S CAMERA, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.

Claire’s Camera is the latest nugget from writer-director Hong Sang-soo, that great observer of awkward situations and hard-drinking.  Jeon (Min-hee Kim of The Handmaiden) is a film company assistant who ia traveled to the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of a Korean film.  It turns out that the film company executive has had a long-term relationship with the movie’s director, and she immediately fires Jeon when she learns of Jeon’s fling with the director.  With several days sill to go before her return flight, Jeon wanders around Cannes. Jeon meets the French schoolteacher and amateur photographer Claire (Isabelle Huppert) and they hang out.  Coincidentally, Claire also meets the director.  Most of the dialogue is in English, the common language of the French and Korean characters – and the earnestly imperfect English-speaking supplies some of the film’s humor.

Not only does Claire have a camera, she IS the camera through which we observe the foibles of the other characters.  Jeon is breathtakingly clueless (or in denial) about the reason for her dismissal.  The director, as many Hong Sang-soo characters, has an enthusiastic relationship with alcohol.  It’s all dryly funny, although the director and the executive redefine their relationship in a powerfully realistic scene.

This is an especially fine performance by Min-hee Kim.  She pulled off some deadpan humor in The Handmaiden, a film more thought of for its eroticism and mystery.  Here, she’s often just wandering around in reflection and making small talk.  But Kim is just so watchable, she keeps the audience’s interest keen.

Claire’s Camera is not as surreal as last year’s Hong Sang-soo entry, Yourself and Yours, but just as observational and droll.  I saw Claire’s Camera at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM), where Hong Sang-soo has a cult following and always appreciative audiences.  It’s now playing at the 4 Star in San Francisco.

Min-hee Kim and Isabelle Huppert in a scene from Hong Sang-soo’s CLAIRE’S CAMERA, playing at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 4 – 17, 2018. Courtesy of SFFILM.