New York Dispatch. 5.

It's an odd, sad coincidence that so many films at this year's New York Film Festival could be called political, in that they address political subjects. It's odd because the United States is in a position of political futility. A war that never needed to be fought is taking more lives than have been measured and Americans barely seem to be troubled by the almost 2,000 American lives that have been given for a cause that was never presented truthfully before the invasion.

Lies and duplicity in high political places haven't hurt the Bush Administration much. Lines of gas-guzzling SUVs can't find the fuel to escape from hurricanes, even at prices that Americans think are immoral, and a key component of the "war on terrorism" is supposed to be energy independence. And that's the immorality that average citizens see - the fact that they have to pay so much for something that they used to get for so little. Maybe this will lead to some accountability down the line, sort of like Nixon's cursing on the Watergate tapes did. The language wasn't the worst of Nixon's crimes - far from it. But it offended people.

The President's Last Bang, by Im Sang-soo, is a look at the demise of a Nixon crony whose regime outlasted Nixon's - the president of South Korea who leveraged the fear of a Communist threat from the north into strong US support. President Park Chung-hee ruled at home with a brutality that we only see in glimpses.

If this film about Park's assassination is any indication of how corrupt things were in Seoul, it was a byzantine kind of corruption in which you can't keep track of all the backstabbing among opportunistic officials in the hallways, and a petty diminutive president's whims are entertained with servility. The title suggests as much. I suspect it's an attempt to render something that's wittier in the original Korean. The president likes pretty girls ("oysters" in palace code) and pop music, we soon learn. "The president hates the sight of a gun when he's drinking," says one official thug as he kicks an underling.

This is not so much the story of the assassination in 1979, but the stories of the last days of the regime that the assassination ended.

"Beatings make you stronger," says President Park (Song Jae-ho) as he gets drunk waiting for two young women to arrive. He also notes that Jimmy Carter's insistence on observing human rights is "stupid."

The audience at the NYFF will be seeing a different film than the film that Koreans saw. Not that what's on the screen has been altered in any way for foreign consumption, but Koreans will know the events quite well. They bring absolute familiarity to it. They aren't watching a thriller. In other words, each audience watching the film will be completing a different experience.

For Americans, the story of murder, betrayal, and the trials of the plotters has an element of surprise. For Koreans, it's like a scroll painting. It's a subject that everyone knows - the brushstrokes make the difference.

There isn't a bravura style to this violent film that shows officials of the Korean intelligence agency murdering Park. The style here is in the specificity, which is a challenge enough for any drama based on real events. Yet the story is as iconic as it is specific. It's a palace coup and the court is full of scheming opportunists. The conflicts lead to a brutal death and the dictator dies in the arms of two courtesans.

There is something iconic cinematically, too, in a story that takes place over the course of a single night. Think of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but think also of The Wedding by Andrzej Wajda and The Rules of the Game. One thing I admire about this film is that it doesn't rely on your feeling any sympathy for anyone. There's not one sympathetic character here, although one Korean central intelligence agency plotter has a few moments of hesitation before he turns a gun on one of Park's bodyguards who'd been a friend of his in the Marines. And you can find some other exceptions in the innocent cooks and servants who are either shot in the initial attack or who take refuge amid boxes of onions in the basement when the plotters reload and shoot the place up again.

The absence of likable characters here isn't an academic exercise. It's based on the perspective familiar to Koreans watching that their government was a corrupt, abusive clique that survived through bribery, torture and US support. There wasn't much to like. The assassins were "palace allies" who wanted to be in charge. Koreans will see that this is not fiction and not an unthinkable story line. This is the way their politics operated.

The plausibility of the film doesn't come from being shot like a documentary, although it does get the look of 1979 with an exactitude that the reality purists will like. Everything is stylized, from the KCIA director's practice of slapping and punching his staff to the last supper of President Park around a table atop a flat pyramid of wooden steps.

There aren't any martial arts here. This is the stylization of a bureaucratic dictatorship - shiny black cars, business suits, drunken dinners, escort girls - no flying robes, no gold chains, no Gucci, no swords.

But there's enough treachery here for the drama to sustain itself. And the story draws some of its momentum from the unadorned, candid approach to presenting the treachery for what it was, a web of competing schemes for power that had no moral bounds. And there's plenty of humor in The President's Last Bang. At times the intelligence agents are anything but intelligent. But at point-blank range, the gang that couldn't shoot straight still hits its target.

There's an odd parallel between Last Bang and Lady Vengeance, director Park Chan-wook's bloodfest about a gorgeous criminal's revenge on the man who helped make her a killer. It's a criminal plot of vengeance against a psychopath who was at the core of a plot to kidnap and murder children. You may be unprepared for the sheer variety of the gore of this revenge. You won't be prepared for the way it will make you laugh.

Posted by dwhudson at October 1, 2005 7:59 AM