Busan Dispatch. 1.

While riding the bullet train from Seoul to Busan to attend the 10th Pusan International Film Festival, I realized that I'd have to explain an inconsistency within this sentence. That is, why do I first spell the city with a "B" (Busan) and then with a "P" (Pusan) when referencing the festival? Well, a few years ago the South Korean government implemented changes in the romanization of Korean words to, amongst other things, better represent the sounds of Korean in the roman alphabet and to avoid the need for diacritical marks that make Internet searches difficult. Problem was that this interfered with the Pusan International Film Festival's brand. Having established itself as the premiere film festival in Asia, it didn't want to mess with a good thing and rebrand itself. So the Pusan International Film Festival resolved to be the exception to the new rule, keeping its P-spelling, and by extension its acronym, PIFF.

The selection of the opening film at this year's festival was disappointing to some. Not that it was a disappointing film. Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien never fails to impress. It's just that his latest film, Three Times, had already been shown over three times - at the Cannes, Toronto, Taipei and New York film festivals - so it was not the "premiere" that many expect of an opening film. Although the film has apparently been re-cut for this event, its previous screenings a damper on what should have been a unique moment.

But the crowd at the opening ceremony didn't seem to care about all those technicalities. Hundreds of teenage paparazzi focused their mobile phone camera sights on the South Korean film stars who walked the red carpet into the wonderful spectacle at the Busan Yachting Center Outdoor Theatre where the event is held alongside the ocean. The mobile phones were held up like a crowd of LCD lighters to keep the concert of stars going on through the night, which would include performances by South Korean pop stars BoA (pronounced like the snake, not like the US-based bank, as I pronounced it, sparking a laugh from my friend who said she'd made the same mistake initially). Many of the stars shining on this night might mean very little to the Western film-goer, but throughout Asia many have reached heights of popularity that make the markets in America and elsewhere irrelevant.

No one needed the two large TV screens to herald the entrance of Lee Byung-heon (Everybody Has Secrets, A Bittersweet Life) because his staple "killer smile" announced his presence along with the piercing screams of his fans. The only other stars who came close to receiving his reception were Satoshi Tsumabuki of the Japanese film Josee, the Tiger, and the Fish, which was wildly popular upon its release here, and South Korea's eccentric fashion designer, Andre Kim, decked out in white as always, but this time in an outfit that rivaled the Michelin Man's.

Despite the controversy over Three Times opening PIFF this year, the choice makes sense when you note that the festival's director, Kim Dong-ho, considers it "the best Asian film" this year. Also, the film received major funding from another acronym that retains the P, the PPP, or Pusan Promotion Plan, at the 2002 Pusan International Film Festival. It was supposed to be part of an omnibus film, but Hou saw greater potential in it and fleshed the film out further to explore a couple's relationship in the 1960s, 1910s and the present, in that order. Unfortunately, I prepared poorly for the weather at the yachting center because I'd been led by the preceding excellent weather to expect warm days and still warm nights, but this night by the ocean provided a breeze that my freshly shorn scalp found more chilling than pleasant. I felt I could relate to the shivering of our characters on the screen, but their shivering was due to tentatively held hands on a rainy night waiting for transit and true love. I ended up leaving the yachting center just as we stepped into the 1910s. This meant I may have been seeing the film as what it was rather than what it is. And I have no worries about missing the next two thirds, for I'm sure I'll have another opportunity to see it. Perhaps at another festival.

The first full film for me, then, was Song Hye-sung's biopic Rikidozan: A Hero Extraordinary - in a multiplex. The Mega(indeed)box is the top floor of a mall in the Haeundae beach area of Busan. Whereas some feel holding screenings in multiplexes taints the festival experience, I find such exhibition spaces wonderfully subversive. Festivals bring hope to the multiplex rather than routine.

Rikidozan addresses the life of the famous Japanese pro wrestler of Korean descent, Kim Shin-rak. Rikidozan is the name he was told to take on in hopes of attaining the Yokozuna rank of sumo wrestling. Righteously angry about the discrimination that prohibited him from attaining such status, Rikidozan drunkenly, and violently, stumbles into professional wrestling. He attains prestige in the United States and returns to Japan to initiate the, er, sport. (It's noted throughout how matches, like now, were often fixed, which is why the art form is seen as entertainment in the US rather than sport.) He also helped TV gain a stronghold in the Japan; the first live broadcast was an infamous match introducing Rikidozan and pro wrestling to Japan, and helped Japan heal post-WWII wounds since he tag-teamed up with a Japanese Judo champion to pummel two American wrestlers.

I cannot attest to the accuracy of this biopic, but along with the generic rise and fall tropes (some of which, such as the requisite infidelity and paranoia, seem forced into the narrative), Rikidozan presents an interesting side wrestling match with identity. Later on in his life, Rikidozan hid his Korean identity and he would use Japanese nationalist slogans to position himself for reporters and sponsors.

Rikidozan is one of many films at PIFF this year presenting the lives of Koreans from the diaspora. Along with Korean-American films such as Grace Lee's intriguing The Grace Lee Project and Michael Kang's The Motel, there is the Korean-Argentinian film, Do You Cry 4 Me Argentina? by Bae Youn-suk, and the next film I saw, the Korean-Chinese Grain in Ear by Lu Zhang. One of several films at PIFF I was anticipating, it did not disappoint.

Soon-hee is a Korean-Chinese who sells multiple kim-chi-ed vegetables illegally without a permit. She is raising her son alone and lives next to Chinese prostitutes alongside a railroad track somewhere in China. Soon-hee must continually battle with stereotypes of her as a Korean-Chinese, stereotypes that are expertly presented by Lu as mistaken identities.

Lu's visual style is equally well executed. Everyone in this film seems to move listlessly, as if they were lumbering ghosts, best emphasized by Soon-hee's excruciatingly slow peddling of her wares along a stationary frame. Throughout the film, Lu presents wonderful frames of frames. That is, centered doorways and windows that enhance suspense by forcing us to imagine what is happening within the non-diegetic space of the diegetic space. All of this culminates in a film that I'm sure will continue to stick in my head just as the title suggests. But in this case, in a good way.

Another film that plays with non-diegetic space is Yeo Kyun-dong's Silk Shoes. In one particularly humorous scene, two characters stumble in and out of the frame to eventually stutter towards an attack and retreat. The film follows a frustrated director who is forced into creating a pseudo-North Korean village for the Alzheimer-stricken father of a mob boss. If you're thinking Good Bye Lenin!, stop. This film's origins lay in 1994, well before Wolfgang Becker's film, in Yeo's conversation with another filmmaker who had already won a screenplay award for his idea that was prescient of, not copying from, Becker's film. This film spawned from a Hello, not a Goodbye.

Yeo Kyun-dong has quite a few acting and director credits to his name. I was introduced to him by his excellent performance in Jang Sun-woo's To You, From Me as an impotent banana skin smoker. Some critics argue he introduced South Korea to the Korean New Wave with his debut, Out to the World. Although not a fully crafted film, Silk Shoes leaves me with enough interesting takes on memory, mis-memory, history, and how space is connected to all of these, that I'm happy I was able to slip this film onto my packed schedule.

Posted by dwhudson at October 8, 2005 4:33 AM