Busan Dispatch. 1.

Quite an interesting time to be at a film festival in South Korea, isn't it?

As the Bush II administration shifts from a PR campaign of doubt as to whether North Korea actually pulled off a nuclear test to dealing with evidence that it indeed detonated a bomb deep inside a mountain up there, Seoul and Busan "feel" no different than when I last visited the Pusan International Film Festival. (The city goes with the legislated "B" transliteration whereas the festival sticks with the "P" transliteration to maintain the brand established before the legislation.) Of course, I should no more trust my "feel" here as I should North Korea or Tony Snow. However, there are no visible signs of heightened alert. I still find the people I meet similar to people I meet everywhere, incredibly friendly and kind to a foreigner making a foreigner's mistakes or incredibly rude to a foreigner who poses an obstacle for them in their efforts to reach point B from point A, or all the variations of interaction in between. South Koreans have adapted to the threats all around them in this theoretical island - you can't go north, so it might as well be part of the sea that surrounds the rest of it - they live happily and not so happily on, like the rest of us attuned to a world more dangerous, thanks in large part to the failed foreign policies of my country.

That said, am I scared? I've been asked this in many different ways by various people. I can honestly say that I am not. As the Korean scholars I trust say about the Korean population, I don't worry that an attack is imminent. And even if it were, I'm a lucky guy who has lived a wonderful life. I've made great friends, had great conversations, read great books, and seen great movies. I've been able to negotiate some blissful romantic relationships regardless of how brief. And I've been able to financially negotiate some lovely trips abroad like this one, again, however brief. As an agnostic, I have no maker with whom to make amends, I merely have worldly ethics as the tools to assess my life and the effects I've had on others. Of course, I can't say what I will feel if I find myself in Seoul again and hear the sirens of the regular air raid drills that require everyone and all vehicles to stop in their tracks until instructed to move. Such will probably resonate differently than simple annoyance about needing to get across the street to catch my bus. But I live with no regrets, and will keep living that way until means beyond my control stop me.

And nothing I could control could stop me from coming to PIFF again this year. I'm as excited as I was last year because again there are quite a lot of fantastic offerings, from established auteurs such as Aki Kaurismäki, Tsai Ming-Liang (in attendance), Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul and Kore-eda Hirokazu and rising talents such as Noh Dong-seok, Shin Dong-il, Lee Yoon-ki and Min Boung-hun. I will again learn much from the Window on Asian Cinema series, this year featuring India's Rajaram Vankudre Shantaram and Iran's Amir Naderi. And then there's the ever wonderful old school is new again experience of the retrospective of early Korean Cinema. This edition, we have seven films from the period of Japan's colonization of South Korea that were found gathering dust within the Chinese Film Archives in the past three years.

This year's opener was Kim Dae-seong's Traces of Love. Kim's first feature was the poorly titled Bungee Jumping of Their Own that followed the South Korean theme of un-crossable barriers to love represented in the recently Keanu-ed fare Il Mare. Kim brought his male main character's dead female lover back in the form of a young man, opening South Korea up to more direct queer portrayals. (Speaking of Queer Cinema, along with the documentary Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema and the South Korean feature No Regret, PIFF is featuring a tiny series of Queer Chinese Cinema and a talk about said cinema by director Cui Zi'en and film critic Tony Rayns.) Kim decided to return to this barriers-to-love theme again, but this time alluding to a tragic incident in South Korean history, the collapsing of the Sampoong Department Store on June 29, 1995 in which 501 people were killed. Hyun-woo (Yu Ji-tae of Old Boy) loses his fiancé Min-joo (Kim Ji-soo of This Charming Girl) in this fictionalized collapse and finds his life void of direction afterwards. A package comes his way via his could've-been father-in-law, a package which provides him with a map that he didn't know he was looking for, a map his fiancé intended they follow on their honeymoon. While following this path, he meets Se-jin (Uhm Ji-won), a woman mysteriously following this path apparently not the least traveled by.

...Or not so mysteriously. See, Kim's film here is constructed in the tested waters of "If there's a gun on the wall, it has to go off." We know things such as that the notebook Min-joo holds still for the camera will return with greater significance later in the film. Although there may be logical leaps in Kim's playing around with time frames in this film (I'd have to revisit it to confirm my suspicions about some confusions), I don't find the connections that follow throughout the film contrived. This is a melodrama that occasionally steps from a more tempered display, but it's well-grounded enough by the middle of the film that I feel I can forgive the missteps.

Director Kim Tai-sik's debut Driving My Wife's Lover was part of the New Currents awards series for new directors. Aware that his wife is cheating on him, Tae-han (Park Kwang-jung) hires the "simple cabbie," Joong-sik (Jung Bo-seog), that his wife is vigorously bonking. Quite a long cab ride, in fact, one that finds them in surreal moments of a waterfall of watermelons and helicopters approaching at an inopportune time. Keyhole close-ups of Tae-han allow for further dork-ification of this pathetic character who we're concerned might make some immoral choices himself. Cho Eun-ji makes an appearance as Joong-sik's wife and, although she stays in her somewhat ditsy typecast, director Kim Tai-shik allows for a much more subdued performance rather than the more histrionic efforts demanded of Cho in films such as Bizarre Love Triangle.

Speaking of bizarre love triangles, Hong Sang-soo continues repeating himself in Woman on the Beach and I still don't want him to stop. The sizably filled house was laughing throughout this exposition of two separate triangles. (Should we add one more triangle here? I'm of course thinking of the one Joong-rae [Ko Hyun-Joung] draws for Moon-sook [Song Sun-mi] that had me flashing back to that freaky moment in Imelda where the eponymous Marcos gets all spirography crazy with her New-Age-y self.) The crowd, made up of mostly women, particularly responded to Moon-sook's willingness to hyperbolically "cut off" hypothetical parts of herself that aesthetically displease her, laughter that presents ambivalence towards the popularity of plastic surgery amongst their fellow countrywomen. This film will flow in and out of my mind and I'll think ever greater things about it as I have of every other Hong film. (And again, I love the score that accompanies the credits. This year PIFF released an Official Soundtrack for the festival consisting of prominent films from the past festivals, including songs from Hur Jin-ho's Christmas in August and April Snow. May I suggest Hong put out a soundtrack of all the songs from his films so I can listen to the song featured in this film along with that lovely xylophone ditty from Tale of Cinema, the bossa nova number on the official website for Turning Gate, and that shoegazer-y track from the trailer for The Power of Kangwon Province that a friend and I have been looking to get a hold of for years?)

I've been following Hong for a long time, traveling to LA to see Turning Gate and to Busan last year to see Tale of Cinema. I would have traveled further to see Min Boung-hun's debut Flight of the Bee, co-directed with Tajik Jamshed Usmonov and championed by none other than Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Sadly, I still haven't had the opportunity to see it nor his second feature, Let's Not Cry!, but I did get to see his third feature here at PIFF, Pruning the Grapevine. Considering the prominence of Christianity in South Korea, it's interesting how rarely the topic extends into South Korean films. This appears to be changing. Last year's PIFF saw Shin Dong-il's Host & Guest respectfully portray a Jehovah's Witness. (Shin is returning to PIFF this year with his latest film, My Friend & His Wife.) And the double definitions of the film Sa-kwa (it means both apple and apology in Korean, thus exploring the significance of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis along with exploring the power of forgiveness) parallel its double appearance at PIFF, showing during media screenings last year and featured again this year since it still hasn't snagged an official South Korean release. Pruning the Grapevine allows for a Catholic exploration of the spiritual. Soo-hyeon (played tenderly by Seo Jang-won) is studying for the priesthood and must struggle with various attachments to the secular world in the process. Heavily bright, heavenly light illuminates throughout this slow, appropriately meditative film. Seo's exemplary performance is accompanied by other great performances, such as the neophyte monk Stefano, a character portrayed in a complicated rather than caricatured manner when revealing his stunted social growth. Min Boung-hun's name doesn't come up much when reciting exciting South Korean directors. Hopefully this film will make the greater festival rounds and his previous works will make it onto DVD so that that might change.

Posted by dwhudson at October 14, 2006 7:21 AM