The violent rise of Korean cinema

Just when you thought October couldn’t get any more exciting – what with dusting off the space beside Tarantula and counting the minutes until the first volume of Mr. Zimmerman’s autobiography hits the shelves – along comes Chan Wook Park’s coruscating psycho-noir OldBoy.

Simultaneously the Vertigo of revenge cycle movies, a twisted ballad of soul death, a cruelly absurd black comedy and a meltingly lush portrait of torment, OldBoy is one of those cinematic rarities like Repulsion, Eraserhead or Audition that treats established artistic boundaries with the withering contempt they deserve.
A disquieting Hitchcockian take on Death Wish as if shot by a young Roman Polanski and edited by Franz Kafka), OldBoy’s protagonist Oh Dae-su (the supreme Choi Min Sik) is a frightfully ordinary man with an apparent fondness for getting obnoxiously drunk. One night he’s kidnapped and taken to a private prison designed to look like a tacky motel room, leaving behind his wife and young daughter.
No explanation is given for the 15 years he’s held there, but just when he’s on the verge of escape and well past the point of lunacy, he’s dumped onto the street and challenged to discover his unknown captor, triggering an orgy of vengeance.
“I feel that revenge is a completely taboo subject”, explained Chan Wook when I caught up with him (and his missus, and his daughter, and his translator, and what appeared to be most of his extended family – it was all rather personable) recently.
“Civilisation demands that we repress our rage and hatred, and while modern society burdens people with a greater sense of injustice and rage and impotence, the outlets through which we can release rage grow fewer. But the interesting thing about the theme of vengeance is the way it festers where other emotions wilt.
“Revenge just breeds more revenge, despite being ultimately futile. Do the American people feel any better about 9/11 since they invaded Iraq? I wanted to get inside that vicious cycle of obsessive, destructive revenge, because it’s a difficult area to materialize or discuss.”
Especially I would imagine in Korea, famously the most Confucian country in all of South East Asia?
“Yes, that’s right. It’s a much greater taboo in Korea. Our tradition demands that you do not get back at the people who wrong you. It’s never even discussed. I think that’s why art exists. As a release valve for what we repress.”
So OldBoy is transgressive and challenging and unfeasibly cool. But then, we’ve come to expect nothing less from the cinema of South Korea. Depending on which buff, anorak or internet-obsessed shut-in you’re talking to, Film Korea is the new black, punk or Hong Kong.
And so the prizes at international film festivals just keep on coming. Kim Il-Duk recently took the Silver Bear at Berlin for Samaritan Girl, while OldBoy won both the Grand Prix at Cannes earlier this year and scooped the fan-boy vote when Ain’t It Cool’s Harry Knowles declared it the best entertainment of the last year.
The profuse acclaim isn’t exclusively coming from arbiters of taste either. South Korea is one of the few countries where native film beats Hollywood at the box-office, and the current new wave of movie making upstarts have seen Korea double its box-office take in 56 countries in the past two years alone.
Predictably, Hollywood has started paying attention. Currently there are around a dozen South Korean box-office successes (including Marrying The Mafia, My Sassy Girl and My Wife Is A Gangster) being remade for the subtitle-phobic American market. Even OldBoy was snapped up by Universal Pictures months before it premiered at Cannes, and is now in production with Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow) in the director’s chair.
While Korea has always spawned directors noted within the festival circuit – Im Kwon-taek and Shin Sung-ok have each made over one hundred films distributed outside their native soil, it’s an absolutely Lazarus-like performance from a film industry that less than a decade ago was declared kaput by the South Korean press, its predominant output being hapless Godzilla knock-offs.
So what the hell the happened to quash the monster movies? Er, quite a bit actually. In purely business terms, Korea introduced quotas to protect its indigenous cinema from Hollywood product. This certainly accounts for the soaring box-office figures – the boom in pop-action flicks like Shiri or the surge in the traditional gracefully artistic film.
One suspects, however, that the contemporary wave of snarling, boundary-bulldozing cinema has more to do with national psychological scar tissue. Since the end of the civil war in 1953, Korea has had something of a wild bipolar ride, what with the schizoid relations between the South and their ‘Communist’ theocratic neighbours, as well as expeditious economic growth, draconian military leaders, violent street demos, cold war blackout drills, tortured political opponents, student protests, and the euphoria of the Seoul Olympics and the 2002 World Cup.
It’s also tempting to read something of Korea’s barbaric colonial past in the current compulsion for graphic sensationalist on-screen violence. Japan’s occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945 was an intensely traumatic experience. Over three million citizens were forced into slave labour and 100,000 girls worked joy division duties.
But the Japanese policy of eradicating Korean national identity was more damaging still. All books in traditional Korean script (hangeul) were burned, history was rewritten, cities and people were renamed in Japanese, and every last film destroyed.
Unquestionably, this tempestuous backdrop, coupled with a punkish attitude toward traditional Confucian dogma, has found its way into OldBoy and Korea’s generally disturbing, inspirationally fuck-you filmic output – a maelstrom of sadism, passionless rough-housing sex, rape, mutilation and generally impolite behaviour, often, and bizarrely, played for laughs.
“It was a very strange and irrational period”, smiles Mr. Park, “but it was almost comically oppressive. We’re an interesting bunch of people. We’re very proud and very stoical. Maybe that’s why we’ve developed such an odd sense of humour.”
A diabolically youthful looking 41-year-old, Chan Wook’s tranquil soft-spoken manner belies a lively wit, and a tendency to conversationally bounce from Stendhal to Balzac to Kubrick to Sophocles to Shakespeare to, er, De Palma.
Little wonder our gracious interpreter Keith Nam seems a bit bamboozled on occasions, or that the director now gets mobbed by adoring ladies on the streets of Seoul. Steeped in all manner of culture, it’s difficult to square this friendly, polite gentleman with raw merciless energy of his movies. A former philosophy major at Sogang University, he joined the audio-visual society out of frustration and boredom. Appropriately enough, he became enraptured by film after seeing Vertigo.
“I knew at that moment”, he tells me, “that if I didn’t at least try to become a filmmaker, that it would haunt me in my later years.”
After a stint in the noble art of film criticism, he made two unassuming and unsung B-movies, Trio and Moon Is The Sun’s Dream.
But everything changed in 2000 when Mr. Park made JSA: Joint Security Area, a tragic murder-mystery set in Korea’s demilitarised zone. It became the biggest grossing Korean film of all time, and enabled the director to embark on his projected revenge trilogy, kicking off with the fantastically chaotic tragic-comedy Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance.
OldBoy, the second instalment, is due to be followed next year by Sympathy For Lady Vengeance, a psycho-femme thriller that looks set to leave Uma Thurman’s Bride quivering behind some fluffy couch. What a strangely unethical universe for an aesthetically obsessed philosophy graduate to fashion around himself.
“Yes, that’s true”, he explains, “but I don’t think of my films as being revenge fantasies. I think of my characters as moral and fundamentally good people. It’s their guilty consciences, the way they obsess about their own wrongdoings that corrupts them. They have to subjugate and transfer their guilt onto others. That’s their tragedy.”
In addition to all those fully deserved occidental plaudits, Mr. Park’s success with OldBoy has seen him honoured at home with the Bogwan Order of Cultural Merit, roughly the equivalent of the British OBE.
“It’s a running joke between my friend Jung Ho (Bong, of Memories Of Murder fame) and I,” he laughs, “that I get all the prizes with paper or a trophy, and he wins all the money with his films. But I’ve been really lucky. I didn’t even expect to be in competition at Cannes, and then to win, and more importantly, to get to meet Roman Polanski was amazing.”
Is the exiled one a fan?
“I’m not sure. He was far more interested in my wife than he was in my film.” (Mrs. Park nods and giggles in comic affirmation.) “Still, at least that confirmed that it had to be the real Polanski!”
But with fickle film fans being what they are, how long can this Korean renaissance last? At least one world-weary writer for The Village Voice has declared his fascination with South Korean cinema to be on the wane, and there are mutterings that like the West’s appetite for Hong Kong movies of the ’90s, it will all end in tears.
Perhaps not. Since Korea attained something akin to democracy in 1992, cultural liberalisation has been the order of the day. Hence, out-there filmmaker Chang Dong Lee (Oasis) has been appointed Minister for Film and Culture – which is a bit like handing the remit to Harmony Korine. When the protectionist quotas came under threat, one hundred film workers shaved their heads and people took to the streets in protest. It’s difficult to envisage a nation so passionate about film tolerating a return to mediocre fare.
Just to really keep things interesting, Mr. Park has co-founded the Nine Directors’ production company with Bong Jun Ho, Kim Ji Wun (A Tale Of Two Sisters) and just about every extreme Korean director working.
One question remains, however. Between the gruesome live sushi scenes in The Isle, and the unforgettable sequence in OldBoy wherein the protagonist bites the head off a live octopus, what exactly do Korean directors have against our piscine brethren?
“Well, as you know”, he beams, “Oh has been locked away for 15 years eating only fried dumplings, so he naturally wants something different. And live octopus is certainly different. But, it was funny because Choi is a Buddhist, and we had to do four takes because the tentacles kept flailing up his nostrils. So he would pray and make offerings and apologies to the octopi between takes, and then they’d stick their legs up his nose. He was very upset about their deaths though.”
Wow, that fish that gets tied to a rock in Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring should be thankful it got off so lightly.

OldBoy is released on October 15. To read Tara Brady's review, click here.