Hey folks, Harry here with a story of interest to those on the quest to learn more about South Korean cinema. For my money, it is the most vital and fascinating territory generating new films these days. This year alone has reaped OLDBOY, SILMIDO and TAEGUKGI: BROTHERHOOD OF WAR that I've seen. OLDBOY appeared on my top ten last year - it is likely that SILMIDO and TAEGUKGI: BROTHERHOOD OF WAR will appear on this year's. We'll see how this year finishes out as the new releases play out the year, and I see what I see at BNAT this year. Anyway - this is a Korean film from 1998 - long before this "trend" developed... it's something to pay attention to, especially if it's as good as the dear Mr Sheldrake says...
The Power of Kangwon Province
Directed by Hong Sang-Soo 1998
Sheldrake reporting to you from New York. Let’s go to the movies.
Now, let me lay it right on the line for you: I am sitting down late to the feast of Korean cinema. I’ve loved foreign films since I was a kid, and my laser disc and DVD library, mostly American Hollywood movies, is also heavy with Japanese, German, French and Russian selections. My library favors those particular cultures for this reason: when I was growing up in New York, those were the films that showed at the reportory theaters: the Thalia (which is now the Leonard Nimoy Thalia, great gawdalmighty), the Regency, the New Yorker, the Bleeker Street, the St. Marks and many, many more. Now, the radio star isn’t the only thing that video iced, and the rep theaters are mostly gone, and somehow in the years since I just kept buying DVDs for the cinema I’d grown up with, with the exception of martial arts cinema and the Chinese major productions that make it to the American movie theaters. Thanks to Lincoln Center, I’ve begun my game of catch-up, and if what I’ve seen so far is a fair sample, I am going to take in Korean cinema slowly and drink in their movies a little at a time, because I want this exploration, this feeling of new discovery, to last for as long as I can make it. These are movies I’ve been hungry for—that I’ve been needing to see—for some time.
Tonight I saw The Power of Kangwon Province directed by Hong Sang-soo. This is the second film I’ve seen by that director; the first was Woman Is the Future Of Man at the New York Film Festival in October this year, but TPKP is having its first distribution in America now, for the first time. Having seen two of Sang-soo’s films now, I’m beginning to get a handle on him – as a sort of Korean Eric Rohmer. Now, you either like Rohmer movies or you don’t. Tarantino likes them, and they’re as unlike anything he makes as is artistically possible. But not everyone does. As the Gene Hackman character said in the movie Night Moves, “I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” Cut to the audience coming out of the Walter Reade theater this evening: “The story just…rambled. If you can call that a story. The director didn’t seem to know what to do next.” Now, I’ve never really had one of those Woody Allen moments where I wanted to drag out Marshall McLuhan from screen-right but I came damn close tonight, because this guy had no idea what he was talking about. Hong Sang-Soo is as careful a director, with as clear a sense of purpose, as I’ve ever seen.
Here’s what throws people when they see this kind of movie: the story opens on ordinary people in the midst of ordinary events. And you watch for awhile, and you have no idea what the point of the tale is so far—and you start to become nervous, fearful, the director starts to lose your confidence, because we’re trained by Hollywood directors who don’t trust us as far as they can throw us. They grab us right away, throw us on the ground, dance on our heads and shout into our ears THIS IS THE STORY GET IT? And, look, I love that kind of story telling, I eat it up. But there’s another kind, and if you keep watching this Sang-soo film (or a Rohmer film), all of a sudden the story will suddenly appear right in front of you, and the longer you watch the movie, the more every event and image in every scene you’ve watched will make sense. But the story is, for lack of a better phrase, back loaded. And what you get, the pleasure you get, is the pleasure at seeing that the director knew what he was doing all along, a sense of revelation, of the details of the story coming together in a larger pattern, with more meaning than you had thought the story could carry. This isn’t art for art’s sake. Sang-soo’s audience is a nation of hard-core coffee drinking chain smoking cinephiles, as fierce and sophisticated as a French New Wave audience, and this is a commercial movie made on their terms.
So onto the film. The story opens with three young women,about twenty-two, on a train on their way---but, see, even that’s cheating, because I’m about to give you more information than you get from just looking at the scene. They’re on a train, and you have to watch a line of people buying beer and dried squid for a couple of minutes before you find out why they’re their and where they’re going, or even which girls on the train they are. You just see a bunch of people on a train. Now, mind you, that scene has a major payoff halfway through the film, but you’d never know it from the way the film starts.
And here I have the dilemma of reviewing this movie. I don’t want to tell you anything more that goes on because, the way the film is structures, everything is a spoiler, because the film’s details, the payload in each scene, is written in a way that you get just enough new information (and often barely that) to get to the next scene. This is a story that opens, and opens, and opens, and tricks you for fully half the movie into thinking its about one thing, then turns into another.
To refer to the Rohmer touchstone again: I may rethink that, because Rohmer’s films often have less story than this movie does. This film depends on a story that is really quite compelling. The trick the director pulls to tell the story in such a way that it’s kept from you for long enough that all you have to deal with is the immediacy of the characters, their immediate situation and their expressed emotions. And the effect of that is that you get to know them very well, and feel their emotions deeply. So that by the time the story makes itself known to you, you’re fully involved.
Let me give you an idea of this story in this way: the film is two long lines of misery and melancholy drawn parallel to each other; both of the main characters (that there are two is a detail I can’t help but reveal if I’m to make any sense about this movie at all) drink heavily and wind up in unfortunate situations as a result, including similar clashing arguments with their friends. Pay attention to the character’s wordless melancholic heartache, because it’s that emotion that unites their actions. The scenes are about how to fill time when you’re unbearably sad, and there’s really nothing to say and you can’t do the one thing you want to be doing, and you’re friends are bored with hearing the one thing you want to talk about, and there’s really nothing to do except go on boring vacations with your boring friends and meet boring strangers. And drink. I can imagine that to someone who’s not going through it, it’s kind of like watching paint dry.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Korean cinema, I recommend buying this months issue of FilmComment, which has an excellent primer on the Korean film industry and a set of small articles on a selection of Korean directors and movies.
The film can be obtained on DVD.
You can also check out the films they’re showing at the Walter Reade in this page:
Mr. Sheldrake
