In 2018, I started to set an annual goal of watching at least 100 films per year — mostly because of my enthusiasm to watch as many as I could from my watchlist, and partly because I want to keep up with my Letterboxd friends. It has been a while since I posted something in this blog, so this seems like the perfect time to talk about some of the films that I watched over the years that I felt changed my life or somehow ‘defined’ me, starting with Korean cinema.
When I was starting out to get into film, I was really into Korean cinema. I mostly watched any director or title that I could find in several lists which include anything from popular rom-coms to arthouse. I love the works of Bong Joon-ho and Lee Chang-dong the most because it is filled with sociopolitical commentaries. Especially interesting to me are their period pieces that are tied up to a particular piece of history, such as Peppermint Candy and Memories of Murder that had traces of the Gwangju massacre as part of the events that influenced the characters’ lives. Through these films, I realized the power of art as both a medium that preserves history and a vehicle to show how seemingly larger-than-life events trickle down to the most ordinary people and ultimately shape individuals, sometimes in the most unexpected way.
The sociopolitical aspect of Korean films was really its biggest draw for me. In particular, I have to admit that I am not much into Park Chan-wook’s films, but one of my top Korean films was Joint Security Area where an unlikely friendship was formed between a group of North Korean and South Korean soldiers, which was then ultimately challenged by the fact that their nation is divided and at war with one another. Another recent film that captured how simple lives are troubled by unrest is Jang Hoon’s A Taxi Driver where an apolitical taxi driver who initially only accepted a job to drive a foreign photographer through Gwangju had an eye-opening experience as he witnesses students and civilians experience violence from the state forces during a series of uprising.
Notice how most of my favourite Korean films are led by Song Kang-ho. If you ask me about my favourite Korean actor, it will never be your expected Hallyu star or an actor from a popular drama. It’s Song Kang-ho. To me, he is the face of Korean cinema. He has starred in so many films directed by big names, and he is one of the pillars of Korean cinema itself. I am glad that Parasite became as globally known as it is because the rest of the world should be introduced to his works and make sure to remember him.
In the same way the Korean dramas started its rise through their romantic series and had become somewhat a genre of its own, Korean cinema also has its fair share of romantic-comedies and romance drama films. One of the timeless classics is, of course, My Sassy Girl. I cannot imagine someone disliking this film because of how unapologetically whack and oddly sincere it was, but even if you dislike it, you cannot deny its sheer influence to the current stream of romcoms today. Personally, it’s not my favourite Korean romcom ever, but it was an essential part of why I developed a fondness for Korean cinema.
Speaking of favourite Korean romance films — for me it is Lee Hae-jun’s Castaway on the Moon and Hur Jin-ho’s One Fine Spring Day. With rom-coms, suspension of disbelief is a given, but nothing could have prepared me for the (pleasant) weirdness that was Castaway on the Moon, where a man decided to live in an ‘island’ in the middle of Seoul and the recluse woman who saw her through her camera became friends with him. I suppose on a personal level, I simply identify with two awkward introverts creating a connection and even falling in love. All sorts of out-of-this-world shenanigans have happened in this film, but it remained sincere in its message of, quite literally, telling us that ‘no man is an island’ and we will ultimately crave for someone to understand us deeply, even if it is just one person in the entire world.
Hur Jin-ho’s One Fine Spring Day is probably an interesting choice by me because it definitely has some traces of internalized misogyny and sexism in the way that it portrayed the female lead, and made out the male lead to be this sad lump of a man who gets heartbroken over and over because of of this woman. But, for a moment, let’s cast that aside and talk about the basic premise of the film which is about a man who is in love with a woman who he cannot quite have. I think this film perfectly captured that idea of love as something elusive. You can love someone so deeply, and even change a lot of aspects in your life to make sure that this person will stay, but things still do not work out. Sometimes it’s really just not you. Sometimes no matter how much you try to make things so your way, it just won’t.
With this, let me share the Letterboxd review that I wrote for this film, which is still one of my favourite things that I wrote in the last few years:
He loves ardently and wholly; she can’t. He believes she belongs to him; she doesn’t. The bitter reality of life is, no matter how much we try to make things go our way, some of them just don’t—including willing someone to love you back in the same amount as you do, when they don’t. And it makes you bitter, it makes you angry, it makes you pathetic. It turns you into this child who throws tantrums when you can’t get what you want. Was it even worth it? Maybe. At the end, it just leaves you with more questions than answers. As much as you wish to find the answers, maybe coming to terms with what you have even when they’re not enough is also a form of closure. At the end of the day, you get to decide what sets your heart free.
I cannot end this post without talking a bit about my love for Lee Chang-dong. To me, his works feel like novels in film form in the way that he successfully brings out the innermost feelings of his characters. Of his recent work, Burning, he successfully translated Haruki Murakami’s short story into film. One characteristic of Murakami’s novels is how much its main characters tend to ‘look inward’ and that is not exactly easy to transform into film, especially when you have to let the viewers in, the same way that you get really into a novel. Burning is not my favourite example of this though; it is his 2010 classic, Poetry.
Watching Poetry was both a fascinating and disturbing experience for me. I kept thinking about how extremely accessible this old woman was to me, her thoughts and feelings, and her experiences. Life around her is not great at all, with so many things happening that it does not seem like she has time for anything. But surprisingly, she has time to study poetry and this was sort of her refuge and quite literally what is keeping her sane. Life keeps burgeoning her with problems after problems, but she has art to hold onto. This art continues to make her appreciate life’s mundanity, and also disturbs her consciousness.
I think that’s the thing with Lee Chang-dong. He disturbs not through big events, but those day-to-day moments that seem like nothing, yet one snap causes a series of profound realizations that change your life forever. These things happen to the characters as much as to the viewers.
Cinema has always been a constant part of my life, from watching local films on CinemaOne or free TV, through pirated CDs and DVDs, and being brought along to the theater by my parents or uncles. What used to be a simple form of entertainment to me has evolved into something that completely captured my interest. Reading thinkpieces and theses on Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder made me learn concepts I’ve only ever heard before. I discovered new ways to watch a film from a technical and storytelling standpoint. Though I do not consume Korean media as much as I did back then, I owe a lot of my personal history with films to Chungmuro.
In the same way that an event changes the trajectory of a character’s life in films, mine was also disturbed (for better or worse) by my early days as a Korean cinema fan.
—
Under the Copyright Disclaimer under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, there is an allowance for ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material for such purposes as education and research, scholarship, criticism, news reporting, comment, and teaching.
j/c 