Essential World Cinema: Top 5 South Korean Films

Callum Davies begins his new Essential World Cinema series with a look at the top 5 South Korean films.

South Korea is a relatively young nation as much in cinematic terms as in others. Since being birthed in the crucible of the fierce Korean War in the 50s, it’s been developing a new, fascinating culture in the shadow of its crazy brother, North Korea. It’s a country that’s been shaped and almost defined by turmoil and unrest; even the language is derived from Japanese, Japan having been a previous occupier and not a particularly nice one. It makes sense then that there’s a certain darkness underpinning a lot of their cinema, themes of betrayal, paranoia and division are common. It wasn’t until the late 90s that South Korean made films starting pulling ahead of Hollywood in terms of national box office figures, then in the early 2000s Korean films began to enjoy more festival success and a whole new wave of high-art Korean cinema was provided with a worldwide platform. The sheer amount of artistic license and variety to have come out of this movement has been astounding and it’s given us some absolute classics. Before we get into that though it’d be remiss of me not to call attention to the cinema of North Korea and their magnum opus: Pulgasari.

Kim Jong-Il was something of a cinephile and somewhere down the line he decided to expand his nation’s culture by having a film commissioned, but being who he was, it didn’t play out quite of simply. Some years previously the South Korean director Shin-Sang Ok had been kidnapped and he was essentially forced to make this film at gunpoint while his wife, a famous actress, was forced to star. The film itself is pretty much a rip-off of Godzilla, which is fitting considering that it has the look of something that was made in the 50s rather than 1985. The plot follows a group of peasants who summon the mythical beast in order to overthrow a tyrannical (and characteristically capitalist) monarch. It’s brilliantly awful and well worth your time, but anyway, here are 5 essential South Korean films that you can enjoy without a hint of irony or cultural unease.

 

3-Iron

Kim Ki-Duk is recognised as one of the most prominent directors to have come out of South Korea, he has a strong, varied body of work behind him and he’s previously come away with the Un Certain Regard from Cannes and the Golden Lion from Venice Film Festival. 3-Iron won him neither of these accolades but it remains perhaps his most interesting film to date.

It follows the exploits of a young, nameless vagrant who scouts out rich neighborhoods to find out which owners are away (by placing menus on the door and coming back in the evening to see which ones are still there) and then breaks in, relaxing, fixing anything that’s broken and then leaving without a trace. It’s a wonderfully tactile commentary on the entitlement of the wealthy-elite, most of the people whose homes he visits turn out to be utterly miserable and lack any kind of appreciation for what they have, the boy on the other hand recognizes and revels in the undeserved luxury they’ve accumulated. Things get more complicated when he enters the stately home of a businessman only to encounter his abused wife, leading the two of them to elope and become partners in crime (if you can call it that). Despite the relative simplicity of the set-up, the film is very abstract and introspective, the main character never utters a syllable and towards the end the realism begins to fade away, but so long as you’re willing to go along with that, the film doesn’t lose any of its intoxicating charm. It’s as much a heartfelt commentary on love as it is an angry degradation of the rich and the characters reflect that beautifully.

The final shot is one of the most perfect, delicately toned images to ever have closed out a film (complete with a written addendum about reality that fondly recalls Cowboy Bebop, if you ask me). It’s quirky and saccharine but in the most determined way possible, I dare you to watch it and not get taken in.

 

 

JSA: Joint Security Area

The unrest between the South and the North is far from secret and although the political implications of it are delicately handled elsewhere (outside of the Red Dawn remake), director Park Chan-Wook decided to tackle it head on. Set at the border point of the DMZ between North and South Korea, the film follows an investigation into the killing of two North Korean soldiers in one of their own border houses, the apparent perpetrator apparently having been a South Korean guard. A Swiss/Korean investigator is hired to get to the bottom of it, stemming from the involvement of the former, neutral nation in conflict resolution. From the outside the audience is left with some interesting questions: how did the South Korean guard get there? What was he doing there?

At around the halfway point we’re given our answer and it’s far more poignant and resonant than you might think. It would have been really easy for this film to descend into a convoluted, bloated political thriller too wrapped up in complex ideology to remain engaging but the film never loses sight of the humanity of the circumstances, it never forgets that despite all the disparity between North and South Korean governments, they are all still people and there really isn’t that much to set them apart. Rather than running into the trap of demonizing North Korea, the film takes an even perspective on both sides and maintains a focus what’s the same, rather than what’s different. It’s as thrilling as it is mature and even-handed and the story the carries it is a beautifully affecting tragedy. One of those films that rises far above its context.

 

 The Host

Since the 1950s the Japanese film industry have had a monopoly on monsters, the US had King Kong and we had Hammer in the UK but if you wanted something 100ft tall that knocked over buildings and made a noise like an elephant being strangled you had to look east. South Korea’s most significant entry is this category however is a film unlike anything else ever made in Japan or anywhere else. Not to be confused with that awful Stephanie Meyer thing about stupid aliens doing stupid things, The Host has a fairly predictable set-up, a pair of lethargic scientists start dumping excess formaldehyde into the Han River, which births a kind of giant mutant tadpole that ultimately runs amok through Seoul. It’s as tired and clichéd as you might expect from this sort of thing, but that’s just the set up.

The entire film is centered around the Park family, perhaps the most dysfunctional clutch of misfits to grace cinema since Little Miss Sunshine, the youngest son, Gang-du, is a dim-witted kiosk vendor and when the aforementioned monster abducts his daughter, he teams up with his disapproving father, drunken lay about brother and his sister, an Olympic archery hopeful. It’s a hilarious, utterly bizarre tale that has the family contending with both the monster and crippling bureaucracy in equal measure to get Gang-du’s daughter back, all while constantly treading on each others tails in various, amusing ways. Even the beast itself lacks a certain amount of poise, it blunders blindly around knocking people over and trying to fit itself through spaces that it’s far too large for, I’ve never seen any other movie monster than manages to be so evenly unsettling and funny by turns. There’s a more controversial undercurrent to it (the scientist who first gives the order to dump the formaldehyde is American and the US intervene at various stages to remedy the situation) and it’s kind of suggested that the monster is as much a victim as anyone else, involuntarily complicit in an international incident, all it ever seems to want is food.

It’s a fascinating, dark comedy with a plot far deeper than it might initially seem and it pokes fun at the US at every given opportunity, which is always fun.

 

 Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… And Spring

Like 3-Iron, this film also comes from the more abstract side of things. Once again directed by Kim Ki-Duk, the story of this film is split between the titular run of 5 seasons (though the gaps between each one are years long) and follows the life of a Buddhist monk living in a man-made island temple in a lake, utterly secluded from the rest of mankind. Through the course of the film he grows from a boy into an old man and each season has its own arc and themes, exploring ideas about empathy, lost, guilt and others. There are only a handful of characters and the action never extends being the bubble that the temple, lake and surrounding woodland seem to be sealed in. At first it might seem like the confinement to a single setting might become tiresome but the sheer beauty of the location and the way it’s shot means that the film is captivating from beginning to end and the story is well-paced and unpredictable enough never to plod.

I won’t pretend that it doesn’t have all the trapping of ‘arthouse’ that so easily frighten so many away, but if you’re willing to accept that you probably won’t understand everything that happens outright (I still don’t know why the guy feels the need to use his cat’s tail to do his calligraphy) and that you’re going to be grappling with some fairly full-on Buddhist ideals, it’s a deeply enthralling piece of cinema. The ideas that the film goes on to explore are significant and wide reaching and every time you watch it, you see it in a different light.

 

Oldboy

Come on, you knew this was coming. Is it a tad obvious to end this list with arguably the most well known film to come out of South Korea? Yes. Do I give a fuck? Not particularly (ED: whoa looks like we got a badass over here). Some things gain notoriety for a reason, because they are just that good and Oldboy is a masterpiece and one of my all-time favorite films.

The second entry in the ‘Vengeance’ trilogy, Oldboy opens with a middle-aged loser named Oh Dae-su attempting to talk his way out of a drunk and disorderly detainment so that he can go home and give his daughter her birthday present. Moments after his release he is snatched away, confined to a drab hotel room and left to rot there for 15 years with no explanation whatsoever. He is fed, given TV to watch and every once in a while he’s knocked out so that his hair and nails can be attended to. During his time within these confines Oh Dae-su becomes consumed by blinding rage, he trains himself to fight and focuses every molecule of energy within him on revenge, which seems like a fitting prerogative when he is suddenly and mysteriously set free. From there the plot spirals into an enthralling tornado of violence, deception and extra-rare octopus eating that culminates in one of the most shocking, gut wrenching narrative beats in cinematic history.

Oldboy is a harsh mistress, you’ll love it but it will fucking ruin you and it won’t say sorry. There’s a pitch-black mirth to it that keeps it from descending into sheer overwhelming disparity (particularly when, minutes after his release, Dae-su encounters a woman for the first time in 15 years in a lift and has a sizeable, spontaneous orgasm) and the sheer aptitude of the craft that went into it is impossible to understate; an action sequence that pits a hammer wielding Dae-su against a gang of heavies is all framed within one uninterrupted tracking shot that goes on for almost 3 full minutes. This is the film that really hurled South Korean cinema into a broader, wider international purview and was almost immediately elevated to a classic status that it has retained ever since. I haven’t seen the recent Spike Lee remake but I’m told it’s fairly appalling, hardly surprising, a remake was unwarranted and unnecessary. This is a legendary piece of cinema that everyone needs to see.

Agree with Callum’s choices? Let us know below.