_Burning_ (spoilers)
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All on Fri Nov 30 22:49:49 2018
The film is adapted from Haruki Murakami short story "Barn Burning" by
Korean master Lee Chang-Dong and cowriter Jungi Oh. As with so many words uttered in the film, the title is a misdirection. At one point Ben, the globe-trotting, Porsche-driving mystery man, asks girlfriend Haemi if
she knows what "metaphor" is. She professes (or feigns) ignorance,
deferring to aspiring novelist Jong-su. He ignores them. Much later
-- too late -- he finds out that Ben's alleged hobby, described in the
title (burning down dilapidated greenhouses), is really an euphemism
for murdering vulnerable young women like Haemi, the love of Jong-su's
life.
From Murikami's flimsy premise, the screenwriters have fashioned a
panoramic indictment of South Korean society. The depth and richness of
the characters are much amplified; the spatial vagueness is replaced by ethnically precise, alienation-haunted landscapes; references to classics (Bruno Dumont, Wim Wenders, and a strong dose of Scandinavian serial-killer existentialism like in Sluizer's _The Vanishing_) serve as the audience signposts, reaching back to our humanistic-cinematic past while also
furnishing the current generation a roadmap to the soul. The resulting
film, Lee's first since _Poetry_, is a masterful examination of the
modern human condition in our post-liberal capitalist century.
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Money has ruined all. Haemi is shunned by family after her default of
credit card loans; when Jong-su's mother reappears after 15 years, she
can only talk about her debtors. The youngsters live on sporadic temp
work and lead formless lives in tiny, incredibly cluttered rooms; Haemi apparently never makes her bed. Space is exorbitant in all Asian cities;
thus Ben's spacious high-rise apartment marks him as a god. Are his
sub-Sahara figurines and Giacometti-like portrait subtle digs at foreign corruption? There are priceless juxtapositions of his Porsche with
Jong-su's rusted pickup truck. The latter compares him to Jay Gatsby;
Lee Chang-Dong probably has more of Nietzsche in mind when creating
this amoral anti-philosopher. Long before we see the extent of Ben's depravity, there are plenty of hints that Haemi is disposable, his
plaything of the month.
In the short story the class difference between the Ben and Jong-su
characters is barely there; the latter even has a wife. In the film
he has a jail-bound violent father who leaves a bankrupt farm near the demilitarized zone. He goes to the trial but they never speak; if it
weren't for phantom phone calls at the farmhouse he may as well be mute.
To dignify this supposed creative-writing college graduate a "writer"
is to be exceedingly generous. With his permanently half-open mouth,
balloon lips, and spaced-out demeanor he seems positively dim-witted -- especially when by the side of the vivacious Haemi. They were school-mates, but he has forgotten her when they meet in the streets. The memory lapse dovetails with the film's subtext that city life makes us interchangeable.
She lures him to her lair -- as dishevelled as she herself is immaculately pretty -- using the pretext of cat-feeding during her impending safari.
They sleep together. Such is his isolation that she suddenly becomes
the lone spark in his life, even after her African trip where she falls
for Ben. When she disappears, he transforms into part child-like detective
in the Cannes-winning _Humanite_, part Harry Dean Stanton searching for Nastassja Kinski in _Paris, Texas_. An ultra-slow car chase and a
stakeout of Ben's gym -- him high in the glass tower and Jong-su low
on the pavement -- echo key moments in Wenders' humanistic masterpiece.
The film ends on a cathartic revenge that Murakami's story elides.
Jong-su locks himself in Haemi's cleaned-up apartment in Seoul. At
long last, he begins to write.
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Jon-seo Jeon, who plays Haemi, has the most memorable role despite her
limited screen time. It is easy to imagine that her aspiring mime-
actress who looks for transcendance on the red sands of Nairobi
was what first drew director Lee to this story. On screen she is
magnetic, flirtatious, a purveyor of African tribal dance and fountain
of tall tales. Yet she is also the loner in the crowd, in her own way
as isolated as Jong-su whom she calls her only friend. After she
makes love or smokes pot, she laughs and cries in equal measure, as
though in a rush to embrace the full spectrum of emotions in her
short life. (Manohla Dargis was no doubt referring to her intoxicated
naked dance at dusk when praising the best movie scene of 2018.) Haemi
brings to mind some of the great generation Y-ers in recent cinema
like Maria Valverde in _Plonger_; what she could have brought to
the Rooney Mara role in _Song to Song_! In Murakami's story she is
as much an occult enigma as her invisible (likely non-existent) cat
she first uses to entice Jong-su. In Lee Chang-Dong's hands, both
remain shimmering, ghost-like metaphors, but are at the same time
indelibly flesh-and-blood.
(for A.)
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