Some New Films from Korea

Brief notes on a few Korean films that I saw last week. In recent years the new films from Korea and Japan have put the life back in the conventional genre movies which were beaten to death by the inanities of Hollywood. The horror films are the most prominent example. Films like Ringu, Audition and Tale of Two Sisters have been enormously influential. These films have literally put the 'horror' back into the horror cinema. So if the antics of Freddy and Jason or the latest zombie flick from Hollywood inspires you to fall into a catatonic stupor, try tasting the delicacies prepared by Hideo Nakata, Takashi Miike and others.



Although horror is the most prominent, this trend is not limited to only horror. As the film Green Chair showed Koreans are good at sex and romance too. The film is about a divorcee woman, who is in her early thirties and who falls in love with a boy who is barely out of high school. The authorities of course do not like it and sentence the woman to hundred hours of social service in a mental asylum. But, as it happens, love and passion know no bounds. The two of them gang up together after the woman is free and indulge in a marathon sex session. The sex scenes are graphic and for a change quite romantic and tenderly so. It was very refreshing after watching all those French (or even some Korean and Japanese) movies - exercises in erotic existentialism, if not downright nihilism. In fact the film after a while started feeling a little too sweet and a little too romantic for my tastes. And I desperately wanted some pretext to hate the movie. Perhaps, I was only feeling jealous of the great fortunes of the young guy on the screen! The fact that I was sitting beside a young couple, who were giggling throughout the sex scenes, didn't help the matters a bit. Anyway, the film digresses through some comic scenes in which viewers get to know about the culinary skills of the hero, the woman's taste in the kind of mattresses on which to have sex, and finally reaches a bizarre and surreal party scene which concludes the film.

The film overall wasn't very satisfying intellectually. There wasn't much depth in the characters and the director wasn't very interested in exploring complex themes in an intellectual manner. The film was about sex and pleasures of sex, no pretentions and philosophizing whatsoever. The film would work well as a good date movie, only that I went to see the film alone and felt even more alone after the film ended.

Face was another horror film in the style of the Japanese new wave horror films. Although well made, it was quite conventional both stylistically and thematically. It rehashed themes and styles from such diverse genres as serial killer, police procedural and ghost-stalking-her-killer films. Overall it looked quite derivative in its approach and having seen quite a few of original horror films the image of a pale white girl with her hair pulled up on her face didn't frighten me at all.

The President's Barber, the third Korean film was however quite interesting. It starts as a political farce about a craven, political fool (the barber of the title) who is used by the political powers for their own political purposes and slowly progresses towards a bitterly ironic ending. The film was overall a great fable about the costs of political oppportunism and conformism.

Overall I found this package of Korean films a little disappointing. I am eagerly waiting for Kim Ki-Duk's latest cinematic provocation Samaritan Girl, which will be shown next week. That should take care of all my grievances.