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Purgatorial Cinema: The Films of Lee Chang-Dong

Louis Norton

 Good and Evil, Thereabouts

Oasis, Secret Sunshine, Poetry, Burning. Confident titles that gesture at lofty themes: light in darkness, salvation, destruction; few films carry the epic emotional detail than those of South Korea’s Lee Chang-Dong. Although far less prolific than his celebrated new-wave peers Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho, his films, across just six features, are equally idiosyncratic, repulsive and transformative, Dennis Lim describes him as a black sheep of sorts in the distinguished South Korean film industry:

“The most successful—and most exportable—South Korean movies of recent years have been stylish genre updates or reinventions, like Kim Ji-Woon's A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003), and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006). On the artier end of the spectrum are more formally challenging works by innovators like Jang Sung-woo (Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie, 1997) and Hong Sang-soo (Woman on the Beach, 2006). Lee’s subtle, forthright dramas don’t fall into either camp". 

Lee’s films are often about ordinary people struggling against societal systems. They are also about death and loss and the forces that drive people to commit unspeakable acts of evil, and what people build from those wreckages.

Lee, once a novelist, has a talent for articulating the daily minutiae of the working- classes and their economic anxiety; from the young cattle farmer in rural Paju in Burning (2019) to the widowed piano teacher-slash-single mother looking after her young son in Secret Sunshine, (2007). Veronique Bergen (2019) says the director “focuses on the outsiders, the marginalized, those who are left behind”. All of these characters dream of something more, desire something better; they are also often artistic creatures and it seems to be in art that seek ideas of order and peace.

“They are mostly characters with communication barriers… I always dream of communicating with audiences through my films… so those characters in my films, in a way, represent the part of me that is not communicated, that longs to communicate”. Lee Chang-Dong, when asked about the preoccupation with disabled characters in his work.

Yet Lee also adopts fantasy sequences and fourth wall breaks, reverse- narratives and explosive churns of violence to counter these contexts of realism. The opening sequences to his films are often indicative of this cinema of polarity. Burning opens on the back of a van, ugly, mundane. Then Lee Jong-Su appears, smoking a cigarette- its lit end unashamedly Chekhovian. Poetry (2011) opens with an idyllic roaming shot of a riverside; kids playing in the marshes nonchalantly. In the following shot, we see the body of a teenage girl floating through the water, face down; a beautiful town with playgrounds on its surface and skeletons in its closet. Peppermint Candy (1999) actually opens with credits on black until we realize we are actually moving through the dark void of a train tunnel; as we reach the light at the end of it we are greeted with the rail tracks that the films protagonist Yong-ho (Sol Kyung-gu) will later throw himself into. In each of these prologues, Lee presents an image of white-fenced mundanity and then hints at an image of chaos and violence, as if the two go hand in hand.  

“Secret Sunshine is a work of visceral emotions and abstract notions; a study of faith in all its power, strangeness, and cruelty; a look at the particularities of human nature and experience that account for the existence, perhaps even the inevitability, of religion—all of which is to say that it’s an attempt to depict the invisible in what is foremost a visual medium”. - Dennis Lim

Burning Questions

Just as Derrida once described a text as being “ordered around it’s own blind spot” (1974), Burning is a film about the absence of things, be it the absence of a clue or the absence of a reason. Jong-su is a delivery boy who’s just finished his mandatory army service. He is an aspiring novelist. His father, a cattle farmer, is currently embroiled in a lawsuit for misbehaviour, apparently having violently lashed out at another farmer . One day Jong-Su casually runs into childhood neighbour Shin Hae-mi, whom he doesn’t recognise at first- she tells him she’s had plastic surgery since they knew each other. Hae-mi is bubbly and perhaps acts overly friendly to the reticent and brooding Jong-su, excitedly telling him about an upcoming trip to Africa she has planned where she will study the culture of miming. When they go out for drinks that night she impressively demonstrates eating an imaginary tangerine in front of him, throwing it up in the air and catching it, taking it apart. He calls her talented and her face falls at the reflexive praise- in fact, she actually spits out the imaginary seed onto the table, offended that he’d think she’s not acting truthfully.

“It’s not about talent”, she explains. “Don’t think there is a tangerine here, but forget that there isn’t one, that’s the key. The important thing is that you really want one”. (Jong-Su asks during this encounter “Do you want to become an actress?”, to which she replies, “You think anyone can be an actress? I’m just learning this for fun. Look. I can eat tangerines whenever I want”, -throughout Burning, Hae-mi will seek to be at one with the universe and Jong-su will look for signs that she’s faking it). She asks him to feed her cat whilst she’s out of the country and shows him her top-floor flat. When they reach the top they have sex and Jong-su notices a ray of sunlight that has bounced off the nearby Seoul tower window and into her room- Jong-su associates this euphoric moment with this feeling of power and warmth, a feeling which is found upwards, at a zenith. A reward.

Her cat is nowhere to be found and each following food trip Jong-su makes to her apartment he will remain unseen. Jong-su significantly jokes whether the cat is imaginary too- “should I forget that there isn’t a cat?”.

When Hae-mi returns from her trip with the wealthy and fashionable Asian American Ben, it seems she has forgotten about their coupling and has moved on to the richer man. But their meeting is off-screen, unseen, and the story of their meeting seems about as likely as her fictive pet.

Ben is relaxed and rich; everything that Jong-su seems to hate. One day at Ben’s lush home he asks Hae-mi “why do you think he’s even with you?” bitterly as they look out over the rooftops of Seoul from a balcony. Ben’s lifestyle includes heights like this.

For the rest of the film, Jong-su’s hatred of Ben will simmer. After all, he might be a serial killer with an appetite for young women, or perhaps a corrupt trafficker who stole and sold Hae-mi like one of his new cars, or… the aspiring novelist’s imagination spirals like ours does. After Hae-mi’s disappearance, this paranoia intensifies when he finds circumstantial evidence of Ben’s part in her disappearance, like finding a wristwatch of hers in his bathroom cabinet and how a cat that he bought around the time of her disappearance responds to the name of Hae-mi’s cat, ‘Boil’. All of these are circumstantial, and although Ben is mysterious, it seems he likes to play with Ben (and when Jong-su asks him what he actually does for a living he even says: “put simply, I like to play”, with a smirk). After all, its certainly possible Hae-mi’s cat remained hidden from Jong-su during his trips. It’s hard to know why a cat may respond to a sound and the wristwatch is hardly the smoking gun that Jong-su seems to be looking for. What drives him mad the most, though, is Ben’s self-admitted hobby for burning down abandoned greenhouses, itself a reminder of Seoul’s and Korea’s economic situation. (TV broadcasts in Jong-Su’s home warn of rising unemployment and widening wealth disparity; in an early scene you can hear Trump ranting about immigration on a news broadcast on Jong-su’s old-fashioned TV box.). As Bergen states, Jong-su “interprets the invisible as a sign for something else”, adding that the ‘invisible’ element of Lee-Chang-Dongs films can be “connected to visual impairment or to narrow-mindedness and mental blindness”. The cat “rosebud” scene that responds to Jong-su, says Bergen, could simply be a white lie- perhaps Ben took in Hae-mi’s cat after she disappeared and didn’t bother explaining this to Jong-su: “Ben’s lie opens up a Pandora’s box…. A lesser evil (Ben lied) becomes the sign of a swarm of evils (Ben is a serial killer)” Jong-su’s imagination, however, only mirrors the morbid curiosity of the audience; Chang-Dong tricks us into identifying with Jong-su to show how easy it is for disenfranchised young men to fall into rabbit-holes of rage and resentment.

How Is It Over There?

The dead victim in Poetry, Agnes, is floating head down and the parents of her killers follow suit; sticking their heads in the sand about what their sons did, which was to make a hobby out of raping Agnes after school in a lab they had the keys to for extracurricular work, leading her to commit suicide. They quietly try to calm the victims family with a polite settlement sum. Our lead Mija (Yoon Jeong-hee) happens to be the grandmother and carer of one of the perpetrators. Throughout Poetry, she struggles to make ends meet, grapples with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, fights off unwelcome sexual advances from a disabled man she nurses and ponders over her grandson- a nonchalant rapist who treats his grandmother like a nuisance and expresses no remorse for his crimes. All this whilst taking up the hobby of poetry writing to entertain her in her old age.

A common thread that binds Lee’s filmography is the matter of misogyny; the events of Burning follow the selfish exploits of two men but the woman at the centre of it never lacks agency. These are women who are put through hell and despair and anguish threaten to consume them. Shin-ae, the recently widowed piano teacher of Secret Sunshine (who discovers her late husband had been unfaithful) enters a crucible of cruelty when her son Jun is kidnapped and held for ransom. The child is later found dead at a riverbank (bodies of water and Lee are like moth and flame). Before Shin-ae can even grieve her husband properly, albeit abstracted by his infidelity, she is the victim of senseless, unthinkable trauma.

“In some ways the journey he plots out for Shin-ae is cruel. She seems to find some peace and even grace in Christianity, giving herself up to the abstract wisdom and unknowable motivations of god. But her faith and belief unravels when she decides to forgive her son’s murderer. The subsequent scene where she visits him in jail is one of the film’s most extraordinary, suggesting the ultimate singularity of the individual and the cosmic indifference of any supreme, moral being or arbiter.” -Adrian Danks, Sense of Cinema.

Danks draws attention to Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece High and Low, and the scene in question, when victim comes face to face with the victimiser, is one of Kurosawa’s most resounding cinematic passages. A simple glass screen separates the two men’s cosmically divergent fates. The villain of High and Low- who also kidnapped the protagonist’s son- merely maintains his right to not live in “a three-tatami room, freezing in winter, stifling in summer” and adds that his victim’s “house looked like heaven,” which is all that we get in the way of any kind of explanation of his crimes before he becomes seized by hysterical stammering and a shriek as the shutters go down between them.

“Kurosawa would normally have shown the kidnapper’s motive; that’s what’s expected, so the audience can feel good about the message of the film. But Kurosawa decided to not even go there. Instead of presenting some revelation of the motive as part of the movie, he just decided that the kidnapper is human and therefore makes mistakes and commits some crimes. The details are left out. Instead of demonizing him, Kurosawa ends up saying that the man was just trying to live, and we don’t know the reason why he did this, and that’s it”. -Takashi Miike, speaking to Criterion

When Shin-Ae meets her son’s murderer, she is appalled to find that he too, has found God in the aftermath. “God has reached out to a sinner like me”, he says, smiling artlessly. “He made me kneel to repent my sins. And God has absolved me of them”. This passage reveals Lee’s philosophic preoccupation; this tether between ground and sky, how one can be an escape from the other. When she leaves the prison she faints in disbelief, in shock at the realisation of this blanket God has thrown around the man who took her son, uniform and all-healing and all-forgiving. It causes her to rebel against the Christian fog that numbed her grieving process and step into the next stages; she will seduce a married man, howl at the winds (she often glares at the sky as if to challenge it) and throws a rock at a religious group’s window before attempting suicide and landing in a psychiatric facility. Lee paints true healing as a combination of earthliness and heavenlines; when Shin-ae faints the audience can’t catch her.

“But the film ends with the camera trained on a humble patch of earth, illuminated by sunlight. It’s no wonder a rationalist would conclude a spiritual journey this way. Shin-ae has spent much of the movie agonizing over the invisible and the unfathomable. Lee ends with a reminder of what we do see and know, and it starts with the ground beneath our feet.” Dennis Lim, Criterion

Men Without Women

Male egos take centre-stage in Burning whilst Hae-mi vanishes from the screen. Her absence is palpable and confuses and frustrates the audience as much as the men, and Jean Jong-sea plays her with a mixture of coquettish charm and emotional extravagance. In one scene she gets stoned and dances to Miles Davis under a sunset, a dance she learnt from monks in Africa about ‘hunger’. Lee follows her entranced steps in a single shot whilst Ben and Jong-su watch like hawks before he pans over to the mountains of North Korea that are visible from Jong-Su’s porch. Counterpoised between South and North Korea, she is trapped between one nation that is openly authoritarian and the one she resides in which invisibly so. And she’s caught between these two men who look to her in different yet equally misogynistic ways. To the wealthy and womanizing Ben, she is his entertainment of the week (Jong-su later finds him on a date with another piece of arm- candy shortly after her disappearance). Jong-Su himself sees her as a key to unlocking that zenith room, that one perfect memory with the sun glancing off the window- that second he felt accepted, validated. He berate’s Hae-Mi as a '“whore” after her topless dance. Her co-worker is unimpressed when Jong-su tells her she’s missing- she knows a lot of girls who are “missing”.

“Whenever [Hae-mi is] not on-screen, the film instantly grows darker, unhappier. This, I think, is deliberate. Lee wants us to grasp that Hae-mi is a woman threatened by the desires and demands of two men who don’t see her for who she actually is. Filled with free-floating spirit, she becomes the occasion for Jong-su and Ben to reveal a masculinity that is as toxic as she is life-affirming.” John Powers, Vogue

Although Burning is a film of layered mysteries and unanswerable questions, that final shot of Secret Sunshine is a great cypher to unlocking its simple thesis, that unassuming patch of grass. What Jong-Su lacks that Lee’s heroines possess is the ability to process the loss of something; to be told no, to connect with the earth underneath him rather than searching for perfection. The ability to stop looking for Heaven.  

References

  •   Bergen, V, Cazier, J.P, Coppolla, A. (2019).  Lee Chang-Dong, Paris: Dis Voir

  •   Choi, J. (2004). The Cinema of Japan and Korea Great Britain: Wallflower Press