lee chang dong parades his literary roots in burning, which blends murakami’s barn burning and faulkner’s barn burning to create a wholeheartedly korean tour de force. absolutely insane.
the film starts off with an unemployed and hapless jeong-soo (yoo ah-in), who is working side jobs to make ends meet but dreams of being a novel writer. he meets his paju childhood friend hye-mi (jeon jong seo makes her grand debut), who is a free-spirit compelled by a “greater hunger” for self-actualisation and fulfilment in life. jeong-soo and hye-mi begin an intimate relationship, which comes under threat when hye-mi returns from a trip to africa with her new friend ben (steven yeun). ben, with his wealth and generous personality, seems better able to materially and emotionally provide for hye-mi than jeong-soo, who stays in a humble farm and is often caught off guard by her unusual behaviour.
but the film maintains a veiled sense of danger around ben and his apparent perfection, which is verified at the halfway mark, when ben reveals to jeong-soo his arsonist hobby of burning barns (or in this case - to localise to rural korea - greenhouses). ben lets in to jeong-soo that he burns barns once every two months, “a good pace”, and he’s decided that he would burn a barn near to jeong-soo very, very soon. jeong-soo, while also trying to find a vanished hye-mi, obsessively checks on the barns near him but even after a month no barns seem to be burning or have burned. when questioned, ben enigmatically advises jeong-soo that “sometimes you don’t see the barns that are closest to you”, and states that he had indeed burnt the barn 1 or 2 days after they last met, coinciding with the date of hye-mi’s disappearance.
jeong-soo begins to suspect that ben’s “barns” are not real barns, and his suspicions are further confirmed when he finds hye-mi’s watch in a drawer of random women’s accessories and hye-mi’s cat in ben’s apartment. luring ben to paju, jeong-soo stabs him with a knife, dumps his body in his porsche, douses the car in fuel, and sets it on fire.
the film is devoted in its adherence to murakami’s plot, but builds its characters with reference to faulkner and fitzgerald. jeong-soo’s character is constructed from both murakami’s and faulkner’s barn burning’s; his socioeconomic background and relationship with his father models faulkner’s protagonist’s, while aspiring to be the successful writer in murakami’s. ben’s character embodies the wealth of murakami’s accomplished protagonist with the dandy behaviour of fitzgerald’s gatsby. i found yoo’s performance as the insecure and genuine jeong-soo very stable and confident, and was surprised by steven yeun’s effortless transition into korean cinema. jeon jong-seo, who naturally possesses an air of mystery and lackadaisical rumination, must have made such a splash into chungmuro with this debut performance as well.
i really liked that lee chang dong, while creating the mix of characters across literary works, had managed to weave in a subtle but heavy critique of class inequality. lee makes clear to us that ben’s and jeong-soo’s worlds are clearly different - ben’s porsche in the fields of paju is as incongruous as jeong-soo’s white lorry in the hills of gangnam. ben’s generosity to jeong-soo and hyemi is also always twinged with a condescension that only the rich can afford.
ben’s insincere treatment to the poor is most obvious in his choice and treatment of his muses. his muses are always from lower socioeconomic backgrounds - hyemi worked parttime as a hostess at a shop event, and his next muse works as an assistant at a duty-free store that caters to chinese tourists. and he parades his muses in front of his circle of well-off friends, who goads hyemi to demonstrate the african “greater hunger” dance and encourages his next muse to talk about her disregard towards chinese tourists. the friends’ expressions belie holier-than-thou attitudes that mock the girls’ self-perceived worldliness, resting in the comfort of their gangnam homes that they would never need to encounter african salvation or chinese tourists. i found the echoing of these scenes (hyemi & his next muse) really effective - it hit home how deeply entrenched class divide is, beyond the superficial niceties exchanged between the rich and the poor. if parasite was a movie that delivered an absurdist criticism of class inequality, burning is a film that packs a subtle, realistic, and equal punch.
what i felt was a slight weakness to the film was the lack of development of hye-mi’s character. hye-mi’s character is a familiar one - the manic pixie girl whose gripes with life effortlessly charm the men she meets - and her easy servitude to ben was slightly off-putting. but her role, i guess, was a plot device meant to draw out larger themes in the film (e.g. hyemi is just one of the many poor girls that the rich play with, just as “there are many barns in korea’s countryside). more importantly, hye-mi’s unreliable character and her pantomime hobby - which bridges the real and the imagined, the present and the absent - weaves together themes of questioned memory and loss. is the tangerine real? does her cat exist? was there a well, and if yes did she fall into it? where.. is she?
as the film ends with jeong-soo’s gruesome act, we are reminded of hye-mi’s words at the beginning. she mimes peeling a tangerine to jeong-soo, who praises her. “you know why i am so good at it? the trick is to not think about whether the tangerine is present or not, but to not think about the tangerine at all.” – 9.5/10
poetry closely follows the life of Mi-ja (portrayed by Yoon Jeong-hee), who raises her only grandson who is in high-school. leading a humble life, she earns a partial income by cleaning for a well-off old man who had suffered from a stroke, and goes to poetry class after being diagnosed with alzheimer’s. there are 2 main plot lines in poetry - that of Mi-ja re-encountering poetry and reconnecting with her thoughts and the words that have seemed to slip by, and that of the sexual assault conducted by her grandson and his friends on their classmate, resulting in the classmate’s suicide.
i watched the film anticipating only the first plot line, expecting a bittersweet reflection of an old lady’s life reignited through poetry, and the beautiful flowering of a new phase of life enabled by poetry. but while the 2 plotlines were kept relatively distinct throughout the film, we observe how the former provides Mi-ja with an escape and coping mechanism to deal with the gravity of the latter. for instance, encouraged by her poetry tutor to really observe the world around her, Mi-ja gets carried away when talking to the victim’s mother about the countryside’s sweet tangerines and pleasant weather. in another scene, a burly man from her poetry reading club (who turns out to be a policeman) arrives as Mi-ja plays badminton with her grandson in the neighbourhood alley. acting as if there was no gravity moment happening in the background, Mi-ja nonchalantly continues playing badminton with the poetry-reading policeman, as her grandson is taken away in a policecar behind her. she is literally sustained by her engagement with poetry.
but the most significant convergence of the 2 plotlines is the ending. having struggled both with her consciousness as a poet and her conscience as the guardian of a rapist, Mi-ja finally arrives at an internal peace and disappears. against a beautifully arranged series of stills of the neighbourhood places that Mi-ja used to occupy, she narrates the poem that she finally put together. but the victim soon takes over the narration, as the scenes slowly trace the victim’s last day and end with the victim standing over the bridge, right before she jumps into the river. the trauma had provided Mi-ja with the impetus to become a “true poet”, but poetry had also helped her to articulate - and come to terms with - the complicated feelings that she had repressed about her grandson’s sins. just as how the film opened, where an extended shot of the stream’s gradual waves revealed the victim’s dead body, the film ends with an extended shot of the same stream’s waves.
being released a year after Bong’s Mother (and Yoon Jeong-hee winning the same best actress award that Kim Hye-ja did), and both being character studies of old poor women who are protective guardians of dismembered males, it is inevitable that the films draws some comparisons. while Kim Hye-ja’s character veered into histrionics at times, i found Yoon’s character to have been more charitably shaped in that she is given more nuance, conflict, depth, and room to develop. when her son is accused of sexual murder, Kim’s character plunges into a wholehearted self-delusional defence (only to be crushed at the realisation of the truth and her complicity in it). in comparison, Yoon’s character begins with self-denial, inaction, action, empathy with the victim, and finally personal resolution. the stories are slightly different that way - Mother brings light to the dangers of overwrought oedipal impulses that can ultimately incapacitate, while Poetry deprioritises the relationship between grandson and grandmother for the self-actualising relationship Mi-ja develops with herself.
while Mi-ja’s character frustrated me at times, particularly the way she carried herself, i enjoyed the side of her that deeply empathised with the victim. when Mi-ja has sex with the handicapped old man with a stony face and later asks him for money, she is subconsciously comparing her situation with the victim’s, realising that women usually only have an illusion of choice when dealing with men’s sexual devices. when Mi-ja remembers her childhood hopes of being a poet, she is drawing on these long-ago memories while mourning for the victim’s own early end of hopes and dreams.
this is my first film by lee chang dong, and i’m happy to say that i enjoyed the mood and tone of the film. either plotline had the potential to meander and explode into melodramatic territory, but the plotlines diverged and intertwined with such control, and the film always treated Mi-ja with a certain detachedness and delicate subtlety. i find myself more seriously moved by films that appear to not have much action appearing in them; the ability to pack waves of poignant revelations into minimal actions is a level of subtle story-telling that i really appreciate. – 8/10
