17th Busan International Film Festival (4-13 October, 2012)

Aditya Wednesday October 24, 2012

The theme of revenge is one that recurred in many films, in a variety of themes. In Lee Ji-seung’s Azooma (2012), it is a mother who hunts down the man who has raped her school-going daughter. The detective on the job is unable to do much since he has been bought over by the celebrity father of the child, who does not want publicity. The mother plans out a chilling revenge, using her estranged husband’s dentist clinic. Le Roy’s Melo (2012) is a self-reflexive film, using the devices of a melodrama to ponder on the nature of obsessive love. The heroine works as waitress, is a student in ‘a third-rate university’ as she puts it. She is employed as a model by a well-to-do artist who is young and handsome.  The woman, who enjoys sex and sees it as a way out of her mundane life, does not want to give up the man at any cost. She is responsible for the death of his ex-girlfriend who is pregnant with his child; she has the artist crippled by a former boyfriend, when he wants to take a break from his relationship with her; she also kills her former boyfriend and disposes off his body by cutting it into pieces and throwing it into the river.  This possessiveness is as much to do with her obsession for the artist, as well as, the good life he offers her. She tells her ex-lover that she had hated going to cheap motels to have sex with him and had hated clearing up in the morning, before leaving.  She got the artist crippled so that he would be forever dependent on her; this is how she had thought she would exact her revenge for his wanting to leave her. But she enjoys the life of looking after him even though h keeps telling her to leave him alone. Once the police discover the pieces of the ex-lover’s body, she realises that her game will soon be up. The artist, too, realizing that he will never be free of her, and sensing, possibly, that she has broken all taboos in order to stay with him, and realizing that she will probably kill him, not wanting to let him go under any circumstance, acquiesces in her killing him. She kills him and then herself, after painting her own and the artist’s body white and the coverlet they lie on red, offering a high angle view from a ladder placed at a vantage point, to the police who will discover them.  Violence in Korean cinema walks on the fringe of horror. Revenge and horror combine to make the violence cathartic even as it is horrifying. The revenge theme also allows the exposition of the gut-wrenching emotions that make women cross-over into a world of violence. The outstanding film on this theme was Kim Ki-duk’s Pieta (2012) which tells the story of a man, whose job is to collect repayments of loans.  He cripples the people who do not pay up, which is often, since the strata he is dealing with is the poorer section, involved in small-time labour, and collects insurance. He is a sub-human form of organic life, without any human emotions, particularly that of compassion or sensitivity. Into his life comes a woman who insists she is his mother, who is sorry she has abandoned him when he was born.  She passes the most gruesome, painful and wretched tests he sets for her and manages to make a place in his house and heart. It is then that she exacts her revenge for the son Kang-do has maimed and driven to suicide: now that he knows the emotion of love, he will suffer when she exits from this life, by jumping off a building.  The film raises many questions. If Madonna suffers holding her son’s crucified body, here the mother also cries for the evil ‘son’.  She laments before her suicide that she is sad for her real son, but also for Kang-do. She weeps in the end for the suffering of her children, her real son, as well as the evil one. Money is the force that drives people here: those who need it, those who get crippled for it, those who have to collect it. The close-up is used to good effect: the mother who cries in utter sadness and the face of the man who is incapable of emotion. The macabre imagination is also pushed to excess in Jen Kyuwahn’s The Weight (2012).  

The NETPAC Award went to Jiseul, directed by O Muel. The film deals with a chapter of Korea’s post Second World War history, when the Americans military regime unleashed terror in Korea from 1948 to 1954.  The film deals with the Jeju 4.3 Uprising.   A group of villagers hides in a cave, while Koreans collaborating with the Americans hunt out villagers from their homes and indulge in cruelty. The film creates a large gallery of characters, has stunning cinematography that captures objects in their sensuous materiality. The director deals with this episode as a requiem for the victims, creating tableaux with characters that resemble still life. Chung Ji-young’s National Security(2012) is based on the memoir of late Kim Guen-tae, former Minister of Health and Welfare,  who was arrested and tortured for being part of the pro-democracy movement against the military autocracy, by the KCIA. 

Rites of passage and growing up and the stress of doing well in school to getting into good universities were some of the other prominent themes in Korean films. Kim Taegon’s The Sunshine Boys (2012) is about two friends who go to meet a third friend who has joined the army. The short time they spend together reveals their weaknesses and strengths and also makes them ‘grow’. Lee Donku’sFatal (2012) deals with the guilt of a young man who meets the girl he and his classmates had raped in school, when he joins the local church. Shin Su-won’s  Pluto (2012) is about competitiveness among a group of young boys and girls to come first, and the lengths they will go to stay ahead. In this case it is rape and murder.

There a retrospective of Polish classics. Chkheidze’s restored Father of a Soldier (1964) was also screened. World cinema had the latest works by Kiarostami (Something Like Love), Makhmalbaf (The Gardener), Haneke (Love), Taviani Brothers (Caesar Must Die). Oliver Assayas (Something in the Air) and others. From Asia there was a large pick with films from Central Asia, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, China, Hong Kong and omnibus films 10+10 and Beautiful, featuring Hou Hsaio-hsein and Tsai Ming-Liang among many others. The festival also saw the screening of films that had been supported by Busan: the closing film Mustofa Sarwar’sTelevision, Edwin’s Postcards from the Zoo, James Lee’s If Not Now, Then When? 


Permalink: https://netpacasia.org/blogpost40-17th-Busan-International-Film-Festival-4-13-October-2012
Show PHP error messages