Some Western fans of Korean cinema have expressed concern about the kind of Korean movies that have found their way to Western audiences. Will American moviegoers think (these writers fret) that Korean movies are nothing but ultraviolent crime films and misogynist psychodrama featuring on-camera animal slaughter? Some of these fretters champion the very films that worry them – OldBoy, for instance – which causes them to trip over their own fervid rhetoric. They don’t worry that their own reactions to Korean movies might be culturally skewed, incomplete, ignorant; no, it’s the unlettered masses who might misinterpret the onscreen eating of a live squid. (Lordamighty, Maw, that feller’s eatin’ a live octopus! Them Koreans must be a buncha postmodern savages!)I submit that the trouble lies less with ethnocentric Western reviewers and audiences, as some K-movie fans claim, than with marketing departments. “Extreme cinema” fanboys are a fairly distinct, receptive niche: misogynist psychodrama, and don’t hold the splatter, is exactly what they are looking for. Having Quentin Tarantino (who boosted OldBoy at Cannes) as your advocate is not, in this respect, a good thing. I took heart from Stuart Klawans’s report in The Nation that Sympathy for Lady Vengeance found an audience among educated young American women, but I doubt that even they want a steady, unvarying diet of Lady Vengeance. Lord knows I don’t.
South Korea lacks the political and economic clout to dump its product in American multiplexes, so it’s most unlikely that Korean or any other ‘foreign’ films will ever see wide release in the US, in any significant numbers. The American movie industry really has no reason to help its competition. What, you think that Disney, Warner, the Miramaxis of Evil are in it for the art? Relatively few Americans will seek out Korean or any other ‘foreign’ films on their own, and those who do will not always do so in a quest for Truth and Beauty. It’s easy to order the DVDs online nowadays, but you have to educate yourself, buy a multiregion player, and take some chances in buying films sight unseen.
Which is too bad, because I think a lot of Americans would like Lost in Love, as well as other recent Korean melodramas, if they had a chance to see them. It’s the kind of date movie Nora Ephron or Cameron Crowe might have made. I suppose it counts as a Chick Flick (the dread genre that makes fanboys splutter and cup their gonads protectively), but I don’t really care. Let me count the ways I’m Lost In Love.
First, I love me some Sol Gyeong-gu.* I admire Choi Min-sik, who if he weren’t such a good actor would basically be a Korean John Belushi or Jack Black. I’m afraid, though, that Choi’s tough-guy-with-han (and bad hair) routine is wearing thin for me. The roles he’s chosen, though they’ve made him famous, are hemming him in. He’s doing comic stuff in TV commercials that is surely meant to crack that mold, but a split second of giggles isn’t really going to change his image. I haven’t yet seen Springtime (Ryu Jang-ha, 2004), in which Choi plays a troubled school teacher bringing out children’s musical talent, and I’d rather see Choi do it than Richard Dreyfuss. But lurking in the back of the audience’s minds there must have been the fear / hope that Choi would eventually go berserk and fight his way out of the child orchestra with a claw hammer, or gobble down a live bluebird of happiness. I know it lurks in mine.
I first saw Sol Gyeong-gu in Peppermint Candy (1999) then in Oasis (2002), both written and directed by Lee Chang-dong. In both films he’s a powerful presence, in very different ways. In Peppermint Candy he plays a man who’s tortured by guilt for what he’s become, a guilt he usually takes out on everyone who can’t fight back. Once in a while a bit of lost sweetness and innocence peeks out. It’s a sort of Jekyll / Hyde performance, though Hyde dominates. In Oasis, Sol plays an innocent. Fanboy reviewers often referred to Sol’s character as “retarded,” but I think “poor impulse control” is a more likely diagnosis. He sees, he wants, he acts, he forgets. Sol changed his bodily movements, his posture, his face, his laughter. It’s the kind of transformation I associate with Dustin Hoffman. With Hoffman, though, much as I like him, I never forget that Dustin Hoffman is in control here, giving you a virtuoso performance. Sol simply disappears into his role. In the interview with him on the Extras DVD disk of Oasis, Sol is almost invisible, let alone unrecognizable. He’s wearing a baseball cap and his large, pudgy hands keep getting in the way. He talks seriously, thoughtfully. At first I thought it was the wrong interview, but it was Sol.
After and before Sol’s work with Lee Chang-dong, he mostly played heavies, usually comic heavies as in Jail Breakers (2002). He would be the clown while another actor was there to draw the girls. Sol can do such roles very well: he’s expert by now at the explosions of temper and violence that they require, and they continue to define his career. He ventured out of type with I Wish I Had a Wife, Too (2000), where he played a nerdy banker, a rather ordinary Korean man, whose quirk and hobby is stage magic. Half an hour into the movie, Sol performs a trick for the bank’s video camera, shredding and reconstituting a newspaper. “Falling in love, Kim Beom-soo,” he intones solemnly in English, then crows, “I got it! You got it! Heyyyy, check it out!” and flashes a peace sign at the camera as he walks out of the shop. The sweetness and boyish vulnerability he radiates here seem to come from as deep a place as the rage and violence in Peppermint Candy. Sol’s nondescript looks are a blank slate on which he can inscribe almost anything.
In Lost in Love, Sol gets subtle -- as subtle as it’s possible to be, anyway, given that he’s playing an aging, lovelorn jock named Han Woo-jae. Woo-jae dropped out of college when his girlfriend dumped him – or maybe he was expelled for punching his rowing coach, who’d been caning him for losing his edge. (This made me love Woo-jae right away. I’ve gotten tired of watching Korean men in movies submit to beatings [often quite brutal] by their seniors. I know, it’s In The Culture. But that doesn’t mean they like it, or that it is not a part of Korean culture that needs to change.) Yeon-su (Song Yoon-a, who also appeared with Sol in Jail Breakers), a fellow student, had been nursing a crush on Woo-jae all along, but knew it wasn’t returned. She visited Woo-jae during his military service, but then they fell out of touch. When they meet again in the film’s present, she’s a veterinarian, and he’s just begun coaching a high school rowing team under his old college rowing coach. That’s right; the one he slugged. The film’s comic moments are built of such small connections and recognitions – even what you might call rhymes, where the same bit of business is given to different characters. For example, Woo-jae can’t figure out the locks to get out Yeon-su’s door, so she has to let him out; soon after, Woo-jae’s father is baffled by the locks on Woo-jae’s door.
Sol Gyeong-gu isn’t likely to make it as a romantic lead for American audiences, but then he’s not a romantic lead in Korea either. The big trouble is that he’s far too old for the character, especially in the film’s earlier sections where he’s supposed to be 22 or so but looks every bit of the actor’s thirty-eight years. Song Yoon-a is five years younger than Sol, and is better able to look like a college student. It’s less of a problem later on, when the film is about grown-up love, not teen romance, and the two stars have good chemistry. (In fact, they eventually married, in 2009.)
The film develops Yeon-su’s character in more depth than Woo-jae’s. We meet her widowed mother (Lee Hwi-hyang), who still lives in the country at Hongcheon and is dating a stocky, lower-class older man (Jang Hang-seon). We see a lot of Yeon-su’s relationship with her mother, and with the young man (Lee Ki-woo) who works for her, who longs for Yeon-su as hopelessly as she longs for Woo-jae. All we see of Woo-jae’s family is his father, in one telling scene: Aboji visits his son’s bachelor apartment, upbraiding him for being a slob and for still being single at his age. It all rolls off of Woo-jae, but you can recognize where he got his crankier qualities.
Woo-jae must figure out that he not only likes Yeon-su, he loves her. That progress drives (or constitutes) Lost in Love’s forward movement. It doesn’t rely on talk (like Beom-su’s video diary in I Wish I Had a Wife, Too); Woo-jae isn’t stupid, but he’s not very articulate, especially about his feelings. So Sol has to show the changes in him. The film is punctuated, ballad-like, by close-ups of Woo-jae feeling a difference in himself. He’s not sure what the difference is, but he likes it, it interests him. Those shots do a lot of work, and it was a pleasure to watch Sol do that work so easily.
Much is shown, rather than told, in Lost in Love – and sometimes it’s not even shown. When Woo-jae hits his rowing coach, the film cuts away to rowers on the water. We hear the impact, but we don’t get to see it. Often director Chu Chang-min cuts away just before the impacts; at first it feels like stepping on a step that isn’t there, but after awhile it becomes witty, as if Chu is saying, “Oh, I don’t need to show you what comes next, this is a romantic comedy, you know the drill; let me move on and show you this instead.” The film elides the normal emotional climaxes of a melodrama: they’re there, but left for the audience to fill in ourselves.
Chu Chang-min’s previous film was the gangsters-meet-grannies comedy Mapado, which I enjoyed. Lost in Love, I think, is Chu’s take on Hur Jin-ho’s understated melodramas Christmas in August and One Fine Spring Day, both of which keep the lid on emotional display. Chu goes for more comedy and a happy ending in Lost in Love. When I’ve seen too many Korean gangster or war or vengeance movies, this is the kind of movie I return to with relief. Maybe that’s the other Extreme Cinema.
*Note on transliteration: I can see I'm going to be inconsistent in how I spell Korean names in English. To be correct, this actor's name should be written as Seol Gyeong-gu, not Sol. (As usual with Asian names, Seol, his surname, comes first.) But I'll try to make things a little easier for readers who know even less Korean than I do by choosing the most phonetic spelling where I can. ("Choi", as in Choi Min-sik, is rather hopeless. It sounds like "Chay", but no standard transliteration spells it that way.) "Eo" stands for the short O sound, much like the O in the English "song". The E is silent, but many foreigners try to sound it, turning "Seoul" into "Say-ool" for example. I don't usually bother with dubbed movies, but when I checked out the English dub of The Host, it drove me crazy to hear the English voice actors pronounce an important character's name, over and over again, as "Hyun-sayo" instead of "Hyun-suh."
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