I went to see a movie today, entitled 오발탄 [obaltan = aimless bullet]. It is a very old movie, especially by the standards of Korean cinema, having been made in 1960, in the waning days of the autocratic Syngman Rhee (이승만) regime, when the Korean war was still a very fresh memory and when North Korea still had a higher per capita GDP than the South. Thus the atmospherics of the movie are very much about the feeling of pointlessness that prevailed with respect to the war in that period (while later treatments could trend more ideological, given the retrospective "necessity" to fight for a better future – later fulfilled by South Korea's arrival in the "first world").
This existential atmosphere of hopelessness is also clearly influenced by the existential charecter of post-WW2 European cinema, but the movie's director, 유현목 [Yu Hyeon-Mok], has masterfully "nativized" that latter genre's cinematic vocabulary such that the movie feels authentically Korean rather than at all derivative.
Superficially, the movie could be summarized in one sentence as "man with a bad toothache and a badly-behaved family struggles to survive while retaining a clear conscience, but gives up in the end." The badly-behaved family includes a mentally deranged mother (traumatized by the war), a prostitute sister, a bank-robber casanova brother, and a dissolute, very pregnant wife who will die in childbirth. The movie is based on a short story by 이범선 [Yi Beom-Seon], which I will try to find and read in tranaslation.
I told my friend Peter, who had suggested us going to the screening at the Seoul Film Society, that I thought the symbolism of the film was not that hard to decipher: while everyone obsesses over and struggles with the various family problems (aftermaths of the War), the real, unbearable problem is the man's toothache, which represents the endemic corruption of South Korea at that time. Unless this core problem is plucked out and solved, the baroque madness surrounding him continues, yet he resists doing it until the end, "sacrificing" so as to provide for family.
Frankly, the movie is pretty dark and depressing. The cinematography is hard to appreciate because of the poor quality of the surviving print that was digitized. Nevertheless I came away quite impressed by the montage. There are all these visual leitmotifs and echoes and almost humorous pauses and dwellings of the camera. The dialogue, which of course was partly ruined by poor subtitles, seemed full of these sort of "speaking in aphorisms" that seem to abound in Korean, and thr movie was in all ways equal to "art cinema" I have seen that was made in the west in the same period.
I liked the movie. I have not been doing much movie-watching lately.
Incidentally, after the movie there was a "discussion group," which was in English and not bad as far as such things go until the conversation got taken over by a mulling of Korea's persistent cultural resentment of Japan. Apropos of this, after we left the locale, Peter said a very quotable thing: "people's opinions about Japan are rarely rational or interesting to listen to."
[daily log: walking 4 km]