Shiri (1999)

Original title: 쉬리

Yu Jong-won (Han Seok-Kyu) and his partner and best friend Park Mu-young (Choi Min-sik when he was rather sleek and well groomed) are working for the South Korean security services, fighting the dastardly plans of Northern spies, mostly successfully. Some years ago, though, a female assassin named Lee Bang-hee managed to paint quite the trail of blood through various officials, ending her series of murders once things got to hot with a goodbye note written on the corpse of spy colleague of Jong-won and Mu-young. Needless to say, this thing still smarts, particularly the more melodramatically inclined Jong-won.

Now, just when Jong-won is planning the wedding date with his fiancée Lee Mying-hyun (Kim Yoon-jin), Bang-hee is becoming active again. Her murders have apparently something to do with the North’s attempts to acquire a basically magical new liquid explosive, though that will turn out to only be the first step in a much bigger and deadlier project.

Formally and stylistically, Kang Je-gyu’s brilliant South Korean action film Shiri is a big sloppy kiss for Hong Kong’s Heroic Bloodshed genre, so it’ll come as no surprise that the film is as much interested in portraying the melodramatically elevated emotional states of its characters through its action as it is in showing fun explosions. For the first forty minutes or so, the film’s attempts in this direction don’t feel to work out quite well enough. The action is certainly kinetic and fast, but its emotional underpinnings don’t quite seem to hit the mark. However, this curious feeling of tepidness isn’t the film failing to hold up to its role models as one might expect, but director Kang Je-gyu playing a longer game, slowly (for the genre, this is still a fast mover in anyone’s book) and expertly revealing greater dramatic and emotional complexity so that it can hit the audience all the better over the head with it. And before a viewer can think “hey, that’s a rather cleverly thought up and well realized way to use these old tropes”, suddenly, personal and emotional stakes have become as big as the action – which is pretty damn big.

Kang doesn’t stop there, though: there’s also the way main protagonist and antagonist are paralleling one another, both also consciously mirroring the separation between the North and South of Korea; and how an at first pretty jingoistic seeming action movie turns into a film that very consciously uses the spectacular shoot-outs and the tears (oh, the tears!) to also talk about the psychological toll the state of affairs between the two Koreas has on the people trying to live their lives there. The film shows a heart-on-its-sleeve sort of pain about the relationship between the Koreas, hiding things South Korean cinema usually tries to avoid even looking at under cover of its awesome spectacle. In other words, unlike a lot of films inspired by the Heroic Bloodshed genre, Shiri doesn’t just take the genre’s cool surface elements (though there’s nothing wrong with that, of course) but actually looks closely at its techniques to then apply them to themes and ideas close to the heart of its director.


This slowly developing depth and complexity is of course only half of the reason why Shiri is quite as wonderful an example of action cinema as it is. There’s also the action itself: it’s kinetic, fast, and varied, but also keeps in mind the importance of some standards of its genre. Glass needs to be broken, cars explode, partners need to die heroically, and happy ends aren’t really in the cards in a world where nobody can survive while being only one person instead of fragmented parts (again mirroring the Koreas).

Three Films Make A Post: A Teenage Titan Of Terror On A Lustful Binge!

Battle Angel aka Battle Angel Alita aka Gunnm (1993): This two-part OVA based on the never-ending manga series by Yukito Kishiro suffers from being one of those OVAs that are really not more than moving complements of their sources. While the plot of the two OVAs mostly does stand for itself, the whole thing still feels a lot like the first chapter of a much longer story that it actually is, instead of being a truly satisfying artefact of its own. That's not to say that the anime isn't fun: it keeps closely to Kishiro's original designs and his world-building style, mixing background details that imply a lot of history with a very blunt yet effective idea of how metaphors work; the violence is satisfying and the drama works too.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008): Stylistically and tonally extremely mobile - and extremely awesome - South Korean director Kim Ji-woon takes the Spaghetti Western and transplants it into Manchuria during the Japanese occupation. Obviously, that time and place is extremely fitting for a mash-up between an Italian way to look at a very US American genre, South Korean contemporary ideas of how to film a kinetic action sequence, and bits and pieces of Japanese and Chinese cinema and culture, until everything turns into a bright, shiny and pretty damn entertaining piece of Pop (yes, the sort with a capital P and more intelligence than anyone could expect from it). Add to that Song Kang-ho out-acting the rest of a pretty swell cast (sorry, Lee Byeong-Heon's hair and Jeong Woo-seong's hat), and you have yourself quite a film.

Werewolf Woman (1976): On first glance, Rino Di Silvestro's movie about Annik Borel running around naked, having sex, screaming and moaning hysterically and killing people might look like the Platonic Ideal of the sleazy Italian sex horror movie, and therefore a film I'd absolutely adore, what with its nearly around-the-running-time nudity, its dialogue full of bad Freudian clichés, its physically improbable murder scenes and some truly histrionic performances. Alas, this is one of those sad cases where a film is so concerned with fulfilling its exploitational duties that it becomes exhausting, its wallowing in sleaze proving monotonous instead of stimulating. Werewolf Woman's fixation on all that is naked and loud is so complete that I found myself - paradoxically - getting bored by it after only half of it had run its course, as if I had found myself in the anti-matter version of all those late 70s lucha movies where nothing ever happens - a movie where so much happens (well, except for an actual plot) that it's impossible to be interested in any of it.

If that doesn't make much sense to you, welcome to the club. I can't explain why a film full of sex, violence, and screaming can still feel as tedious as Werewolf Woman does in any rational way, but feel that way it does.

 

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In short: Antarctic Journal (2005)

A small self-funded expedition tries to reach the Point of Inaccessibility - the point farthest from the coastline - of Antarctica.

It won't come as a surprise that the expedition is doomed. Strange occurrences, accidents that become ever more dangerous and an expedition leader (Kang-ho Song, as good an actor as ever) whose mind slowly deteriorates are just some of the problems the expedition has to face. From time to time they find traces of the lost British expedition of 1922 that must have had an equally hard time.

It looks as if the greatest trouble the men will have to face are ghosts - those that roam Antarctica and those they have brought with them.

After watching Hansel & Gretel I felt the need to acquire director Pil-Sung Yim's debut feature as fast as possible. As it turns out, this was one of my better ideas.

Antarctic Journal is as much of a mood piece as the director's second film. Again, much of film's emotional strength stems from the sure grasp it has on the beauty and terror of nature. Of course one would be hard pressed to make a film taking place in the Antarctic and not make impressive use of nature. Finding the point where it is hard to decide where beauty begins and terror ends as Antarctic Journal does is quite another achievement.

The appeal of nature alone does not a good film make, though. Fortunately, the acting is strong as well, if maybe a little subdued for some Western viewers. For me, this helps to give the characters a grounding in reality that makes a fine contrast to the growing unreality of their surroundings.

The script is fine as well. I was especially happy about its ambiguity. It's left to our own interpretation or imagination if the ghosts are real or just hallucinations of men under heavy strain.

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